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Magnetic North posted:I have sold old CCGs and old RPG books to them on three separate occasions and have absolutely no complaints the service. This was all pre-pandemic, mind you. IIRC, the way it worked what you told them what it was: you talk via mail to decide what they think they can resell and the conditions and agree on a price, they mail you shipping labels, and then you send them out on their dime. Then they mail you a check (maybe they can do direct deposit, who knows). I have not used them to sell board games, and I don't know if they have a process for if something is not in the condition specified or is otherwise incomplete, like you might expect if you sold a Magic card and they disagreed on the condition. I've also sold a few boxes to Noble Knight, during the pandemic. I was impressed. They make it pretty easy. I made more selling books at the GenCon auction, but that requires a bunch of upfront cost and much more work on the seller's part. Noble Knight made it super easy and I thought the price was fair considering that - especially if you just want em out of your house.
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Feb 25, 2022 05:12
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Prowlers and Paragons - I'm on a supers-collecting spree, and I'm looking at this. Any red flags? Not to get all Trad Industry, but there's a niggling feeling in the back of my head. Did I hear something? Can anybody speak to the people involved. Bonus, can anybody speak to the game itself?
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Feb 26, 2022 00:26
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CitizenKeen posted:Prowlers and Paragons - I'm on a supers-collecting spree, and I'm looking at this. Any red flags? Not to get all Trad Industry, but there's a niggling feeling in the back of my head. Did I hear something? Can anybody speak to the people involved. Bonus, can anybody speak to the game itself? There is a quickstart for the game at least.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:03
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CitizenKeen posted:Prowlers and Paragons - I'm on a supers-collecting spree, and I'm looking at this. Any red flags? Not to get all Trad Industry, but there's a niggling feeling in the back of my head. Did I hear something? Can anybody speak to the people involved. Bonus, can anybody speak to the game itself? Sean Patrick Fannon worked on the book and was accused to sexual harassment by multiple people. He got bounced off RPG.net for doxxing somebody.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:23
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Dawgstar posted:Sean Patrick Fannon worked on the book and was accused to sexual harassment by multiple people. He got bounced off RPG.net for doxxing somebody. I knew that feeling was coming from somewhere. Thanks.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:40
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Weird random question : when do you think number of people who knew a vancian magic system eclipsed number of people who were familiar with Vance’s books? Ignoring the name “vancian” for the question, just the system. Early 80’s?
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Feb 26, 2022 09:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:Weird random question : when do you think number of people who knew a vancian magic system eclipsed number of people who were familiar with Vance’s books? Ignoring the name “vancian” for the question, just the system. No later than the early 1990s when FF1 came out on the NES.
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Feb 26, 2022 09:29
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Reminds me that I really need to read more of Vance's stuff, I've had a anthology containing several of his novellas(The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, and The Miracle Workers) for several years but I've barely touched it at all in the time I've owned it
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Feb 26, 2022 11:49
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Even knowing it was largely cribbed from his work, and having heard it called "Vancian magic," the first time I read Vance I was still struck by how directly adapted it is. It feels so essentially game-y now, but it's really all there in Vance, down to the spell levels.
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Feb 26, 2022 12:02
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drrockso20 posted:Reminds me that I really need to read more of Vance's stuff, I've had a anthology containing several of his novellas(The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, and The Miracle Workers) for several years but I've barely touched it at all in the time I've owned it I would strongly recommend giving his work a go. He has a very good knack for direct and to-the-point prose that make his stories move at a good pace and keep the more indulgent aspects of his writing in check. The Dying Earth stories in particular feel a lot like the ideal Gygax was trying to work towards with early D&D, but are so much better executed from a tonal and writing perspective. One thing about Vance's The Dying Earth stories that often doesn't get properly conveyed by fans is how darkly humorous and ironic they are in tone. Like, major segments of the Cugel the Clever stories read less like game of thrones and more like a very dark Daffy Duck cartoon.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:13
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The thing to know about Vance is that you can read a lot of Vance in not a lot of time. The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, and all of the Dying Earth, that's fewer pages than e.g. two installments of ASOIAF or any big YA trilogy.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:00
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Anybody played External Containment Bureau? I have some players that are interested in it but I've never played it myself (or any other Forged in the Dark game) and there are some rules and structure things in the book that are sort of half-explained, but that I don't totally understand how they work in practice.
