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Has anyone else noticed a culture war among tabletop game shops? Like, as a kid, we assumed that every store would be smelly, gate keeping comic book guys with no interest in inviting anyone else in, equal parts ogling and insulting women especially to the point where we gave up on all the local stores and got all our rpg poo poo from Barnes and Noble. Nowadays tons of stores are hard against that, and then occasionally you'll walk in and find That Store again. And I get flashbacks to being 14 and having some goonlord quiz me on lore while I looked at Warhammer boxes we couldn't afford. At least at the official GW the overbearing weirdo just wants me to buy everything I glance at. Almost as if we hit geek social fallacy peak. Now you either live and die by "accept everyone, except assholes" or "accept only assholes." Like closest to our apartment rn there's a gooncave store and a store with a trans pride flag in the window by the MtG posters.
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Aug 5, 2022 21:31
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Has anyone else noticed a culture war among tabletop game shops? Might be a local thing. Nearest shop to me banned all the furries, because they were playing yu-gi-oh, and yu-gi-oh players are the worst.
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Aug 5, 2022 21:49
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That Store is usually basically a vanity project/kool kids klubhouse for the weirdo who owns it to get anyone to hang out with him, especially nowadays I think.
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Aug 6, 2022 02:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:That Store is usually basically a vanity project/kool kids klubhouse for the weirdo who owns it to get anyone to hang out with him, especially nowadays I think. Whenever I consider the FLGS industry I always remember that the one I grew up near was started because the owner - and this is a direct quote - "wanted to find people to play Star Fleet Battles with." They're all personal vanity projects, every single one. Some of them are the vanity projects of people that can actually run a business, is all. Most aren't.
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Aug 6, 2022 03:23
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A lot of the early 10s culture wars are hard to articulate years after partly because there was so much intense bullshit going on, partly because it's a result of Trump pretty much totally realigning the political landscape. Definitely had slightly different flavours of tedious scolds who wanted to ban and/or arbitrarily censor everything they don't personally enjoy, just with slightly different priorities, though it was easy enough to see in retrospect who down the line would end up posting Facebook screeds about 'woke' at literally any occasion and who would disappear into the obscurity of YA Twitter to backstab each other eternally over whose depiction is clearly endorsement. One of the funny things about the reactionary D&D folks is you can really tell how few of them actually play the games on anything like a regular basis, despite or rather because of having extremely specific ideas about how they're 'supposed' to be played. Of course, ties into how That Store is usually a guy (and always a guy) basically trying to buy friends to play with.
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Aug 6, 2022 03:40
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Xiahou Dun posted:As King Language Nerd of the forums who's played for years exclusively with fellow post-grad language nerds : NO. Lol no, gently caress no. Nothing about that is fun. Lmao. I already do that in real life and it's called "gently caress you brother in law I'm tired of translating for you at Christmas learn some loving German". Start loading your translations with insults to his intelligence, "so the shithead here wants to know...", "dumbass mister can't learn one of the languages his own was derived from liked the soup...". You'll have more fun, amuse the relatives, and I'll bet a bottle of good scotch he starts picking up some useful German. Scheissekopf is useful right ?
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Aug 6, 2022 05:24
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mllaneza posted:Start loading your translations with insults to his intelligence, "so the shithead here wants to know...", "dumbass mister can't learn one of the languages his own was derived from liked the soup...". You'll have more fun, amuse the relatives, and I'll bet a bottle of good scotch he starts picking up some useful German. Scheissekopf is useful right ? Obviously. What am I an rear end in a top hat? And obviously its cousin, translating wrong to embarrass him. But then we enter phase 2 where my sister gets mad at me for not translating and I ask her why she can’t translate for her own loving husband and now we’re fighting. Also he’s been to Germany twice without learning anything besides “beer”. Motherfucker thinks Islam is language, I don’t think he’s doing some scholarship on the side. Regardless, none of this would be fun in a game.
