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I just got a notification from Luke Crane announcing that the world is ending. By which I mean that Burning Wheel and the Burning Wheel Codex are now available in PDF, apparently because, and only because, Adobe has ruined his files so hard that he can never edit them again, which is presumably why the PDFs don't have bookmarks. I kind of don't wish Luke Crane any particular success at this point, but honestly I think it's funnier if he suddenly makes significantly more money selling PDFs than he ever did on physical books and is inspired to have a come-to-Jesus moment.
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Aug 16, 2023 17:18
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| # ? May 23, 2024 13:20 |
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Rand Brittain posted:I just got a notification from Luke Crane announcing that the world is ending. did he announce it in obnoxious wizard speak
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Aug 16, 2023 17:21
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What, the wizard didn't keep his own backups?
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Aug 16, 2023 17:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:did he announce it in obnoxious wizard speak He sure did! "We said we would never do it, but when you play Burning Wheel every belief you possess may be broken. And so, inevitably, we played against our beliefs and released PDFs of Burning Wheel and the Codex"
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Aug 16, 2023 17:27
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By Crane standards I would call that fairly restrained.
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Aug 16, 2023 17:32
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I can't imagine how intensely painful it was for him to sell a product to people who wanted to buy it from him. Truly awful. Is he okay? Is there anything I can do to help?
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Aug 16, 2023 17:39
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Panzeh posted:its heyday was the early 90s and being set in the real world was the thing to do. When people ask* me why certain OWoD games are the way they are I just look them right in the eye and say "It was the 90's and there was time for... KLAX" *This is a fictional scenario. No one has ever asked me about storyteller irl.
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Aug 16, 2023 18:12
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I don't know whether to be exasperated by Luke Crane's schtick or grudgingly impressed that he's found a way to subject so many willing participants to his fetish
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Aug 16, 2023 18:18
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Whybird posted:I don't know whether to be exasperated by Luke Crane's schtick or grudgingly impressed that he's found a way to subject so many willing participants to his fetish luke crane or ed greenwood: who's the more successful sex wizard game designer e: maybe we include phil brucato too
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Aug 16, 2023 18:20
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Peter Adkison? I remember reading that WotC was a very odd work environment after Magic was a hit.
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Aug 16, 2023 18:46
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Halloween Jack posted:Peter Adkison? I remember reading that WotC was a very odd work environment after Magic was a hit. Special cameo appearance from Raven c.s. McCracken!
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Aug 16, 2023 18:49
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Thanks! I wonder if Kevin Siembieda is still mad that he didn't snag a piece of Magic purely by being an enormous rear end in a top hat.quote:Basking in shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity with his employees, Peter Adkison rattled off his workplace sexual encounters, both actual and desired. He wasn't boasting, vain or predatory. He just loved all of us, from the depths of his innocent geek heart, and saw nothing wrong with talking about his corporate sex life. We were all in this together, pioneering settlers of a new and better world. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 19:08
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Whybird posted:I don't know whether to be exasperated by Luke Crane's schtick or grudgingly impressed that he's found a way to subject so many willing participants to his fetish I can't speak for anyone else obviously but I tolerate the wizard speak bullshit in the Burning Wheel books because I think the system is genuinely great and there's nothing else really like it
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Aug 16, 2023 19:16
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That's true but gauche to say.
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Aug 17, 2023 06:24
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One of my many "this is neat and I will never play this" moments came right after reading Burning Empires. The group for that probably doesn't exist anymore.
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Aug 17, 2023 06:37
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There was a Dune RPG that used Burning Wheel. It was set during the Muaddib's Jihad rather than the events of the original novel, which was a cool twist.
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Aug 17, 2023 06:44
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The Dune hack was the predecessor for Burning Empires IIRC - the way it was written players could choose between being Jihadists or a noble house resisting the Jihad but it was a foregone conclusion that the nobles would lose because they were going against the Muad'dib. BE was "wait, what if the defenders could actually win"
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Aug 17, 2023 06:48
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True victory is in accepting Muaddib though???
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Aug 17, 2023 17:14
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Traveller posted:The Dune hack was the predecessor for Burning Empires IIRC - the way it was written players could choose between being Jihadists or a noble house resisting the Jihad but it was a foregone conclusion that the nobles would lose because they were going against the Muad'dib. BE was "wait, what if the defenders could actually win" I don't think it was a direct ancestor; Burning Empires is way more complex and involved than the hack was, IIRC. The comparison between religion and brainworms is a bit of a stretch, too, unless you're going to put on your official Internet Atheist Fedora.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:08
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Hypnobeard posted:The comparison between religion and brainworms is a bit of a stretch, too, unless you're going to put on your official Internet Atheist Fedora.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:24
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Burning Empires isn't even about fighting against a Jihad, it's a bunch of mind worms bodyjacking people and taking over worlds.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:51
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Let’s put this to rest: Burning Empires is based on a (quite good) graphic novel series called Iron Empires, of which the BWHQ folks were fans. The setting is taken directly from the comics, one to one.
