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neaden posted:People want to have fun unproblematic violence, but it turns out violence is always problematic so that doesn't exist. You either find the level of problematicness you are comfortable with, just don't think with it enough, or play a game that isn't based around fun problematic violence. something something "just beat up robots", writing RPGs like it's 80s kids shows. (This is not an actual solution and you raise a very good point.)
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Mar 23, 2021 23:23
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SkyeAuroline posted:something something "just beat up robots", writing RPGs like it's 80s kids shows. (This is not an actual solution and you raise a very good point.) But robots can be deep too also I want to gently caress the hot robot.
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Mar 23, 2021 23:26
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neaden posted:People want to have fun unproblematic violence, but it turns out violence is always problematic so that doesn't exist. You either find the level of problematicness you are comfortable with, just don't think with it enough, or play a game that isn't based around fun problematic violence. I dunno, I always thought one really fun D&D 4E campaign would be combat-as-sport set in a logical-conclusion-of-D&D-magic utopia where everyone has access to magical healing and revival (or death prevention or whatever you prefer) such that you're a bunch of consenting beings fighting no-holds-barred in a dungeon who all get patched up and have drinks after. That seems minimally problematic to me. Though maybe you're talking about the problematic aspects of "I specifically want to enjoy that I am killing these other intelligent creatures," in which case, agreed, that is going to be a problematic thing to actively enjoy even if those creatures are deserving, though I think there's a complicated discussion to be had about how able we are to change problematic aspects of ourselves vs finding outlets for them that aren't damaging to anyone, and D&D-as-murder-simulator plays into that. In any case, I think it's sad that we're talking about fantasy worlds but we still limit ourselves to looking like Lord of the Rings or poorly-understood early modern Europe while simultaneously not wanting to engage with those settings honestly. Either engage with the problems of violence, or use the full powers of a high fantasy setting to avoid them IMO.
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Mar 23, 2021 23:27
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Froghammer posted:The Panzercut drama is a dead-ringer for Orion Black's criticisms of WotC; namely that they talk a big game about inclusion and diversity before quietly editing out any actual attempts to make their game more inclusive and diverse. They hire queer or POC freelancers, but don't want those people to write explicitly queer-coded or anti-racist content This is one of the reasons why I'm not exactly enthused about the planned revising of Vistani in the upcoming Ravenloft setting. It's entirely possible they do a good job, but they have quite a poor track record holding them back.
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Mar 23, 2021 23:30
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Libertad! posted:This is one of the reasons why I'm not exactly enthused about the planned revising of Vistani in the upcoming Ravenloft setting. Yeah I can't imagine why anyone should be having faith that a new Ravenloft is going to be anything other than dogshit at this point, exactly what confidence has really been earned here?
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Mar 24, 2021 00:16
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Y’know, I doubt that earning back trust and goodwill was ever a priority for WotC. Seems more like they’re just relying on nostalgia and their large base of people who are already bought in to D&D, same as always
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Mar 24, 2021 00:23
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thetoughestbean posted:Y’know, I doubt that earning back trust and goodwill was ever a priority for WotC. Seems more like they’re just relying on nostalgia and their large base of people who are already bought in to D&D, same as always Agreed. They're gonna stay the course and keep pulling poo poo like this until they get punished for their bad behavior, and won't stop a second before.
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Mar 24, 2021 00:24
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Ultiville posted:I dunno, I always thought one really fun D&D 4E campaign would be combat-as-sport set in a logical-conclusion-of-D&D-magic utopia where everyone has access to magical healing and revival (or death prevention or whatever you prefer) such that you're a bunch of consenting beings fighting no-holds-barred in a dungeon who all get patched up and have drinks after. That seems minimally problematic to me. Though maybe you're talking about the problematic aspects of "I specifically want to enjoy that I am killing these other intelligent creatures," in which case, agreed, that is going to be a problematic thing to actively enjoy even if those creatures are deserving, though I think there's a complicated discussion to be had about how able we are to change problematic aspects of ourselves vs finding outlets for them that aren't damaging to anyone, and D&D-as-murder-simulator plays into that. It’s all fun and games until you’re last picked for your dungeonball team
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Mar 24, 2021 00:33
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Wizards is doing what basically every media company in the country is doing, to greater or lesser degrees of proficiency: try to hold onto as many customers as possible by making the right noises at their aesthetic and political tastes without ever committing so hard that it drives away more people than it pulls in. Which is to say, this incoherent mix of superficial wokeness and racist dogwhistles is neither an accident nor some unique dysfunction of WotC's: it's just what mainstream American marketing looks like. Which naturally calibrates not to the level of "moral" or even "tasteful" but rather to "as much poo poo as people will still grudgingly tolerate." You can see the exact same thing happening with Disney, Activision, you name it.