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Aug 6, 2022 05:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:One of the funny things about the reactionary D&D folks is you can really tell how few of them actually play the games on anything like a regular basis, despite or rather because of having extremely specific ideas about how they're 'supposed' to be played. Of course, ties into how That Store is usually a guy (and always a guy) basically trying to buy friends to play with. This is the one unifying aspect of almost every grognards.txt post in those threads to me. Just having that very superficial understanding of how the games they "play" work. And it is hard to look back at now because how much things were realigned over the past six years. Like prior to that I knew plenty of super left people who I'd be speaking to about RPG stuff and 4E would come up and they'd just go into an immediate "see the thing with 4E is it's more like an MMO and not an actual tabletop top game and..." like any grognard.txt post you'd see online. But a big part of that was also that people were going to be way more accepting of what we'd now automatically consider a regressive outlook on our entertainment/game stuff. Like as far as online spaces went there were plenty that went poo poo and died because a few toxic sacks of poo poo were never banned because "well he's been a member for years" or "he's a good guy honestly he just sometimes says [insanely hateful stuff about various minority groups] he's just joking around". So in the face of that everyone who wasn't like that left. But it also gave a lot of people an overly heightened bullshitometer for "[regressive thing] is there for realism" or whatever. OSR was an absolute toxic wasteland for a long time and kind of still is. Like type "OSR" into Twitter and enjoy just insta-blocking half the folks that come up. Thank God for MÖRK BORG and CY_BORG. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Aug 7, 2022 |
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Aug 7, 2022 02:30
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I used to go to an LGS that touted itself on being welcoming to all and calls itself a safe space. It’s really well-kept and I’d call it like a boutique level store in terms of how well furnished it is, but the store owner is just a performatively woke small business petty tyrant who continually abuses his staff and runs them out. A new place opened up fairly close by that looks more gooncave than it is. People are accepting but the owners won’t use you as a prop to pat themselves on the back, which is nice.
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Aug 7, 2022 05:41
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The one near me is weird because all of the staff and most of the customers are cool but the owner is definitely comes off like someone who wishes they were still able to run That Store.
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Aug 7, 2022 19:37
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I’ve only encountered the 4e good person / 3.5 and 5 are bad people kind of vibe on the TG board. I presume it’s elsewhere but I don’t think it can be quite that widespread, as my gaming group is mostly ultra identity interested politics progressives who literally hash this kind of thing out on tumblr as a hobby (they’re nice creative people, we all have our quirks), and they have not made a single mention of that. They talk about all the problematic people associated with 5 but they don’t express any particular ideological affiliation to the editions.
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Aug 7, 2022 20:14
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If you ever want to go into the full Nazi-adjacent/4chan adjacent stuff in RPG's (pen and paper and vidya), checkout RPGCodex.. You'll wish it was possible to napalm the site to the ground afterwards, though
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Aug 7, 2022 22:47
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fr0id posted:I can only say as a long time lurker, but this isn’t accurate. There were absolutely some general cultural beliefs about old school folks being right wing. These also happened to be backed up by the aforementioned folks I brought up with zak, tobacco dude, and sexual assault games dude. But as mentioned above, I think it lead to a general sense of the tg forum being seen as incredibly anti-anything but 4e for a bit. I don’t have the direct posts, but I even remember golks bringing up “hey are we conflating politics with edition wars?” and some light discussions happening well after things were settled. I was pretty terminally online during the 3E/4E editions wars. Here's what I remember: Initially, the conflict was largely apolitical and focused almost entirely on 3E vs 4E rules, with most major gaming forums (your rpgnets, en worlds, wotc forums, etc.) being pretty evenly split between the two before they balkanized entirely. TBP went pro 4E, Paizo forums of course went pro 3E; wotc and en world quarantined 3E/OSR threads into their own subforums. This is when things started to get weird: instead of criticizing game mechanics, people started to criticize playstyles and gaming communities. That's when the edition wars turned into a culture war, though at this point it was still focused on gaming instead of real-world politics. So the case I'm going to look at is Therpgsite, run by tobacco guy (John Tarnowski, AKA Therpgpundit; who isn't so much a conservative as he is a paranoid, weirdo egomaniac and monarchist who thinks he's a real-life wizard) Before 4E came around, the whole thing on the rpgsite was a conflict between "story" games (narratively focused indie games) vs "real" roleplaying games (Old school D&D). Tarnowski and his lickspittles weren't just OSR fans, they believed that game mechanics like meta-currency and player authorship were a secret, insidious hipster plot to destroy the rpg hobby from within and 4E was bringing these mechanics into the mainstream. This is where the D&D culture war started to percolate, accusing 4E players and later 3E players of being swine out to destroy the hobby. 4E was a dumb baby game for snowflakes and REAL manly men played old school games, etc. Politically, the rpgsite leaned right, but hadn't gone full MAGA yet. Conversely, you have the gaming den which was very anti-4E but also very much politically left. So by 2012 the dust had settled on the edition wars and 4E had officially lost, and for years the rpgsite crowd had been getting high on their own farts with a lot of detritus banned from en world and rpgnet washing up on their shore. This got kicked into high gear during the gamergate era, when therpgsite forum became a bastion of "freeze peach". Since pundy always needs an enemy trying to infiltrate and dismantle tabletop rpgs, the enemy shifted from storygame swine to "social justice warriors" and "wokeism" and after the Trump years, all of the left-wing voices on the site who liked OSR games had been driven away. So to answer your question in the most roundabout way possible, I don't think that the OSR was initially right-wing but it WAS reactionary in that there was a belief that new people were coming in and trying to destroy the game. They saw the major changes in 4E as a sign of this, and so they kept doubling down again and again on this belief that by the time 5E came around, the fight had become more important than the cause so the enemy at the gates eventually morphed into the woke hordes, so it became the unofficial haven for right-wing gaming types.
