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Terrible Opinions posted:Lucas isn't a talentless hack but the original Star Wars movies were a team effort, and several of the people who contributed just weren't around for later movies. Lucas is a nerd. Amazing at worldbuilding, and at knowing what the tech of the time was capable of and who put together an amazing team. And who sucks at naturalistic dialogue, creating tension (no, Luke didn't just get a second chance at the Death Star - it was originally just hanging there in space to be swung at as often as necessary; the plan was added in editing over a CGI piece added in the edit, and the firing sequence was an alternate take for Alderaan), and understanding emotions actors are showing. One of the things about film making is it's a team effort and Lucas made a larger contribution than most. Until he became The Great George Lucas when he made an outsize contribution that showed his weaknesses,
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Sep 29, 2023 00:30
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Just try telling me you don't want to watch *that* movie!
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Sep 29, 2023 01:23
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neonchameleon posted:Lucas is a nerd. Amazing at worldbuilding, and at knowing what the tech of the time was capable of and who put together an amazing team. And who sucks at naturalistic dialogue, creating tension (no, Luke didn't just get a second chance at the Death Star - it was originally just hanging there in space to be swung at as often as necessary; the plan was added in editing over a CGI piece added in the edit, and the firing sequence was an alternate take for Alderaan), and understanding emotions actors are showing. One of the things about film making is it's a team effort and Lucas made a larger contribution than most. Until he became The Great George Lucas when he made an outsize contribution that showed his weaknesses, Behind the scenes shows it was kind of the reverse: George kept asking the opinions of people he respected and they all told him it was his idea, he should do it how he wants.
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Sep 29, 2023 02:12
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Whybird posted:FTFY Also that, yeah. Pickled Tink posted:That's the thing. As far as the people in the setting are concerned, they're not people. They're tools that if not properly memory wiped will eventually go rampant in weird ways. it's the ones who get emotionally attached to them that are weird. I mean, since when have you cared about the opinion of your hammer? I think a big part of the space-fantasy setting is that many of the setting conceits are pretty normal for golden age sci-fi, like Jetsons esque treatment of robots, and fantasy settings where you have heroes and villains in feudal societies where serfdom and even slavery are just taken as a given and the sympathetic characters are just more polite than most to them. It's one of those things that probably wouldn't even be brought attention to if Star Wars wasn't both being treated as a Universe and also compared to other franchises like Star Trek that actually do focus on the moral and ethical facets of the setting through modern-day lenses, as those things are a core part of the premise.
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Sep 29, 2023 04:12
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's one of those things that probably wouldn't even be brought attention to if Star Wars wasn't both being treated as a Universe and also compared to other franchises like Star Trek that actually do focus on the moral and ethical facets of the setting through modern-day lenses, as those things are a core part of the premise. Star Trek is extremely poor at examining its own setting and if you ever want to make trekkies mad, keep asking why every starfleet officer's family seems to own a shitload of valuable real estate in a society where nobody is supposed to own anything
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Sep 29, 2023 04:24
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Staltran posted:Padme's line about being angry being human is not necessarily the most appropriate thing to say about the slaughter of a village of non-humans, either. TheDiceMustRoll posted:Star Trek is extremely poor at examining its own setting and if you ever want to make trekkies mad, keep asking why every starfleet officer's family seems to own a shitload of valuable real estate in a society where nobody is supposed to own anything
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Sep 29, 2023 04:35
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Nessus posted:I figured they'd come up with some common vernacular to refer to 'all intelligent/civilized beings' but this would be some conlang term and for every future slang word you introduce, you take a chance that people will fail their Banality checks and go "hey, wait a minute, monastic laser-sword warrior monks wouldn't say 'skood'!" Or you ask them why people on Deep Space 9 use money and talk about getting paid money.
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Sep 29, 2023 04:48
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Or you ask them why people on Deep Space 9 use money and talk about getting paid money. This is a really easy one - since DS9 is only Federation-administered and not actually Federation space, the Starfleet crew present are likely given a stipend to participate in the local economy. Things like heritable estates like the Picard family vineyards are the harder ones to square, at least in casual conversation.
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Sep 29, 2023 05:26
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disposablewords posted:This is a really easy one - since DS9 is only Federation-administered and not actually Federation space, the Starfleet crew present are likely given a stipend to participate in the local economy. Things like heritable estates like the Picard family vineyards are the harder ones to square, at least in casual conversation.