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Mar 24, 2021 00:40
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Graeme Barber, aka POCGamer has written up a post-mortem on their experience writing for WotC in two parts, the first of which can be found here.quote:Based on my experience, here are some broad rules I suggest future writers use if engaged by Wizards as work-for-hire freelance writers:
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Mar 24, 2021 01:33
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The second post in that series is very worth reading. Looks like Barber submitted something that, frankly, I would love to read, but which wasn't what Wizards actually wanted to include in that supplement: an unconventional adventure with a lore deep-dive. At some point a decision was made higher up in WotC that they wanted this to be A Very Normal D&D Adventure and the hatchets came out, to the end we've now seen. Given that Barber was working with a Wizards supervisor early in the process, who had seen something close to a finished draft, given it a pass, and advocated for it to some extent, this is absolutely a failure of project management. They had a rookie with an unconventional style, and rather than tell him early on that he needed to produce something more traditionally styled, they let him do his thing and then "fixed" it in post. Kate Welch's departure makes more and more sense. Her project management background must have been making a nearly ultrasonic screeching sound the entire time she worked there.
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Mar 24, 2021 02:06
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Kestral posted:The second post in that series is very worth reading. Yep, this is what makes all the "well that's just how freelancing is!" takes from various quarters extremely irritating because everybody who freelances, Graeme included, knows how freelancing fuckin works, nonetheless this whole debacle speaks to a massive failure of project management that could have all been easily solved with minimal fuss by WotC actually doing their job and giving the freelancer they tapped for the project any sort of guidelines or feedback or direction. That this is all technically permissible and legal and etc doesn't change the fact that it's also pretty clearly mismanaged to a degree that wasn't at all necessary, and that actively made the finished product significantly worse in numerous respects.
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Mar 24, 2021 02:29
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Ultiville posted:I dunno, I always thought one really fun D&D 4E campaign would be combat-as-sport set in a logical-conclusion-of-D&D-magic utopia where everyone has access to magical healing and revival (or death prevention or whatever you prefer) such that you're a bunch of consenting beings fighting no-holds-barred in a dungeon who all get patched up and have drinks after. That seems minimally problematic to me. Though maybe you're talking about the problematic aspects of "I specifically want to enjoy that I am killing these other intelligent creatures," in which case, agreed, that is going to be a problematic thing to actively enjoy even if those creatures are deserving, though I think there's a complicated discussion to be had about how able we are to change problematic aspects of ourselves vs finding outlets for them that aren't damaging to anyone, and D&D-as-murder-simulator plays into that. I'm blanking on the name, but there was a D&D-offshoot that kinda did that. Dungeon delves in the modern day as spectacles with special effects and an "enemy" MC organizing things (including a beholder that earned its way out of being a combatant) and supplying narrative banter. Adventures/monsters as celebrities somewhere between boxing and pro wrestling, action outside the arena, PR shoots, managers, hijinks, it was wonderfully bizarre and I never actually put one together but I loved the idea.
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Mar 24, 2021 02:58
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Bruceski posted:I'm blanking on the name, but there was a D&D-offshoot that kinda did that. Dungeon delves in the modern day as spectacles with special effects and an "enemy" MC organizing things (including a beholder that earned its way out of being a combatant) and supplying narrative banter. Adventures/monsters as celebrities somewhere between boxing and pro wrestling, action outside the arena, PR shoots, managers, hijinks, it was wonderfully bizarre and I never actually put one together but I loved the idea. You're probably thinking of X-Crawl, which was a way better concept for a game than the actual published game itself was. A lot of people did run "X-Crawl but actually good" games using 4E, but it was more a case of just stealing the elevator pitch and running with it.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:03
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Kai Tave posted:You're probably thinking of X-Crawl, which was a way better concept for a game than the actual published game itself was. A lot of people did run "X-Crawl but actually good" games using 4E, but it was more a case of just stealing the elevator pitch and running with it. Yeah, that was it. And that's how I'd do it too.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:04
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Bruceski posted:Yeah, that was it. And that's how I'd do it too. You don't want to run a campaign in right wing fascist America where christianity is dead and lich ronald reagan is president emperor for life? (XCrawl was sooooo baaaaad)
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Mar 24, 2021 03:10
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Mystic Mongol posted:You don't want to run a campaign in right wing fascist America where christianity is dead and lich ronald reagan is president emperor for life? It's a personal bias of mine, but I find anything with a "Rome came back/never left!" concept as bad. It's like number 2 on my poo poo list of alt history behind "Germans/Confederates won!" Doesn't matter if it's on Earth or in space. Bringing back Rome poo poo is lazy and hacky.
