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Reminds me how some background characters wear enlisted or ensign uniforms even if they're middle-aged, and an alternate universe Picard remains at a lower rank despite his age and people are surprised when he seeks promotion and assume it's a mid-life crisis. Starfleet doesn't do up-or-out, and it makes complete sense both based on it being a genuinely egalitarian organisation... and also that it's a multi-species organisation, for that matter. Probably a silly idea to maintain human social strata by age when you also have Vulcans who can live for centuries, just for starters.Angry Salami posted:And a lot of the inconsistencies in the Federation world-building can then be explained if you assume the Federation's closer to the European Union or even the Holy Roman Empire than it is to a unitary state; it's an alliance of dozens of different political entities, most of which have histories stretching back centuries already, and some of those are themselves confederations of different political entities. This is also pretty consistent with how the Federation is usually shown, an extremely diverse entity where while there are specific requirements to qualify as a member world, otherwise kinda the point is that they're left alone to run things however works for them, even and especially if they're running a silly gimmick planet. It is brought up on occasion that democratic government isn't a requirement. (Though as a few episodes point out, caste-based discrimination is an explicit dealbreaker, and even then there's gray areas- what's going on with the Trill for starters)
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Oct 1, 2023 04:54
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Didn't the gangster planet end up joining the Federation?
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Oct 1, 2023 05:13
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Reminds me how some background characters wear enlisted or ensign uniforms even if they're middle-aged, and an alternate universe Picard remains at a lower rank despite his age and people are surprised when he seeks promotion and assume it's a mid-life crisis. Isnt that the episode where the "alternate universe" is that Picard literally never had an ounce of ambition?
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Oct 1, 2023 05:17
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Nessus posted:Didn't the gangster planet end up joining the Federation? Kirk forces them to become a tribute state, later implying the federation will somehow rehabilitate the gangster's culture. e: I watched TOS recently, maybe they go back in later series?
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Oct 1, 2023 05:42
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Isnt that the episode where the "alternate universe" is that Picard literally never had an ounce of ambition? More like so risk-averse he never really succeeds in chasing any ambitions beyond "be in Starfleet," but yeah. He's got an artificial heart from a brawl gone bad when he was much younger, and it starts breaking down... and he's either having a near-death hallucination on the operating table or Q is having a grand old time loving with him, but he has the chance to "do it right" only to end up being someone who never really takes a risk and so never truly distinguishes himself.
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Oct 1, 2023 06:26
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Isnt that the episode where the "alternate universe" is that Picard literally never had an ounce of ambition? It's a Q-driven episode where Picard "dies" because his artificial heart breaks and Q gives him a chance to change the event that gave him the fake heart so that he can live. So he goes back and instead of getting stabbed in a bar fight defending his friend, he plays it safe, leading to a boring rear end life of taking no risks and being an old lieutenant. He asks Q to give him his old life back as he'd rather be him and die than be the boring play if safe guy.
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Oct 1, 2023 06:29
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It's pretty funny given the stereotypes about them that Kirk was the nerd who carried a stack of books taller than his head at the academy, while Picard got stabbed in the heart in a bar fight and only a day before had gotten slapped for two-timing his dates. Also I feel like a near-death hallucination where Q is having fun messing with him in new and exciting ways aren't mutually exclusive. I found that bit interesting, really, Q seems to be taking a genuine interest in helping Picard introspect.
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Oct 1, 2023 06:31
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DalaranJ posted:Kirk forces them to become a tribute state, later implying the federation will somehow rehabilitate the gangster's culture. Seemed like a cop out. They should be committed to their ancient traditions of being a 1920s gangster.
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Oct 1, 2023 06:36
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neonchameleon posted:Thank you. I'd bounced off the first two episodes. I'll try going back to it because I've wanted idealistic Trek. tbh I think it only gets really good in the last two episodes of Season 1. it's great from there on in.
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Oct 1, 2023 08:47
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:tbh I think it only gets really good in the last two episodes of Season 1. it's great from there on in. It's a solid Trek-related comedy by episode 8. The pilot is just bad and episode 2 is uncharacteristically mean-spirited, skip those and you get some good Star Trek comedy. The last two episodes of season 1 are legitimately good Star Trek, and it just keep getting better as it goes along. Like The Orville, the comedy drops out and they end up just doing good Star Trek episodes with jokes. Season 4 has just delivered 5 absolute bangers in a row and I'm expecting 5 more to round out the season. Moopsy! Goddamn but that still gets me giggling.