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Sep 29, 2023 05:42
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Evil Genius Games (of Rambo TTRPG fame) is suing Netflix over a cancelled TTRPG for Zack Snyder's failed Star Wars movie Rebel Moon. https://gizmodo.com/rebel-moon-ttrpg-netflix-sued-evil-genius-games-1850880262
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Sep 29, 2023 06:27
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CitizenKeen posted:Evil Genius Games (of Rambo TTRPG fame) is suing Netflix over a cancelled TTRPG for Zack Snyder's failed Star Wars movie Rebel Moon. This is where I'm going to out myself as horribly ignorant, but I have never heard of Evil Genius Games before now, and going to their site I feel like I just had a Mandela Effect moment. These guys make a Rambo RPG? A Pacific Rim RPG? The Crow? Escape From New York? Total Recall? Who the gently caress are these guys?
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Sep 29, 2023 07:38
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Do you think R2-D2 gets a salary from the Rebellion? Does Chewbacca send money back to his family? The wookie didn't get a medal, there's no way they're paying him.
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Sep 29, 2023 10:18
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Kai Tave posted:This is where I'm going to out myself as horribly ignorant, but I have never heard of Evil Genius Games before now, and going to their site I feel like I just had a Mandela Effect moment. These guys make a Rambo RPG? A Pacific Rim RPG? The Crow? Escape From New York? Total Recall? Who the gently caress are these guys? would be very funny if they sue for soemthing like loss of future revenue and got like 2 dollars
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Sep 29, 2023 11:14
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Kai Tave posted:This is where I'm going to out myself as horribly ignorant, but I have never heard of Evil Genius Games before now, and going to their site I feel like I just had a Mandela Effect moment. These guys make a Rambo RPG? A Pacific Rim RPG? The Crow? Escape From New York? Total Recall? Who the gently caress are these guys? I remember them coming up when they first dropped a ton of games on DTRPG, and the general consensus was "LOL, somebody is going to get slapped down hard by IP lawyers" before it turned out that actually you can just get the TTRPG license rights for a ton of random old action movies if you just ask for them.
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Sep 29, 2023 11:28
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I'm just genuinely gobsmacked that there's a Pacific Rim RPG, even if it's not a good one (it looks like everything they make is using a d20 Modern-alike) and I've never heard a single person ever mention it before, even as like "oh yeah this exists I guess."
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Sep 29, 2023 11:53
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So I'm guessing they just use one "core" system and just reskin it for each license? Because they're putting way too much work and effort into something that just needs a core system and reskins if not. Plus that way you can do the Rambo/Pacific Rim Mashup you never knew you wanted until now.
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Sep 29, 2023 12:06
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Yeah I only just learned of their existence a couple months ago when I stumbled across a few of their books in a local store. I was like "WTF an Escape From New York and Crow RPGs?" They are extremely thin little softcover books all running on the same lite game engine. Maybe d20-derived? I honestly don't remember, I flipped through them, sent some "get a load of this poo poo" pictures to a friend, and then completely forgot about them.
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Sep 29, 2023 12:13
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Randalor posted:So I'm guessing they just use one "core" system and just reskin it for each license? Because they're putting way too much work and effort into something that just needs a core system and reskins if not. Yeah it's a system called everyday heroes(5e/d20 modern) + reskins. Very basic designs from what I'm seeing here, two column layout, generic background images and the art looks really cheap. They don't charge a lot for them which probably makes the buy-in for people who like those properties easy. It's weirdly nostalgic of me looking into older FLGSes a decade ago and finding the leftovers of the d20 fad (A trigun rpg! Oh it's 3.5 but trigun) piled at the back under dust. I'd criticize it harder but a lot of the art isn't much better than some of the slop WW put out near the end of their existence.
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Sep 29, 2023 12:18
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Kai Tave posted:This is where I'm going to out myself as horribly ignorant, but I have never heard of Evil Genius Games before now, and going to their site I feel like I just had a Mandela Effect moment. These guys make a Rambo RPG? A Pacific Rim RPG? The Crow? Escape From New York? Total Recall? Who the gently caress are these guys? "Evil Genius is one of the few tabletop game design companies that has raised money via venture capitalist funding" Like.... It explains where they got their money, at least. But I've legit never heard of them either, which leads me to believe nobody is probably buying their books or playing their games.
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Sep 29, 2023 12:59
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dwarf74 posted:This line struck me. You don't think new merchandise for the cult classic 1981 film Escape From New York is flying off the shelves 42 years later?
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Sep 29, 2023 13:30
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I’m glad(?) someone is keeping the tradition of licensed d20 shovelware alive.