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Aug 8, 2022 04:51
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TheRPGSite is weird because it wasn't built around a philosophy/approach to RPGs, as opposed to forums like Dragonsfoot, which is explicitly dedicated to AD&D1e, or The Gaming Den, which is dedicated to Frank Trollman's incredibly blinkered theories of game design. It was a catchment for people who got banned from RPGnet and ENWorld, and the only uniting factor is that it's made up of people who can't talk about games on other forums without losing their temper and publicly melting down. Last I checked, its members argue bitterly about the most mundane poo poo imaginable when they're not united in hatred against some outside force. (Zak's signature there is "Buy something. 100% of the proceeds go toward legal action against people this forum hates.") Of course, people like that tend to be reactionary turbonerds who hate indie games. The attitudes toward certain RPGs and types of RPGs grew out of Tarnowski's own idiosyncratic tastes and fascist politics, as much as anything else. Like, he loves Amber Diceless and wrote a ripoff of it, so it is officially not one of the hated Storygames. I think it's actually less fervently right wing than it was a few years ago, when they had regular posters who would constantly call people beta cuck faggots and ramble about the Cultural Marxist conspiracy. Those people were so angry all the time that even Tarnowski got sick of their bullshit, and I think the 5e consulting gig gave him an incentive to cool things down a bit.
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Aug 8, 2022 15:42
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Halloween Jack posted:TheRPGSite is weird because it wasn't built around a philosophy/approach to RPGs, as opposed to forums like Dragonsfoot, which is explicitly dedicated to AD&D1e, or The Gaming Den, which is dedicated to Frank Trollman's incredibly blinkered theories of game design. It was a catchment for people who got banned from RPGnet and ENWorld, and the only uniting factor is that it's made up of people who can't talk about games on other forums without losing their temper and publicly melting down. Last I checked, its members argue bitterly about the most mundane poo poo imaginable when they're not united in hatred against some outside force. (Zak's signature there is "Buy something. 100% of the proceeds go toward legal action against people this forum hates.") The RPGSite actually predates Tarnowski. It was started by another guy who hated storygames and disliked RPG.net for facilitating those discussions, then a year in he sold it to Pundit. So it was started with this philosophy of groggy "real RPGs" and then went from there, but I don't believe it was explicitly for people who got banned from other forums or people who are anger elementals. It then metastasized under Pundit. (source: I know a couple people who have hung out there at various points and they've told me about it.) e: https://annex.fandom.com/wiki/Nutkinland this page goes over the pre-pundit history and matches up with some digging i did in very early RPGSite threads right now. e2: https://www.therpgsite.com/help-desk/ok-here039s-the-deal-the-pundit039s-greatest-challenge/ this thread is the turnover Arivia fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 17:52
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It's easy to think "Ah, of course this was always about politics," but tabletop regressives also likely being political regressives was a distant secondary issue until many of those regressives found a political figure they could all rally behind, and then things like 5E explicitly aligning with these stupid assholes happened. It's important to remember that there's always been edition wars, 3E vs. 4E is just the first one that was fueled by social media and the many consequences of that. It would have been as minor as every other edition war if the Internet weren't increasingly designed around forming echo chambers. If Facebook/Reddit doesn't happen, people probably just move on from 3E instead of trying to hold it up as a philosophical pillar of gaming or whatever dumb loving thing.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:59
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I recall when 3e came out, a bunch of people sang the praises of 2e. Posts on the WotC board explaining how THAC0 was for smart people who could count backwards.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:06
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I think a lot of people would just continue with 3/3.5 because they didn't want to throw their piles of splatbooks away. But it might not have had the same commercial cachet as having an entire alternate D&D path still being maintained for a bit, it would be more like people who were still playing AD&D or Basic-like games throughout AD&D2 and 3/3.5 on the regular with their own crew before it became a component of the OSR.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:07
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exmachina posted:Remember when the WoD games were written by Americans and had Linguistics 5 (peak human performance, decades of study required) give you the ability to speak 5 whole languages? That's not how it worked in VTM Linguistics 1 - 1 extra language Linguistics 2- 2 extra languages Linguistics 3 - 4 extra languages Linguistics 4 - 8 extra languages Linguistics 5 -16 extra languages Nowadays linguistics doesn't exist and you just pay one freebie point per language.
