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Nuns with Guns posted:No idea why tabletop RPGs draw all the dumbest hucksters possible out of the woodwork.
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Sep 2, 2022 20:26
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Piell posted:CoC D20 is very funny because if you read 99.99% of the rulebook you would think that they have made investigators into massive badasses who can take on any monster and come out fine. My first exposure to Call of Cthulhu was just reading a module a friend had, randomly opened it to an entry of "anyone looking out the station window has a 5% chance to see the planet open its eye. If so they suffer 5d100 points of sanity damage. Thank you for playing." I have no idea if that's a typical module sampling, but it certainly painted a picture.
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Sep 2, 2022 20:48
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seaborgium posted:That Discworld fact does come up a couple times, as Rincewind does save reality on at least one occasion and is preparing to do so a second time with just a brick in a sock. "No bricks, I'll have to use sand." "You're going to fight those things with a sock full of sand?" "No, I'm going to run away. The sock is for when they follow."
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Sep 2, 2022 20:50
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joylessdivision posted:Why did Mage:The Ascension need a gun chart? Because 1993 rpgs thats why! Who cares that you're playing wizards, have some guns! the worst mage game I was ever in had three players I don't remember what I or the other non-batshit person was playing, but I do remember the third person was playing a virtual adept, probably because technology is for hard men who make hard decisions and I'm a hard man who makes hard decisions or some poo poo the first scene involved the three of us meeting to investigate an anomaly. two of us wanted to investigate one aspect of the anomaly. virtual adept (let's just call him Alan, it's his name, he was a dick, this was twenty years ago) had a totally different plan. A small argument was had. The two of us went off to do our sensible investigation into the cosmic horror plaguing wilkes-barre Alan ported off into the desert where no-one was around (because must avoid paradox.) As I and my compatriot, boarded a train to track a guy who might know a thing, Alan indicated he was going to open a small portal directly from his location to directly behind me (virtual adept, that's in their portfolio) and fire a rocket launcher into it. The game ended in short order.
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Sep 2, 2022 21:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:No idea why tabletop RPGs draw all the dumbest hucksters possible out of the woodwork. quote:Coolness Averted posted:These people are going beyond just hate-filled and vile into full on delusion. I just don't even understand how they think the world works. Like I just want to see them spell out what they think their win condition is and how they get there. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Sep 2, 2022 |
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Sep 2, 2022 21:16
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Bruceski posted:My first exposure to Call of Cthulhu was just reading a module a friend had, randomly opened it to an entry of "anyone looking out the station window has a 5% chance to see the planet open its eye. If so they suffer 5d100 points of sanity damage. Thank you for playing." There's giant worm monsters called "Dhole" that have turned a planet into swiss cheese. The beastiary states they have a roll attack where if you make your save anyone looking for you finds enough to bury. CoC has a ton of great memorable lines like that to really hammer home that the only bullets that count are the ones you use on yourself before the horrors get you.
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Sep 2, 2022 21:57
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piL posted:Hadozee probably exist because of the maritime parlance of 'deck apes' referring to boatswain's mates onboard US naval vessels. "What if deck apes were actually apes," looks simple on its surface but is probably a really dangerous question to ask and I wouldn't recommend asking it. That tracks, really. Fading Suns did the same thing in the mid-90s with the Gannok, who are a species of chimp-like aliens with a knack for technology whose whole thing is being a huge "grease monkey" gag. Primate puns are eternally enticing. I don't really know enough (in either capacity) to say if they're particularly racist or not, but FS had some of that well-meaning but unfortunate 90s racism still go around. (One of the human noble houses, for example, being described as "exotic" and with a touch of the "Oriental" to make them stand out.) Yet to delve deep into the recent new edition of FS to see if that got cleaned up or not, too.
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Sep 2, 2022 22:22
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There's a  part of my brain that wants to think all this TSR awfulness was a calculated deploymeny to make the monkey-folk minstrel show seem less horrible by comparison.
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Sep 2, 2022 22:51
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moths posted:There's a Nah it's just really racist people that want to make games for their weird white male wish fulfillment and Wizards just has people that think 'Harry Potter house elves in space' was a clever idea of a race. They're both racist but the TSR people say 'look at biological facts' and the Wizards people say 'oh it's not that bad because they're happy'.