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Sep 29, 2023 13:37
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Yeah, they made a 5e version of d20 Modern called Everyday Heroes and they paid for licenses to a lot of classic action movies to release modules based on them. There was a Let's Read on rpg.net and apparently it's pretty solid for what it is, actually. (As long as you're not so anti-5E the very thought of someone making a new D20 Modern gives you a hate-aneurysm.) I'm surprised more of you haven't heard of it, I've seen all of those movie-based modules in the DTRPG Bestsellers' when they came out and the Rulebook is still in the list (at 98 at this point, but still.) Megazver fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Sep 29, 2023 |
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Sep 29, 2023 13:42
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Star Trek is extremely poor at examining its own setting and if you ever want to make trekkies mad, keep asking why every starfleet officer's family seems to own a shitload of valuable real estate in a society where nobody is supposed to own anything How much do the servers at Sisko's restaurant get tipped?
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Sep 29, 2023 14:38
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Randalor posted:So I'm guessing they just use one "core" system and just reskin it for each license? Because they're putting way too much work and effort into something that just needs a core system and reskins if not. Yeah it's this. I got blitzed by their ads on FB for a while and it turns out all these 'Rambo RPG', 'Crow RPG' things were really just ads for a system they call Everyday Heroes that they claim can do all these settings. I have no idea if it can, or not, and I haven't seen the ads in a long while now. e: f,b.
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Sep 29, 2023 14:47
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Star Trek is extremely poor at examining its own setting and if you ever want to make trekkies mad, keep asking why every starfleet officer's family seems to own a shitload of valuable real estate in a society where nobody is supposed to own anything Worldbuilding nerd answer: Even if you only include the Alpha Quadrant, the Milky Way Galaxy is vast enough that anyone who really wants land can find an uninhabited M-class planet (aka, suitable for supporting human life) and plant stakes there. The stabilized population growth we see in industrialized nations exists to an even greater degree in a post-Warp civilization. Replicator technology means that arable land is no longer a necessity, and the demand for real estate in Earth drops when Warp technology makes land across the galaxy more accessible. (The servers at Sisko’s benefit from the same level of universal basic income as everyone else in the Federation. They don’t need wages or tips; if they are serving, it’s because they genuinely enjoy the work. Being a server or a restaurant owner is more like a hobby than a necessity. They can always find something new to do without any economic consequence.) Glib answer: Trek is an American show, and so it’s written by privileged people who have lived with accessible capital and real estate for most of their lives, so, for all of their utopianism, they can’t even conceive of a world where private land ownership no longer exists.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:03
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Science fiction just seems increasingly pointless as a genre because there is no future. Sci fi technology is just a magic wand to allow the unsustainable status quo to continue forever. Endless frontiers to consume. Endless wars to fight. Numbers going up forever.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:30
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neonchameleon posted:Lucas is a nerd. Amazing at worldbuilding, and at knowing what the tech of the time was capable of and who put together an amazing team. And who sucks at naturalistic dialogue, creating tension (no, Luke didn't just get a second chance at the Death Star - it was originally just hanging there in space to be swung at as often as necessary; the plan was added in editing over a CGI piece added in the edit, and the firing sequence was an alternate take for Alderaan), and understanding emotions actors are showing. One of the things about film making is it's a team effort and Lucas made a larger contribution than most. Until he became The Great George Lucas when he made an outsize contribution that showed his weaknesses, Didn't he ask around for other people to direct the prequels for him but no one agreed to it? Granted it could have been no one wanted to be the person that ruined Star Wars, but it could also be the conditions Lucas gave. Do like how the prequils and the sequels are bad movies in completely different ways.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:56
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Giant Tourtiere posted:Yeah it's this. I got blitzed by their ads on FB for a while and it turns out all these 'Rambo RPG', 'Crow RPG' things were really just ads for a system they call Everyday Heroes that they claim can do all these settings. I have no idea if it can, or not, and I haven't seen the ads in a long while now. It was kickstarted. I have the Everyday Heroes core and the Crow supplement because I'm a silly goth kid who god drat loves the Crow comic and original movie so I backed it. I flipped through it and the art was nice but I haven't actually read it yet. I also got a pack of minis with I think Rambo, Snake, Eric Draven Crow and someone else who I'm drawing a blank on. I got an email from them yesterday about suing Netflix but didn't read it closely enough to see they were suing, all I saw was "We're making a Rebel Moon rpg" and I thought "Oh neat" and then closed the email lol. I may do a F&F on the Crow book at some point, I remember seeing there were a few other animal spirits who could be your characters guide besides just a crow, but I can't remember what they are off hand.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:59
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I saw someone on Twitch playing the Escape from New York game, and it looked like it would be fun for one shots. Seemed pretty easy to learn too.