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Mar 24, 2021 03:19
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depends on which rome you're talking about :byzantine:
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Mar 24, 2021 05:07
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Bring back rome but only as a target.
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Mar 24, 2021 05:25
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Alaois posted:depends on which rome you're talking about I hate alt-history Rome so much I'm glad that's not a real smiley. I mean, yeah, it's personal, because I read a bad roleplaying game every two weeks, and every old sci-fi game is like "Well it's the year a million, and Gaius Septimus Romulus XIII is the emperor of all the holy roman humanspace."
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Mar 24, 2021 05:33
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theironjef posted:It's a personal bias of mine, but I find anything with a "Rome came back/never left!" concept as bad. It's like number 2 on my poo poo list of alt history behind "Germans/Confederates won!" Doesn't matter if it's on Earth or in space. Bringing back Rome poo poo is lazy and hacky. What if it was an alt-history story where the Romans came back, but due to time travel? Like it's 1974 and the entire city of Rome circa 200 CE falls out of a time portal somewhere in South America.
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Mar 24, 2021 05:35
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Bring back rome but only as a target. Bring back Rome, but only as a Target.
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Mar 24, 2021 05:50
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Libertad! posted:This is one of the reasons why I'm not exactly enthused about the planned revising of Vistani in the upcoming Ravenloft setting. I imagine their way of writing the Vistani will include most of the old lore with little changes and then a single paragraph that just says 'Despite their history and reputation amongst locals, not all Vistani are evil' and somehow still have 'the Evil Eye' ability name be a thing.
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Mar 24, 2021 06:14
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King of Solomon posted:Bring back Rome, but only as a Target. Render unto Caeser what is Caesers, but they don't take Amex.
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Mar 24, 2021 06:36
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Bruceski posted:I'm blanking on the name, but there was a D&D-offshoot that kinda did that. Dungeon delves in the modern day as spectacles with special effects and an "enemy" MC organizing things (including a beholder that earned its way out of being a combatant) and supplying narrative banter. Adventures/monsters as celebrities somewhere between boxing and pro wrestling, action outside the arena, PR shoots, managers, hijinks, it was wonderfully bizarre and I never actually put one together but I loved the idea. If I remember from the F&F of that, it had dungeon crawls as an actual blood sport where you absolutely are doing serious violence and risking killing people (and also as an aspect of a dystopian society). Which is potentially a fun game, but that one absolutely needs to address the violence, and indeed that should be a lot of the point (which seemed like part of where X-Crawl fell down, though it's been a while). I feel like most good games like that should end with a revolution. Whereas the other option is to actually use the magic to solve the violence issue by removing the consequences of combat and making a non-dangerous sporting event. I'm sure that wouldn't work for everyone, because some people seem to really like having death as an option, but I'd say the large number of low-stakes sports dramas and so forth indicate that "will we win the cup" are good enough stakes for a lot of folks. And for me I find the idea that I can defeat the characters without involving death or grim consequences kind of appealing in a game like 4E where pushing the mechanical difficulty can be fun for everyone. And the tier system works well too, replace heroic/paragon/epic with different leagues and have them fight for promotion, etc. In any case, it'd certainly remove the violence-porn problem.
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Mar 24, 2021 06:39
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Kurieg posted:Render unto Caeser what is Caesers, but they don't take Amex. Render unto Little Caesar's, perhaps?
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Mar 24, 2021 06:45
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SkyeAuroline posted:Render unto Little Caesar's, perhaps? They really went downhill after Nero got promoted to night manager and thought that "hot and ready" referred to the building and not the pizzas.