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Aug 9, 2022 03:30
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Charlz Guybon posted:That's not how it worked in VTM That is revised edition. 1st and 2nd have you one each.
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Aug 9, 2022 04:18
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Aug 11, 2022 21:45
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I am intrigued and horrified. What book is that from so I can make sure I never own a copy I paid money for?
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Aug 11, 2022 22:24
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Randalor posted:I am intrigued and horrified. What book is that from so I can make sure I never own a copy I paid money for? It's The Adventurer's Guide to the Bible, a 5e source book for... well... adventuring in "the time of the Bible" which, to the authors at least, appears to mean "the year 29 CE." https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/359794
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Aug 11, 2022 22:41
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Do I get turned to salt if I spill my seed upon the ground, or just if I intentionally don't impregnate my dead brother's wife? What's the weapon stats for the tablets of the ten commandments? What bonuses do I get for knowing my own daughters? How sever is the strength penalty for getting a haircut? How many times am I allowed to sacrifice my son for the piety bonus? What kind of bonus modifier does having a Legion of demons inside you give?
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Aug 11, 2022 22:57
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Randalor posted:Do I get turned to salt if I spill my seed upon the ground, or just if I intentionally don't impregnate my dead brother's wife? What's the weapon stats for the tablets of the ten commandments? What bonuses do I get for knowing my own daughters? How sever is the strength penalty for getting a haircut? How many times am I allowed to sacrifice my son for the piety bonus? What kind of bonus modifier does having a Legion of demons inside you give?
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Aug 11, 2022 23:31
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The Legion of demons is a Jesus story, I demand answers. 
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Aug 11, 2022 23:44
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Randalor posted:Do I get turned to salt if I spill my seed upon the ground, or just if I intentionally don't impregnate my dead brother's wife? What's the weapon stats for the tablets of the ten commandments? What bonuses do I get for knowing my own daughters? How sever is the strength penalty for getting a haircut? How many times am I allowed to sacrifice my son for the piety bonus? What kind of bonus modifier does having a Legion of demons inside you give? Just bought the book to tey to answer your questions. Unfortunately, the only one I can answer is the cutting your hair one. There's a barbarian subclass called Path of the Nazirite. As you gain in levels, you can get a bunch of bonuses, including doubling your carrying and lifting capacity, immunity from charm and frighten, blindsight, and the ability to attack every enemy within range. However, you also take a vow to defend the innocent, abstain from alcohol and not cut your hair. If you break the vow, you lose your abilities until you repent and go to a consecrated site and stay there for 24 hours. No rules on possession, although most of the printed adventure involves our heroes wandering the eastern Mediterranean hunting down seven demons and members of a cult that worships them. Jesus is around, the characters should meet him, and see him crucified, which will take them into the last part of the adventure, but the game isn't a "hang out with Jesus" game.
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Aug 12, 2022 00:07
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Epicurius posted:ability to attack every enemy within range. Good, now you too can wield a +2 rear end jawbone. How do they approach the warlock class? Can I be indentured to a djinn?
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Aug 12, 2022 02:30
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Tnega posted:Good, now you too can wield a +2 rear end jawbone. How do they approach the warlock class? Can I be indentured to a djinn? Bunch of new Warlock Spells, most of them 3rd level spells that are Induce [Deadly Sin]. So, Induce Greed makes a character obsessed with protecting an item. Induce Lust is stunned if they see a target of their lust, etc. They also have a spell, Tehom, which can create a whirlpool, which will damage your enemies and teleport them to the place you got the water until the spell ends, and Walk in Shadow, which temporarily turns you into a shadow, making you harder to see and let you travel up walls and under closed doors. No new pacts for warlocks, just new subclasses for barbarians, bards, clerics, druids, fighters, rangers, rogues, and wizards. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 03:04
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Sodomy Hussein posted:It's easy to think "Ah, of course this was always about politics," but tabletop regressives also likely being political regressives was a distant secondary issue until many of those regressives found a political figure they could all rally behind, and then things like 5E explicitly aligning with these stupid assholes happened. Nerds are largely reactionaries who crave, above all, power over others as recompense for their suffering real or imagined n public school.