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Feb 27, 2022 00:05
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I bought the Troubleshooters from my flgs, and drat the art direction is incredibly on point. It captures the feeling of 60s-70s bédé perfectly. I love it.
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Feb 27, 2022 02:01
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MockingQuantum posted:Anybody played External Containment Bureau? I have some players that are interested in it but I've never played it myself (or any other Forged in the Dark game) and there are some rules and structure things in the book that are sort of half-explained, but that I don't totally understand how they work in practice. You could check the Blades in the Dark SRD to see if it's covered there. https://bladesinthedark.com/basics
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Feb 27, 2022 07:03
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Napoleon Nelson posted:I've only flipped through Orbital Blues so far and I think it looks great, but I'm a little worried it'll be too graphically busy for easy reference. Well, as of today we can add Monster Care Squad to the list of "totally gorgeous books". Oh this is pretty, very pretty. I'd read a bunch of text from the PDF a while back, but this is my first look at the finished art and layout. I am extremely happy to add this to the huge pile on my coffee table. Speaking of PDFs, I did start in on the Avatar PDF by going through the GM section. It looks solid, agendas, guidelines, moves all line up the way they should, and there's a good amount of text describing how it's all supposed to work. I think they knew this would be a lot of their customer base's first RPG, and the work on the GM section reflects that. Now to go over it again and make sure it's actually good.
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Feb 27, 2022 08:12
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KingKalamari posted:He has a very good knack for direct and to-the-point prose that make his stories move at a good pace and keep the more indulgent aspects of his writing in check. I enjoy words a lot and make it a point to know a bunch of them. more or less exactly once per chapter, Vance will use a word that's so esoteric I have to go look it up. it's fun and he does it right but I imagine it's one of the origins of Gygax abusing the dictionary.
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Feb 27, 2022 16:20
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I enjoyed the Vance collection I had right up until Cugel the Clever, who was so awful I couldn't stand to read any more about him.
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Feb 27, 2022 17:13
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mllaneza posted:Now to go over it again and make sure it's actually good. Have they improved description of the setting? The preview basically required you to know a ton about Avatar to run, which I guess is perfectly appropriate for the target market, but not ideal in general.
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Feb 27, 2022 17:29
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Empty Sandwich posted:I enjoy words a lot and make it a point to know a bunch of them. more or less exactly once per chapter, Vance will use a word that's so esoteric I have to go look it up. Yeah, Vance's love of complex and esoteric words tends to mostly work because the other aspects of his prose are so direct and too the point. Gygax's own writing made a lot more sense after I read Vance since it's clear Gygax is trying to imitate Vance's writing style but doesn't fully understand what made it work and so he just ends up reading like a smug, bloviating windbag who ate a thesaurus. potatocubed posted:I enjoyed the Vance collection I had right up until Cugel the Clever, who was so awful I couldn't stand to read any more about him. A lot of people tend to have that reaction to the Cugel stories and it's definitely not helped by some of Cugel's worst actions happening in the first half of the first book. As the series progresses it gets this good rhythm going where Cugel achieves temporary windfalls by being a backstabbing rear end in a top hat, only to end up losing that windfall in the next story by either overestimating his own abilities or by getting dicked over by someone who's better at being an rear end in a top hat than he is. I made reference to Chuck Jones era Daffy Duck earlier when describing the Cugel stories and I honestly think it's an apt comparison: Cugel's an immoral rear end in a top hat who does incredibly lovely things, but for some people he's really fun to read about because he's so frequently the author of his own downfall.
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Feb 27, 2022 20:58
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It's Always Sunny On The Dying Earth
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Feb 27, 2022 23:22
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The Cugel stories became more palatable once someone pointed out to me that they're all in the picaresque genre. Wikipedia posted:A picaresque narrative is usually written in first person as an autobiographical account. Cugel is an rear end in a top hat whose greed unveils the hypocrisy of society. At the end of every story he loses his ill-gotten gains *because* he is a relentless rear end in a top hat, and is driven out to find new hypocrites to swindle.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:55
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Eyes of the Overworld is good, but I couldn't get thrugh Cugel's Saga. It felt padded, like every encounter that would have been a page or two in the previous stories was blown out to a full chapter. My favorite part of the whole setting is how much more dynamic "Vancian Casting" was in its original conception than what eventually got codified in RPGs. There's a scene where Cugel picks up a book in a treasure room, reads and memorizes a powerful spell, and then casts it to destroy the monster burrow he's been imprisoned in. Memorizing spells isn't a class feature exclusive to Wizards, and doesn't take any appreciable amount of time beyond reading the words off the printed page. The real skill of an experienced mage is pronouncing them correctly, with hilarious miscast effects if you do it wrong. I can see why this was discarded in the modern class based fantasy paradigm, which prioritizes role protection for casters, but it's fun to imagine an alternate path where it was the norm.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:11
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mellonbread posted:Eyes of the Overworld is good, but I couldn't get thrugh Cugel's Saga. It felt padded, like every encounter that would have been a page or two in the previous stories was blown out to a full chapter. 