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Oct 1, 2023 10:19
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Nessus posted:I heard one of the novels had them come back and find that they'd sort of become a sketched-out version of TOS Starfleet, complete with a starbase of their own design, and you now have to be very, very careful if you're going down to pay a visit.
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Oct 1, 2023 10:48
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Splicer posted:I do like the idea of an incredibly impressionable species that bases their entire society around whoever spoke to them last. Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson, "The Sound and the Furry (The Complete Hoka Stories)" may be of interest to you.
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Oct 1, 2023 11:44
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DalaranJ posted:Kirk forces them to become a tribute state, later implying the federation will somehow rehabilitate the gangster's culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6RfltyAg7Q Kinda.
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Oct 1, 2023 15:04
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You know what? If someone trains an AI on TSR's original modules and Appendix N, the OSR would probably embrace it. You're just automating the process of remixing a very specific, narrow band of content. I don't think any company will publicly come out in favor of it, but in a few years we're going to start hearing employees that were brought in to polish up AI modules.
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Oct 1, 2023 19:53
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Is there still an OSR as a singular movement at this point? It seemed like it was fragmenting into a lot of smaller circles as sensibilities drifted. Like when people started tweaking old-school D&D rules in ways that drifted further from the "baseline" and repurposed things from "modern" games as needed.
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Oct 1, 2023 20:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:Is there still an OSR as a singular movement at this point? It seemed like it was fragmenting into a lot of smaller circles as sensibilities drifted. Like when people started tweaking old-school D&D rules in ways that drifted further from the "baseline" and repurposed things from "modern" games as needed. Between Mork Borg, Into the Odd, OSE, ShadowDark, and Dolmenwood it’s hard to find the heir apparent. Remember when everyone was making stuff Lamentations-compatible?
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Oct 1, 2023 21:00
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If anything modern OSR stuff is significantly more varied than the modern adventure paths. An AI could probably create OSR systems easily enough, but getting anything like the adventures or settings produced would be less likely to work than just giving it a decision path that starts with "find a region of Golarion/Faerun" and have it just auotcomplete the 1-15 adventures from there.
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Oct 1, 2023 21:08
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The "OSR" has been pretty fractured since the end of G+ and blogs being less of a thing people talk about than published books. The big community spaces left in the leftist slice of the OSR are the purple OSR discord originally started by Chris Mcdowall, the NSR discord, and perhaps also the FKR and Exalted Funeral discords. Beyond that, it's mostly smaller spaces and game-specific discords like the ones for Into the Odd, OSE, etc. The blog side is still active, it's just less where all the conversation is centered. Notably, Bones of Contention has started up as a consistent OSR book review blog with multiple contributors. The format and content are highly variable since every author does their own thing, but it does get linked to and discussed frequently. In the non-leftist spaces you have the tenfootpole forums, the Dragonsfoot forums, and Tenkar's Tavern for forums. The stuff happening in these spaces has little to do with the leftist ones, though I think a lot of people still reference reviews on the tenfootpole main site. Beyond that, it's worth noting that people often find out about OSR stuff from more commercial spaces now. The Questing Beast youtube channel is more or less a series of flip-throughs of popular books and it has a newsletter called The Glatisant which links to new OSR books and blog posts. Exalted Funeral still puts out small scale zines and so a lot of new ideas or trends that would have ended up on forum or blog posts a few years ago might be found there in zine form instead. And finally you have big tentpole Kickstarters like Break, Dolmenwood or Mothership that tend to draw attention from the greater RPG market just because of the sheer numbers they're putting up. If I had to describe the OSR nowadays, I would say it's less of a movement/community and just a way to describe what some books have in common. Active spaces definitely still exist, but generally the trend seems to be for popular authors to silo themselves off once they find their audience. There's less treatment of "the OSR" as like a community or milieu and that's probably for the best at this point.
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Oct 1, 2023 21:17
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DCC seems to be the biggest going by Gencon numbers. Mork borg sells a lot but is so shallow it doesn’t see much play beyond one shots IME. I agree in general that OSR is less a codified community and more a design approach (or marketing gimmick if you want to be cynical) these days.