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Aug 17, 2023 23:17
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Rand Brittain posted:By which I mean that Burning Wheel and the Burning Wheel Codex are now available in PDF, apparently because, and only because, Adobe has ruined his files so hard that he can never edit them again, which is presumably why the PDFs don't have bookmarks. It turns out Adobe didn’t ruin anything. Luke is unhappy that typeface technology changed and he won’t be able to use Postscript fonts any more. He could of course swap to OpenType and spend the required time to re-flow layout, but that plan doesn’t suit him.
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Aug 18, 2023 04:05
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Thanlis posted:It turns out Adobe didn’t ruin anything. Luke is unhappy that typeface technology changed and he won’t be able to use Postscript fonts any more. He could of course swap to OpenType and spend the required time to re-flow layout, but that plan doesn’t suit him. I have no way of knowing if this is sarcastic hyperbole, so I'm just going to believe it as gospel.
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Aug 18, 2023 04:23
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Kestral posted:Let’s put this to rest: Burning Empires is based on a (quite good) graphic novel series called Iron Empires, of which the BWHQ folks were fans. The setting is taken directly from the comics, one to one. I could not loving figure it out. The graphic novels are great tho.
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Aug 18, 2023 04:45
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If nothing else I'm glad Burning Wheel is more accessible to people now.
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Aug 18, 2023 05:23
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dwarf74 posted:I got the game at Gen Con a long time ago. It's been described as "weight training for roleplaying games" and that is completely accurate. If you're a fan of comics it's worth taking another look at, the official forums are a great resource for it. Thanlis posted:It turns out Adobe didn’t ruin anything. Luke is unhappy that typeface technology changed and he won’t be able to use Postscript fonts any more. He could of course swap to OpenType and spend the required time to re-flow layout, but that plan doesn’t suit him. If you've followed the development of Burning Wheel long enough, you will know why the idea of re-flowing something like 1200 pages of dense, painstakingly-formatted InDesign documents fills BWHQ with soul-searing horror. After the stories we've heard over the years, I completely understand why this would break them, especially since it's a passion project rather than something they do for income. Believe me when I say that Burning Wheel is a life-consuming passion project for these people, a kind of demonic game design possession they have been trying to exorcise for literal decades, while making barely any money and at times even taking substantial losses on it. When they say that something is presenting an obstacle so great that it has broken their will to work on Burning Wheel, they're not saying it lightly or because they're lazy or persnickety: it's because it is genuinely too much to bear. long-rear end nips Diane posted:If nothing else I'm glad Burning Wheel is more accessible to people now. Same, it's a shame it comes at the cost of development ending, but such is life. Burning Wheel is the game a huge number of people want to be playing, or think they're playing in their D&D sessions, but don't, because they don't know it exists.
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Aug 18, 2023 05:27
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It would be kinda funny if the shifting terrain of technology ended up making him more money than he would otherwise.
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Aug 18, 2023 05:34
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Well Played Mauer posted:I like Cyberpunk’s world view and openness better, and RED is actually a pretty decent system, but Shadowrun definitely seemed to “get” what the game should be. It’s cool that Cyberpunk lets you be a noir detective or nomadic gun runner tribal dude or a corporate raider but what I usually wanna do is shoot up a bunch of red shirts and stick it to the Cyber Man. My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over.
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Aug 18, 2023 06:01
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Glagha posted:My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over. At the risk of going all "let me tell you about my character" the troll street sammie I played in a pretty long-running 4e game was cybered up pretty extensively, but it was all under the skin type stuff, reflex boosters and the like. He actually relied on pistols and brains more than anything else, but the occasional BFG Time was a lot of fun too. Shadowrun always did seem torn between its slick fantasy-cyberpunk aesthetic based on what's cool and grognardy realism-driven "you can't do that because" mechanics. drat shame. The GM of that game willing to play fast and loose with the system made it a lot more fun than strict rule enforcement would have been. I learned a lot about running games from him.
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Aug 18, 2023 06:14
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Thanlis posted:It turns out Adobe didn’t ruin anything. Luke is unhappy that typeface technology changed and he won’t be able to use Postscript fonts any more. He could of course swap to OpenType and spend the required time to re-flow layout, but that plan doesn’t suit him. Having had to work with one of Crane's InDesign files ostensibly ready for print, I absolutely believe this is enough to completely demolish one of his layouts.
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Aug 18, 2023 06:23
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Why can't he just keep using whatever old version of InDesign still supports PostScript fonts? I saw his post but I'm in disbelief that it isn't possible to convert fonts from one standard format to another without breaking everything. I know everything around fonts is extremely stupid but it can't possibly be that bad, right?  I'm seeing people talk about conversion being incomplete and other people about font licenses not allowing conversions and I really do not envy the burning wheel people for this mess.