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Aug 12, 2022 03:11
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Epicurius posted:Bunch of new Warlock Spells, most of them 3rd level spells that are Induce [Deadly Sin]. Tnega fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 03:42
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Tnega posted:If you try to stat the miracles of Jesus in 5e, most of them are 3rd level spells or less, with a single instance of a fifth level resurrection. Does the book address this? I am clearly far too invested in attempt #457 in attempting to undemonize tabletop role-playing. It does not. In fact, it's got a spell where you yourself can turn water into wine. I will say that of all the Christian Roleplaying, I've read, this is by far the chillest. It goes out of its way to say that, while for purposes of the story, it takes the idea that Jesus's death redeemed the world from sin, and while the writers of the book believe that, this isn't intended as just a game for Christians, and it says basically, to Christians, look if there are non-Christians or Christians of other denominations playing the game besides you, and you're tempted OOC to proselytize or to argue doctrine, just don't. Save it for another time. Or as the game puts it: quote:Although this module cites as its source material a collection of scriptures that form the basis for the faiths of billions of people worldwide, it is still just a game! When you sit down to play, you are telling a story of fantasy and imagination. For this, and many other reasons, this is not the time to try and have discussions of faith with your friends who may not believe in the Bible the way that you do. Not only is board game night not the right time to try to convert your friends, this module is NOT the Bible, and should not be treated as such; a fantasy game should not be used as a back door into evangelism. We sincerely hopethat this module inspires interest in and conversations about its source material, but these conversations should happen It also goes out of its way to say that the cultures depicted in the book were all real cultures, and some still exist, and it's a mistake to assume that any of these cultures are all "good" or "bad". Focus on the individual. A person can be good or bad, based on how he or she acts, but don't make any of these cultures "evil".
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Aug 12, 2022 04:01
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Tnega posted:If you try to stat the miracles of Jesus in 5e, most of them are 3rd level spells or less, with a single instance of a fifth level resurrection. Does the book address this? I am clearly far too invested in attempt #457 to undemonize tabletop role-playing. I saw this image in a review of it elsewhere: 
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Aug 12, 2022 04:40
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Arivia posted:I saw this image in a review of it elsewhere: I never got into 5e enough to memorize spells, so help me out, folks. 1) What targets Dex, Con and Str saving throws that we can use to target Jesus? 2) There has to be a mirror of spell reflection out there right? We gotta make Jesus read his own mind so he stunlocks himself insensate. That's at least two ways we can take a crack at ol' Yeshua bin Yessuf, I'm sure there's more.
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Aug 12, 2022 04:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:I never got into 5e enough to memorize spells, so help me out, folks. There's nothing stopping you from just throwing a fireball at the guy. As mentioned elsewhere, tjojgh, Jesus does habe the ability to get out of combat whenever he wants. That being said, the game points out that Jesus has to be killed. He doesn't have to be crucified. If the PCs kill Jesus, that doesn't derail the adventure
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Aug 12, 2022 05:05
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Epicurius posted:There's nothing stopping you from just throwing a fireball at the guy. As mentioned elsewhere, tjojgh, Jesus does habe the ability to get out of combat whenever he wants. O god no, we wouldn't want to kill him. That's rude. Something weirder and funnier than that, like shoving him into a pocket universe of infinite clones of himself.
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Aug 12, 2022 05:08
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Epicurius posted:There's nothing stopping you from just throwing a fireball at the guy. As mentioned elsewhere, tjojgh, Jesus does habe the ability to get out of combat whenever he wants. How does every playthrough not turn into the party defending Jesus at all costs. That's what I'd do. Just to be contrarian.
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Aug 12, 2022 05:13
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Son of a Vondruke! posted:How does every playthrough not turn into the party defending Jesus at all costs. That's what I'd do. Just to be contrarian. Then we'd have to PvP because I'm playing Pontius Pilate.
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Aug 12, 2022 05:32
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That's enough to have me wash my hands of this thread.
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Aug 12, 2022 05:48
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Agents are GO! posted:That's enough to have me wash my hands of this thread. this is a weird first post in the thread.
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Aug 12, 2022 05:55
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