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Sep 29, 2023 17:29
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Trying to build an RPG publishing empire on top of strange and largely unwanted licenses is giving me strong late-era West End Games vibes (which gave us can't-miss adaptations like Species and Tank Girl and Necroscope)
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Sep 29, 2023 17:32
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Gatto Grigio posted:Worldbuilding nerd answer: Even if you only include the Alpha Quadrant, the Milky Way Galaxy is vast enough that anyone who really wants land can find an uninhabited M-class planet (aka, suitable for supporting human life) and plant stakes there. The stabilized population growth we see in industrialized nations exists to an even greater degree in a post-Warp civilization. Replicator technology means that arable land is no longer a necessity, and the demand for real estate in Earth drops when Warp technology makes land across the galaxy more accessible. Also there's a nuclear war between now and then so "ancestral vineyard" is yet more LARPing.
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Sep 29, 2023 17:33
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FMguru posted:Trying to build an RPG publishing empire on top of strange and largely unwanted licenses is giving me strong late-era West End Games vibes (which gave us can't-miss adaptations like Species and Tank Girl and Necroscope) They're doing every property as a single sourcebook-slash-adventure that are all compatible with each other, which seems to be working out for them so far.
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Sep 29, 2023 17:44
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Splicer posted:I was going to post a similar nerd answer so I'll just summarise it as everyone on earth with a job is just LARPing. There's a million more interesting things to do than potter about running a vineyard so the job of vineyard potterer goes to the guy who wants it.
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Sep 29, 2023 17:49
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Splicer posted:I was going to post a similar nerd answer so I'll just summarise it as everyone on earth with a job is just LARPing. There's a million more interesting things to do than potter about running a vineyard so the job of vineyard potterer goes to the guy who wants it. Yeah, like that's the superficial answer that goes unexamined, like what do you do when there's a shortage of volunteers to wait tables at your restaurant, or who decides how to allocate restaurant space in the french quarter of new orleans, is it a lottery? How does Picard's vinyard attract people who want to pick grapes but somehow don't want to live in a fancy mansion situated on the estate or own their own vinyard with their family name on it or to boil it down: there are still obviously limited supplies of luxuries and so there has to be some system to fairly allocate them when demand exceeds supply, and also there are still obviously limited supplies of labor and without any market for increasing incentives to do undesirable jobs there's no explanation for how all the people running their hobby restaurants keep staff because the writers of Star Trek are actually not capable of conceptualizing and explaining the underpinnings of their utopia Which is lampshaded by the deep space nine series in which the writers just went ahead and created all kinds of dark underbellies of the federation, from secret police doing very shady poo poo to the federation's treatment of federation citizens living on planets ceded to the cardassians in a treaty. From that point, with the exception of Voyager, Star Trek writers have repeatedly moved away from Rodenberry's utopian vision, but never seem willing to completely repudiate it. To bring that back around to TG stuff, I think it's a thing that can happen with any franchise which has dozens or hundreds of creative people involved and not a consistent person at the top carefully exercising ironclad editorial oversight to keep the setting consistent and the underlying themes clear. People are going to have their own take, they'll try to shoehorn the stories they come up with into the setting even if they don't really fit quite right, there's always a temptation to add drama by undermining previously established truths of the setting, and as the total volume of lore expands it becomes impractical to demand every contributor have an encyclopedic knowledge of it. It's just really hard, and the makers of star trek actually have done a good thing by focusing their top priority on entertainment value over obsessive attention to setting consistency, because the majority of the audience isn't nerds who will slam the off button when a starfleet officer buys something with money in a scene, it's people who just wanna see some space opera with a vulcan and a klingon. The doomed romance between the robot and the blue guy is compelling... the unanswered question about who has the privilege of getting to drink rare vintages of romulan ale is not. We can see this with large, long-lived TG franchises too. And the writers of those games, despite catering to nerds who will definitely pore obsessively over the details, are best-served by focusing on the coolness factors, because those sell RPG books.