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Aug 18, 2023 10:27
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Glagha posted:My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over. Shadowrun's got this problem in spades. Like every second picture in the book is cool elves with katanas, and that kind of character sucks because elves have no strength and melee in general is bad. Shadowrun really needs a proper developer to sit down, look at what the theme of the game is, and rewrite the rules from the ground up so they actually encourage that theme.
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Aug 18, 2023 10:59
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Vanadium posted:Why can't he just keep using whatever old version of InDesign still supports PostScript fonts? Layout and font poo poo is exactly this stupid. It's incredibly even less stupid than it used to be. InDesign didn't have a built-in "auto-create bookmarks from headings" function until like 2008. You might think an "identical" font that's just a different format exists, but it's entirely possible it's been tweaked in versioning or the software just handles it differently, so when you convert now you have to figure out where those extra dozen pages came from and comb through the entire book multiple times to figure out where things went wrong and to catch all the errors that occurred but didn't produce an extra page or error report. If Crane and Crew had messy layouts, which is extremely more likely back when the books were originally created in the early 2000s, that combined with all the little quirks of publishing can absolutely present an enormous obstacle. Not insurmountable, but something that could easily require rebuilding the files from close to scratch.
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Aug 18, 2023 13:32
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Glagha posted:My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over.
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Aug 18, 2023 13:39
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Font scaling is a dark and forbidding country where sane men fear to tread. Whoever could have guessed that adaptive kerning would lead to so many dead?
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Aug 18, 2023 13:40
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Splicer posted:As someone who has never actually /played/ shadowrun how often do players lose limbs by accident? Part of the appeal of a cyberpunk system for me is that you can have a fun, robust crit system so the party usually ends up down one body part per run, and part of post-run recovery is deciding how much to spend on the replacement. Yeah sure your standard 1,000 newBux LimbBoy/LimbGirl robot arm doesn't give super strength, but the DeadLift System comes with full body structural reinforcement as a standard part of the 10,000 newBux price tag (Attaching additional DeadLift limbs to the FullBod system only 6,000 newBux per limb or 4,000 if performed at time of initial instalation. Note: third party limbs not compatible with DeadLift FullBod DRM. DeadLift: Gains Goblins Go Home) As complicated a game as Shadowrun is I don't believe there's any actual rules for dismemberment by damage, but I could be wrong. I'm like 95% certain there's no crit blows your arm off rule though. Of course that's all without getting into the can of worms that is getting a prosthetic without any superhuman augmentation RAW costs you essence which means you'll lose access to magic or lose your mind if you do it too much which is... Not great. That and the written rewards system is so stingy that it's not like you'll ever be able to afford an arm after character creation when they're like "oh yeah you can expect to get like 5k nuyen after a typical job. How much is a cyber arm? 30k? Oh. What about if the streetsam wants an upgrade on their wired reflexes? Oh like 700k cool cool cool cool cool"
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Aug 18, 2023 13:51
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Glagha posted:As complicated a game as Shadowrun is I don't believe there's any actual rules for dismemberment by damage, but I could be wrong. I'm like 95% certain there's no crit blows your arm off rule though. Of course that's all without getting into the can of worms that is getting a prosthetic without any superhuman augmentation RAW costs you essence which means you'll lose access to magic or lose your mind if you do it too much which is... Not great. That and the written rewards system is so stingy that it's not like you'll ever be able to afford an arm after character creation when they're like "oh yeah you can expect to get like 5k nuyen after a typical job. How much is a cyber arm? 30k? Oh. What about if the streetsam wants an upgrade on their wired reflexes? Oh like 700k cool cool cool cool cool"
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Aug 18, 2023 14:04
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If I remember correctly Cyberpunk 2020 has rules for damage to specific body parts. It’s crunchy as hell though. RED streamlined things a lot more, but in the translation you lose mechanical fidelity for your leg being destroyed by automatic gunfire. Wouldn’t be incredibly hard to bring that back. I’d definitely add crunch to RED as opposed to removing it from 2020.
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Aug 18, 2023 14:15
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CP2020/RED presented cyber-replacement as a valid way to skip healing times as well in a lot of cases, and RED explicitly said that "medical grade" cyberware which gave you no super-powers other than a. being pre-configured for a future upgrade and b. party trick stuff, also c. cost you no Humanity. Neither game has a super great way to express the concept of cyborgization as alienation from yourself, although I think Cyberpunk's system is better. From comments I have heard, the fact that Shadowrun is pretty much "you have modern world tropes AND D&D tropes laying next to each other in a big jumble" is a plus to a lot of people, even if it's incoherent and reads weird to me, local herbivore.
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Aug 18, 2023 14:55
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