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Oct 1, 2023 22:27
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Bottom Liner posted:DCC seems to be the biggest going by Gencon numbers. Mork borg sells a lot but is so shallow it doesn’t see much play beyond one shots IME. Goodman also does a very admirable job at promoting third-party DCC materials, from highlighting their Kickstarters to stocking zines and adventures in their online store.
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Oct 1, 2023 22:51
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Lumbermouth posted:Goodman also does a very admirable job at promoting third-party DCC materials, from highlighting their Kickstarters to stocking zines and adventures in their online store. They also promote the stuff in the core book, too.
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Oct 2, 2023 03:44
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Kurieg posted:Picard season 2 had several flashbacks to picard's childhood at chateau picard and his mother.. to.. mixed effect. Obviously Picard's family gets to keep the vineyard because they're the only ones willing to commit to the bit so hard they die of untreated mental illness
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Oct 2, 2023 04:20
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moths posted:You know what? ??? The OSR is all about random table generation so that's not really new, I was referring to using AI art, of which there was the guy making LL2e (the reception was mixed) I mean, seriously: https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/ https://dungen.app/dungen/ https://watabou.github.io/dungeon.html https://www.kassoon.com/dnd/dungeon-map/ On top of this, I'd say most, if not all of the best OSR products are the ones that mostly involve you rolling on some tables, like the Gardens of Ynn or Vornheim and those have been pretty influential. The only products I've seen that do the traditional "here's a massive amount of content in a huge 300 page book" are the WFRP 4e ones, and those only really work for me because they'll go "This is goblin town. there's goblins in goblin town" and then they'll have plot hooks directly attached to them like (The Goblins recently were raided by a company of dwarves, a wizard and a half-ling. They are willing to pay big time for information on their wherabouts. However, in their weakened state they might be ripe to be dealt with once and for all and there's a bounty one can claim for killing the Goblin king, since nobody has yet, all you would need to do is find his crown, down down down in goblin town). Gray Ghost posted:Between Mork Borg, Into the Odd, OSE, ShadowDark, and Dolmenwood it’s hard to find the heir apparent. It was a handy-dandy system with a "good enough" take on thief skills most people were fine with. Edge art was a fine price to pay, but there's a good reason that OSE basically up and ate Raggi's lunch. Zak's downfall didn't help but I've spoken to a few OSR people at the time who agreed Raggi had already been losing talent and running low on good ideas for awhile TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 2, 2023 05:08
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Wasn't the big reason for Lamentations success just Raggi paying well?
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Oct 2, 2023 06:35
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Terrible Opinions posted:Wasn't the big reason for Lamentations success just Raggi paying well? Iirc the entire game line was dying until A Red and Pleasant Land or Vornheim came out, IDK which. Had quite a few bangers after that like Veins, Scenic Dunnsmouth etc.
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Oct 2, 2023 15:24
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Iirc the entire game line was dying until A Red and Pleasant Land or Vornheim came out, IDK which. Had quite a few bangers after that like Veins, Scenic Dunnsmouth etc. I really believe that books like Veins, Dunsmouth, Into the Cess and Citadel, and Into the Wyrd and Wild are the books that OSR does really well: stuff that helps you write or generate a really expansive adventure/game world. I just got the PDF for Mothership 1e’s GM book and it tells the reader so much about keying a map, making a faction, building a horror scenario, and even taking session notes—all in 60 pages! I would give a starting GM that before giving them something like the DMG. Gray Ghost fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 2, 2023 18:06
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Bottom Liner posted:DCC seems to be the biggest going by Gencon numbers. Mork borg sells a lot but is so shallow it doesn’t see much play beyond one shots IME. I don't know how it's doing in terms of sales figures, but OSE also seems to be the major player in terms of 3rd party content. If you stumble on an adventure or supplement produced in the last few years there's a decent chance it was made for OSE. To the original point: I don't feel like a fully AI-generated product would go over particularly well in OSR spaces, largely because one of the underlying philosophies of the scene is a DIY, modular approach to mechanics so getting an AI to create something for you seems to run directly counter to the values of the type of people buying these products. As well, because so many of the tools associated with the scene already rely on random generation, getting a randomly generated system or adventure just feels kind of redundant? I can see something using AI art being positively received. I'm pretty strongly opposed to generative AI art as a concept, but I don't see it having the same kind of negative reception on the OSR market.