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Sep 29, 2023 18:02
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Picard's family are basically full immersion LARPers, clearly land is assigned depending on how willing you are to commit to the bit
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Sep 29, 2023 18:33
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Nessus posted:yeah pretty much, it's like in Japan where you get a paycheck to sustain the ancient art of some form of textile weaving or something. Presumably there are tours available if a Bolian wants to see how hewmon "whine" is prepared and try one of our guh-rapes fresh from the vy-nee. There's a whole thi ng about replicated food not tasting good/the same as normal food. It's more weird that people are against eating meat, even when it's wished into existence by a magic box. quote:Yeah, like that's the superficial answer that goes unexamined, like what do you do when there's a shortage of volunteers to wait tables at your restaurant, or who decides how to allocate restaurant space in the french quarter of new orleans, is it a lottery? How does Picard's vinyard attract people who want to pick grapes but somehow don't want to live in a fancy mansion situated on the estate or own their own vinyard with their family name on it The whole "no money" line was a throwaway gag from Star Trek IV. There's this whole thing where a good chunk of the people of Trek's creative team couldn't give less of a poo poo about the canon but there was a faction that did (roddenberry and his bootlickers). quote:Which is lampshaded by the deep space nine series in which the writers just went ahead and created all kinds of dark underbellies of the federation, from secret police doing very shady poo poo to the federation's treatment of federation citizens living on planets ceded to the cardassians in a treaty. From that point, with the exception of Voyager, Star Trek writers have repeatedly moved away from Rodenberry's utopian vision, but never seem willing to completely repudiate it. Honestly I get the impression that the people who worked on Star Trek were either kind of bored with it or actively against it. One of the heavyweights of the series went on to do the BSG reboot which was aggressively anti-trek. But you hear about some of the proposed and then dropped due to resistance plot ideas like "Well what if Kira Nehrys started loving the architect of her people's holocaust(who is very not sorry about it)?" Section 31 is in general at least acknowledged to be an evil thing that should be destroyed but every writer afterwards was more than willing to use section 31 as an excuse to gently caress around with the morals and do some underbelly poo poo in every show afterwards and usually in very uninteresting ways. It worked as a great counter to Julian Bashir's obsession with being a spy and fantasies of being a sexy cool supergenius when it was really more "please murder this union boss and his family because Quarkcorp needs(wants) to keep wages low low low" but after that its just "what if setting and iconography people liked and remember but also you can shoot unarmed prisoners and say you're the good guys". I don't have any hope for the upcoming Section 31 tv show. quote:To bring that back around to TG stuff, I think it's a thing that can happen with any franchise which has dozens or hundreds of creative people involved and not a consistent person at the top carefully exercising ironclad editorial oversight to keep the setting consistent and the underlying themes clear. People are going to have their own take, they'll try to shoehorn the stories they come up with into the setting even if they don't really fit quite right, there's always a temptation to add drama by undermining previously established truths of the setting, and as the total volume of lore expands it becomes impractical to demand every contributor have an encyclopedic knowledge of it. It's just really hard, and the makers of star trek actually have done a good thing by focusing their top priority on entertainment value over obsessive attention to setting consistency, because the majority of the audience isn't nerds who will slam the off button when a starfleet officer buys something with money in a scene, it's people who just wanna see some space opera with a vulcan and a klingon. The doomed romance between the robot and the blue guy is compelling... the unanswered question about who has the privilege of getting to drink rare vintages of romulan ale is not. Was it you or someone else in this thread that said tg franchises are basically a more gatekept version of things like the SCP universe? TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Sep 29, 2023 |
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Sep 29, 2023 18:41
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probably someone else since I don't know what the "SCP universe" is
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Sep 29, 2023 18:56
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It's a collaborative horror fiction website that resolves around a Technocracy/MIB organization.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:00
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Oh OK. Yeah star trek even from the very beginning had guest writers, and while roddenberry was there to oversee things there were still inconsistencies that showed up regularly. It's never been the kind of setting where the overseers were extremely careful about "canon." Like, do phasers vaporize you, or just kill you, or just do a glancing shot that hurts but you can be rescued? Yes to all, whatever the script requires. They're space guns, shut up nerd. This episode is about racism and the next one is about egomania, don't think too hard about how space guns work you know? OK so yeah they don't use money, it's the future! Next week we will not be worrying about post-economy utopias, because we are finding out what happens when the psychic alien mind melds with a rock creature that everyone thought was just an animal and... we've been killing its babies!
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Sep 29, 2023 |
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Sep 29, 2023 19:03
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I don't think it's too much to ask, if you've decided you're creating a world, that other people be able to reason about it somewhat. If you don't, just make each episode take place in a different world, or a different variation on our world, like in The Twilight Zone.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:14
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