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Mar 24, 2021 06:46
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Dungeon Crawl as Sports Entertainment, a la WWE, SMASH TV, The Running Man, American Gladiators, Takeshi's Castle/Most Extreme Elimination Challenge is an amazing idea, and there aren't enough that do that. The fact that people need to build a horrible setting around it is so brutally disappointing. Don't write a setting, the settings for poo poo like the WWE are already insane enough. Vince McMahon is a real life Dark Lord who used every dirty trick in the book to destroy or absorb all of his rivals. He built a massive empire, treats his employees like poo poo, etc. There are so many objectively insane people in just Pro Wrestling alone. The entire sport is something insane people would do. There's attempts at safety but like, sometimes its just horrifying and painful poo poo they do for the crowd, like Cody Rhodes letting someone powerbomb him onto a pile of thumbtacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc4qK7RxeVo or the Undertaker throwing Mankind off a 25 foot cage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hMp65SzyTU Having an actual lore/worldbuilding component is a giant waste of time. Nobody cares. The story is in the "sport" and the dungeon crawl. Use that.
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Mar 24, 2021 06:48
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Literally just run WWWRPG and say "...but it's a fantasy dungeon crawl league" before the start of session zero.
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Mar 24, 2021 08:36
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Nystral posted:Did FASA or any of the successor companies for ShadowRun ever address the wholesale tokenization of the shamanism as portrayed in the game? I stopped following it closely back in the 90s when I went to university. They went to Unified Magic Theory a couple editions ago and basically made all of the shamanism aspects just a matter of a particular casters' personal paradigm as opposed to there being actual seperation of magics.
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Mar 24, 2021 09:57
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Dungeon Crawl as Sports Entertainment, a la WWE, SMASH TV, The Running Man, American Gladiators, Takeshi's Castle/Most Extreme Elimination Challenge is an amazing idea, and there aren't enough that do that. The fact that people need to build a horrible setting around it is so brutally disappointing. Don't write a setting, the settings for poo poo like the WWE are already insane enough. This concept was utterly derailed when I started to think too hard about the worldbuilding to support it, and I never recovered.
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Mar 24, 2021 14:21
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Kai Tave posted:Yep, this is what makes all the "well that's just how freelancing is!" takes from various quarters extremely irritating because everybody who freelances, Graeme included, knows how freelancing fuckin works, nonetheless this whole debacle speaks to a massive failure of project management that could have all been easily solved with minimal fuss by WotC actually doing their job and giving the freelancer they tapped for the project any sort of guidelines or feedback or direction. That this is all technically permissible and legal and etc doesn't change the fact that it's also pretty clearly mismanaged to a degree that wasn't at all necessary, and that actively made the finished product significantly worse in numerous respects. I don't know game publishing, but from a typical writing contract this structure is real weird - the "we control the final product, this is a work-for-hire" model is common but almost always for uncredited work where it goes out under the name of the company/outlet. For things where you're naming the author (and using it as a selling point!) contracts usually allow authors to review if not formally approve the final text. This seems super unprofessional and massively unnecessary.
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Mar 24, 2021 16:22
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Notahippie posted:I don't know game publishing, but from a typical writing contract this structure is real weird - the "we control the final product, this is a work-for-hire" model is common but almost always for uncredited work where it goes out under the name of the company/outlet. For things where you're naming the author (and using it as a selling point!) contracts usually allow authors to review if not formally approve the final text. This seems super unprofessional and massively unnecessary. It's definitely pretty standard in the games freelancing industry IME (source: I was an active freelancer for various companies from 2000-2018 or so)--I can only think of a few projects where I saw the final, post-editing and development draft before the book went to print, and even those were more the lead developer saying "here's a sneak peek at the finished product if you're curious" rather than any kind of authorial review or proof. Likewise being informed in advance of cuts to your work is a courtesy but generally not something I've seen outside of really extreme cases--when WotC decided at the 11th hour to publish Dark Sun 4e as a "Player Options + Setting Guide" book and a Monster Manual instead of the separate Player's Guide and Campaign Guide approach they'd used for Forgotten Realms and Eberron, those of us working on the Campaign Guide got an advance heads up that large chunks of our work had to be cut, since they now had to cram a 160-page Player's Guide into the book, but I think that's the only instance I can recall. None of which is to say it's okay or not a problem, just that it's pretty bog-standard in the industry, again IME. There's absolutely no excusing adding back a bunch of racist, colonialist tropes, though, especially when the author in question is someone you specifically hired because of their criticisms of your use of those tropes.
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Mar 24, 2021 16:37
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Kai Tave posted:Which is even weirder because if you want an unquestionably evil enemy like zombies, zombies are right there. neaden posted:People want to have fun unproblematic violence, but it turns out violence is always problematic so that doesn't exist. You either find the level of problematicness you are comfortable with, just don't think with it enough, or play a game that isn't based around fun problematic violence. Ultiville posted:I dunno, I always thought one really fun D&D 4E campaign would be combat-as-sport set in a logical-conclusion-of-D&D-magic utopia where everyone has access to magical healing and revival (or death prevention or whatever you prefer) such that you're a bunch of consenting beings fighting no-holds-barred in a dungeon who all get patched up and have drinks after. That seems minimally problematic to me.