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Sep 2, 2022 23:56
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Yeah, and I think the biggest hole in the "distraction racism" hypothesis is that WotC wouldn't know when to deploy it. That and nuTSR emits racism like a pulsar, its unpredictable racism that only sometimes obscures less obviously radioactive signals.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:14
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WotC is passive racism as a by-product of laziness and casual racism baked into the TTRPG culture and history, the TSR stuff is an active campaign to preach white supremacy. In this case, the former probably does more harm because near-zero people are aware of or will see the TSR garbage.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:18
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DesertIslandHermit posted:Nah it's just really racist people that want to make games for their weird white male wish fulfillment and Wizards just has people that think 'Harry Potter house elves in space' was a clever idea of a race. They're both racist but the TSR people say 'look at biological facts' and the Wizards people say 'oh it's not that bad because they're happy'. To be exact the House Elf flavouring was from decades ago, the new stuff was planet of the apes with some easy unfortunate allusions that could be made.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:50
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Coolness Averted posted:These people are going beyond just hate-filled and vile into full on delusion. I just don't even understand how they think the world works. Like I just want to see them spell out what they think their win condition is and how they get there. Their win condition is that they get their way. They get to say what they want, hurt who they want, and do what they want, always.
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Sep 3, 2022 01:41
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hexwren posted:the worst mage game I was ever in had three players The best Mage game is the one you don't play  Seriously though that sounds miserable and if I'd been the ST, that would have *Somehow* only killed his idiot character and the story would have continued without him. But I also have zero patience for that kind of poo poo anymore in my games.
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Sep 3, 2022 02:20
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https://twitter.com/Wizards_DnD/status/1565900965974360066
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Sep 3, 2022 04:29
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oWoD Mage is such a cool setting and neat idea for a game hampered by the state of games when it was made, and ultimately a system that doesn't support what it's trying for. More than the gunporn not at all fitting the game, hell I'd say having arete and spheres go past 2 maybe 3 dots goes beyond the scope of what oWoD wanted for PCs. Or rather it was a game where a third of the designers wanted to make Exalted, a third wanted a horror game that's a mesh of Dark City and the first 15-20 minutes of the Matrix, and another third wanted to make Nobilis/Glitch. So you see a ton of cool toys that weren't really intended for players, or were 'balanced' strictly around antagonistic GMs.
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Sep 3, 2022 04:47
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Coolness Averted posted:This is what I was talking about when I mentioned people coloring the game text with stuff in their head and then blurring their interpretation with the actual text. "In time, all Hadozee newborns came to possess the Traits of the enhanced Hadozee" How the gently caress else do you read this?
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Sep 3, 2022 05:54
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I don't think Ascension didn't want players to use the cool toys, it was just written by people who were either blissfully ignorant of how the mechanics worked or actively didn't care whether the mechanics did what they were supposed to, or if they in fact did anything.
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Sep 3, 2022 05:54
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Darwinism posted:"In time, all Hadozee newborns came to possess the Traits of the enhanced Hadozee" I think they were going for "the sentient hadozee took the magical uplifting potion back to their home world, used it on every squirrel-monkey they could find, and the uplifted qualities were passed on to children, so eventually there weren't any of the 'mundane' squirrel-monkeys, as far as anyone could tell." There's like... subsequent threads you could pull on regarding the ethics of uplifting something that can't consent, or the overall implications of taking the magical power of their enslaver back and spreading "knowledge" to everything around, but I don't think they're conveying there was some active breeding or culling of the non-sapient animals.
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Sep 3, 2022 06:47
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Darwinism posted:"In time, all Hadozee newborns came to possess the Traits of the enhanced Hadozee" The descendants of the escapees used the potion that enhanced them so frequently the magic became inborn, and they didn't need to uplift newborns anymore. Akin to 'someone fed barkskin potions to the cats of neverwinter so often all cats are born with barkskin.'