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Feb 28, 2022 00:18
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Kegel's Saga
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Feb 28, 2022 00:54
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potatocubed posted:I enjoyed the Vance collection I had right up until Cugel the Clever, who was so awful I couldn't stand to read any more about him.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:58
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Give the Demon Princes a shot; it's a scifi riff on Man in the Iron Mask, a heroic assassin seeking revenge on the five pirate lords who enslaved his home world. It has all the wild worldbuilding and poetically bizarre dialog of classic Vance, only the over-the-top assholes all get their karmic comeuppance. The protagonist is surprisingly self-aware for the genre, and is frequently warned that his victory will destroy him as totally as defeat. But hey, those assholes aren't going to kill themselves.
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Feb 28, 2022 01:30
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Eyes of the Overworld is pretty good so far, while The Dying Earth was... okay? It kind of felt like a series loosely connected Zothique stories with way fewer dictionary seeks.
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Feb 28, 2022 01:31
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Runa posted:Kegel's Saga A real clenching narrative.
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Feb 28, 2022 03:32
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It's worth noting that The Dying Earth and both Cugel books (though less the second than the first) are largely fix-ups of short stories that were originally published separately from each other, which accounts for a lot of the loose connections and padded episodes. I definitely laughed out loud at one point in Cugel's Saga when I realized that Vance had structured an entire nation's geography, cultural mores, economic system, and fashion just so Cugel could steal a boat in the funniest possible way. Johnny Landmine fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Feb 28, 2022 |
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Feb 28, 2022 07:34
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grassy gnoll posted:A real clenching narrative.
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Feb 28, 2022 15:00
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Splicer posted:Tightly written I was skeptical at first, but once I got in there it was absolutely gripping
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Feb 28, 2022 19:03
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I'd gently caress with it.
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Feb 28, 2022 19:18
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do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game?
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Feb 28, 2022 23:53
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redleader posted:do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game? Wait, these are games? That people actually play? With other people?
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Feb 28, 2022 23:57
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redleader posted:do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game? I own Lancer and will not play it. I own Electric Bastionland as an art book and an inspiration source that will likely never see a table, since I'd have to GM it and it's not the kind I'm really capable of. I have & do play 5e from time to time, and I have 2/3 of the core set. So overall I'm at a 50/50 split on "yes". Would have been 60/40 if I kept my Mothership pledge. I'm not counting the 5e limited-cover modules I'm just holding to flip in this arrangement - I haven't even opened them and don't intend to.
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Mar 1, 2022 00:06
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redleader posted:do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game?
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Mar 1, 2022 00:07
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redleader posted:do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game? In more than one instance I have bought RPGs literally by the pound for this reason. Just big blind box purchases. Ended up throwing out a lot of out of date 40k codexes but ended up with treasure nonetheless.
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Mar 1, 2022 00:08
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I supported way too many Zinequest items last year, there's no way a single human being can play all of those in a lifetime.
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Mar 1, 2022 00:25
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redleader posted:do y'all ever buy physical rpg rulebooks just to own and read, with no expectations of ever playing that particular game? I try not to but I definitely have more RPG books than I can ever use in a lifetime. I’ll be maxing out my second bookcase this year I think.
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Mar 1, 2022 00:44
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Yeah as a non-joke answer, I can only think of one instance where I've bought an RPG rulebook that I'd probably never play. Every other one I've bought, I may have bought in part because of the art or production or to support the creators, but with the hope of actually playing them at some point. It's hard to say if I ever will, just given my limited time on Earth.
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Mar 1, 2022 00:58
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