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Oct 2, 2023 19:48
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hey, there's always rutibex
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Oct 2, 2023 21:48
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Nessus posted:I heard one of the novels had them come back and find that they'd sort of become a sketched-out version of TOS Starfleet, complete with a starbase of their own design, and you now have to be very, very careful if you're going down to pay a visit. Wait, these aren't the aliens who are 1920s gangsters that Kirk taught that made up game? Or are you combining in your mind the Betans (Landu guys) and Lotians (20s gangsters)? (yes, star trek alien names are dumb sometimes)
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Oct 2, 2023 23:12
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Foolster41 posted:Wait, these aren't the aliens who are 1920s gangsters that Kirk taught that made up game? Or are you combining in your mind the Betans (Landu guys) and Lotians (20s gangsters)? Some tie-in materials have taken the Iotians in that direction, yes. https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Iotian#The_Transtator_Revolution
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Oct 2, 2023 23:32
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Picked up Vaults of Vaarn after reading about it around here and it's very cool, when I look at a bunch of random OSR tables I want curated weirdness with an impish authorial voice, not extruded AI slop. I have no doubt you could trivially train an AI to make themed random tables but it's the little interesting flourishes that make them actually fun, not the sheer existence of unending tables to slog through. Adding AI into the mix doesn't really add anything that a basic random number generator can't already do.
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Oct 2, 2023 23:38
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Yeah, I actually almost never use tables at the table. I treat them more as a sort of implicit "here's the type of ideas or rulings that might be interesting in this situation" than as actual Content (wandering monster and loot tables not withstanding). AI-generated tables would be worthless for that.
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Oct 3, 2023 02:02
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:Picked up Vaults of Vaarn after reading about it around here and it's very cool, when I look at a bunch of random OSR tables I want curated weirdness with an impish authorial voice, not extruded AI slop. I have no doubt you could trivially train an AI to make themed random tables but it's the little interesting flourishes that make them actually fun, not the sheer existence of unending tables to slog through. Adding AI into the mix doesn't really add anything that a basic random number generator can't already do. Of course it helps that the writing in the game is beautiful and weird and has a definite style to it.
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Oct 3, 2023 08:29
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Kestral posted:Or, you could do what every Star Trek writer from DS9 onward has utterly refused to do because they're all cynicism-poisoned, and embrace the concept of a post-scarcity utopia in a way that uses the collaborative nature of an RPG group to come up with an interpretation that makes sense for everyone at the table. Add me to the list of people that don't think Lower Decks is cynicism-poisoned at all (it is my favourite newTrek by far because of that). Warthur fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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Oct 3, 2023 10:59
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I do wonder how viable enemy generation in D&D is by AI not unlike RoboRosewater
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Oct 3, 2023 13:01
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Warthur posted:Add me to the list of people that don't think Lower Decks is cynicism-poisoned at all (it is my favourite newTrek by far because of that). Yeah, like I mentioned early if you watch the first two episodes I get how you could think that and the only joke is 'Star Trek is dumb' but it moves beyond that to be leagues better than anything else recently Star Trek-related.
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Oct 3, 2023 13:27
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah, like I mentioned early if you watch the first two episodes I get how you could think that and the only joke is 'Star Trek is dumb' but it moves beyond that to be leagues better than anything else recently Star Trek-related. Lower Decks is "Star Trek is dumb" made by Star Trek superfans. Your favorite IP is dumb, too.
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Oct 3, 2023 13:44
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CitizenKeen posted:Lower Decks is "Star Trek is dumb" made by Star Trek superfans. No, actually, Lower Decks is about how Star Trek can be silly but is also really cool and good.
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Oct 3, 2023 16:29
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Foolster41 posted:Wait, these aren't the aliens who are 1920s gangsters that Kirk taught that made up game? Or are you combining in your mind the Betans (Landu guys) and Lotians (20s gangsters)?
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Oct 3, 2023 16:43
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Dawgstar posted:No, actually, Lower Decks is about how Star Trek can be silly but is also really cool and good. I don't think you and I are saying different things.
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Oct 3, 2023 16:51
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