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Sep 3, 2022 06:53
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think Ascension didn't want players to use the cool toys, it was just written by people who were either blissfully ignorant of how the mechanics worked or actively didn't care whether the mechanics did what they were supposed to, or if they in fact did anything. Yeah but then there were gleeful chapters and Storyteller advice about paradox spirits and how to punish your players for trying to be mages. I think it was a matter of different people having different design goals. Like a milder version of the whole Infernals Exalted book, where some people wanted to make a PC faction about defying fate and coping with becoming alien, and others wanted to write a book about babyraping irredeemable monsters that only existed to be to setting's true villains, and the tone of the book whiplashed between chapters.
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Sep 3, 2022 06:57
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TG As An Industry: I think like chess
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Sep 3, 2022 09:28
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Darwinism posted:"In time, all Hadozee newborns came to possess the Traits of the enhanced Hadozee" "The sentient (sapient?) group of animals was so much more successful at coping with things like natural disasters, predators, and food scarcity, as well as at society-building, that they out-competed the non-sentient group of animals for food, resources, and space." Like, I did not jump immediately to 'never-ending bestiality rape', I'll tell you that.
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Sep 3, 2022 10:49
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I’m not surprised a poster named Darwinism had a particularly brutal reading of the survival of the fittest hadozee.
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Sep 3, 2022 13:22
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah but then there were gleeful chapters and Storyteller advice about paradox spirits and how to punish your players for trying to be mages. You nailed one of my biggest complaints about Ascension on the head. The wild tonal whiplash is infuriating in the corebook, and while I liked some of the Paradox spirits provided purely from an antagonist perspective, the whole system of Paradox was just....no, gently caress you I won't punish players because they're not playing the game exactly as the writer intended. And gently caress you for chastising me for wanting to play a cool wizard in the wizard game. Compared to Werewolf where there was definitely things that made me go "What in the gently caress?!" but overall the core managed to keep a consistent tone throughout and was far more willing to say "Hey its your game, make it work for you" and didn't constantly get pissy at the idea that the players would....you know, use their powers and do cool poo poo with them.
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Sep 3, 2022 14:34
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So what I'm hearing is in the time of hadozees there were no monkeys.
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Sep 3, 2022 15:43
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Arivia posted:I’m not surprised a poster named Darwinism had a particularly brutal reading of the survival of the fittest hadozee. Let's not do this, please. I'm glad to see that WotC is making adjustments based on feedback, even if the original should never have made it live in the first place.
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Sep 3, 2022 16:36
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Podima posted:Let's not do this, please. Sorry if it came off like an attack, I was just going for a username/post joke.
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Sep 3, 2022 16:38
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Let's never consider the implications of monkey sex
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Sep 3, 2022 16:58
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Arivia posted:Sorry if it came off like an attack, I was just going for a username/post joke.
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Sep 3, 2022 17:02
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It's all good, the hadozee conversation got a little spicy earlier so I figured I'd poke in.
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Sep 3, 2022 17:13
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theironjef posted:So what I'm hearing is in the time of hadozees there were no monkeys.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:14
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Nuns with Guns posted:Let's never consider the implications of monkey sex  Yeah we don’t want to destroy any precious artifacts
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Sep 3, 2022 18:41
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Hostile V posted:Correct, it was the Thetans that uplifted the Hadozee by infecting them with emotions caused by alien ghosts. I think he was just raised by scientologists, he's been on record a few times saying he isn't a member and doesn't believe in any of their stuff.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:48
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better than nothing, but truly owning a mistake like this really should include a better explanation. Yes, explaining will cause some (bad) people to react more negatively, and yes, it requires more effort and requires somebody who can do the subject justice to write it, but it's also an opportunity to educate. For example, a little extra context was provided when the Netrunner/NISEI group announced its name change.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:51
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That Old Tree posted:
Lol, 'Morgoth'. It's like they can't help themselves. 'Hans, are we the baddies?' yet again.
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Sep 3, 2022 19:05
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Deptfordx posted:Lol, 'Morgoth'. It's like they can't help themselves. 'Hans, are we the baddies?' yet again.  That's how Sauron did it.
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Sep 3, 2022 19:41
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Bruceski posted:
The man just wants to turn people into dinosaurs and I can respect that
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Sep 3, 2022 20:51
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:The man just wants to turn people into dinosaurs and I can respect that There's something satisfying about going back to a comic character's old stuff and finding out they were always a dork.
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Sep 3, 2022 21:42
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