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Mar 24, 2021 16:53
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Mystic Mongol posted:You don't want to run a campaign in right wing fascist America where christianity is dead and lich ronald reagan is president emperor for life? theironjef posted:It's a personal bias of mine, but I find anything with a "Rome came back/never left!" concept as bad. It's like number 2 on my poo poo list of alt history behind "Germans/Confederates won!" Doesn't matter if it's on Earth or in space. Bringing back Rome poo poo is lazy and hacky. XCrawl is set in a warped version of the Reagan era probably because almost all of the relevant media influences were released in that era: Turkey Shoot, Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072, Prize of Peril, The Running Man, Salute of the Jugger, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. To say nothing of the 80s wrestling boom and American Gladiators. The Roman stuff is pretty innocuous--it grates because it just doesn't contribute anything. The stupid thing about XCrawl's setting is how it just gets in its own way. It has modern technology, so there's no reason to have barbarians or druids...but you're also not allowed to take your machinegun into the dungeon. That's just slamming the door shut on your own dick for no reason. You could replace the Roman pantheon with a standard Greyhawk/FR pantheon and lose nothing. What matters is that it's a vision of the Reagan 80s without the role of Christian evangelical conservatism. Liberalism wins the culture war by default, but it doesn't really change anything. All that imperial violence and injustice has to get channeled somewhere, so it goes into televised deathsports. In the original edition, barbarians and such are replaced by soldiers and athletes. What were the soldiers doing before they signed up for XCrawl? Presumably they were paving the way for death camps in South America. The athletes are where the pro wrestling connection comes in. Instead of going into pro wrestling after a knee injury ends your football career, you go to XCrawl. So XCrawl has the best orcs--they're a metaphor for oppressed peoples, and also painkiller addiction.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:07
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The answer keeps coming back to the ideal RPG game being a party of terrorists blowing up specific bad guys. Zorro and Robin Hood, don't need hordes of bad guys to mow down. Just the corrupt authority figure and those that directly serve them.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:08
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Terrible Opinions posted:The answer keeps coming back to the ideal RPG game being a party of terrorists blowing up specific bad guys. Zorro and Robin Hood, don't need hordes of bad guys to mow down. Just the corrupt authority figure and those that directly serve them. Which sounds like the D&D Version of Leverage, which brings us back to 4e again...
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Mar 24, 2021 17:15
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Halloween Jack posted:XCrawl is set in a warped version of the Reagan era probably because almost all of the relevant media influences were released in that era: Turkey Shoot, Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072, Prize of Peril, The Running Man, Salute of the Jugger, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. To say nothing of the 80s wrestling boom and American Gladiators. I'd say the most grating thing to me in X-Crawl was how all the prestige classes and the single new class in it were absolutely horseshit. The new class, Athlete, was basically "pick a sport and get +1 to it every few levels" spread out over 20 levels, with a specific caveat that X-Crawl Dungeons didn't count as a selectable sport. Then all three prestige classes pertained to people's lives outside the dungeons. It was like Monster Hunter, Dungeon Master, and Celebrity. Just all stuff that would only happen outside (Monster Hunters just trapped wild monsters to stock the dungeons) so the classes suggested you should be playing supply side of the dungeon entertainment, but 90% of the book was like "obviously you're a contestant here."
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Mar 24, 2021 17:15
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Terrible Opinions posted:The answer keeps coming back to the ideal RPG game being a party of terrorists blowing up specific bad guys. Zorro and Robin Hood, don't need hordes of bad guys to mow down. Just the corrupt authority figure and those that directly serve them. hello Spire, you called Writing a game like this, being my white whale of game design, is surprisingly hard though. Haven't got it figured out on my end yet.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:16
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theironjef posted:I'd say the most grating thing to me in X-Crawl was how all the prestige classes and the single new class in it were absolutely horseshit. The new class, Athlete, was basically "pick a sport and get +1 to it every few levels" spread out over 20 levels, with a specific caveat that X-Crawl Dungeons didn't count as a selectable sport. Then all three prestige classes pertained to people's lives outside the dungeons. I appreciated your review for pointing out how it indulges in that D20 trope of "Here's a feat that lets you do stuff that you should just be able to do anyway."
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Mar 24, 2021 17:18
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