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Alexander has written a lot of really useful GM advice that has improved my game immensely. He also seems to be really, really stubborn about certain things.
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Jan 22, 2024 20:27
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i literally never had context for any of this and bought the "she didn't like the name" excuse because it seemed plausible to assume people were acting basically decent in that regard? what's the problem with pointing something out
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Jan 22, 2024 20:27
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theironjef posted:Is he "disassociated mechanics" guy? So like basically he doesn't like 4e because he's invented a system by which anything he doesn't like for any reason "reminds him that it's a game and takes him out of the game" and stuff he does like doesn't do that, even if it's the same thing between the two games? Like he doesn't like skills in 4e because they're disassociated, unlike in 3e, where they are apparently not. Pretty sure his issue was more with powers than with skills.
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Jan 22, 2024 20:28
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Ah, sure, more like "The concept of Daily Powers is bad and disassociative, unlike in 3e, where a Paladin's Lay on Hands, which can be used 1/Day, is not." Gotta give him credit, disassociated mechanics is exactly logic-sounding enough to work as an argument for a lot of people even though it's basically just a two-dollar way to say "tummy feels."
theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 20:30
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dwarf74 posted:his pseudo-intellectual approach to edition warring
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Jan 22, 2024 20:35
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Mister Olympus posted:i literally never had context for any of this and bought the "she didn't like the name" excuse because it seemed plausible to assume people were acting basically decent in that regard? what's the problem with pointing something out Right, to be clear, litigating his dumb ancient D&D opinions wasn't what I was going for. I guess I shouldn't have posted this here if it was going to dredge that up. I didn't know about the recent poo poo involving republishing the dungeon design essay, and the evasive way he phrased his justification is really iffy to me. That all happened before Jennell Jaquays passed on, but it didn't sound like there was clear documentation that she gave permission for him to rename it after himself while she could. If something's come up showing she did approve of that, it would change a lot about this.
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Jan 22, 2024 20:44
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theironjef posted:Ah, sure, more like "The concept of Daily Powers is bad and disassociative, unlike in 3e, where a Paladin's Lay on Hands, which can be used 1/Day, is not." This is getting to the weeds a bit, but I think there is a difference here; a Paladin's Lay on Hands is presumably channeling some sort of divine energy similar to Cleric spells, so it's plausibly an in-universe limitation that the Paladin is consciously aware of, which is harder to buy with some 4e powers. Having said that, 3e also has its share of x/day powers that are harder to justify. In general I think a lot of complaints about 4e were about things that were present in previous editions to various degrees, but were more central (especially in terms of presentation) in 4e - so they were exaggerated but not completely wrong. A lot of this came from taking 3e's moves toward more unified mechanics (as opposed to TSR-era D&D's hodgepodge of subsystems) further, moving away from the unwritten principle that the classes are differentiated not so much by what they do as by what subsystems they use to do it. And I can see why WotC did move towards more unified mechanics; in theory, they should be both easier to learn and easier to balance. (Though in practice, 2e's less unified mechanics are generally agreed to be more balanced than 3e's, in part because 3e tended to remove fiddly exceptions that existed for a reason.) (5e basically ended up taking a "worst of both worlds" approach here: despite rolling back 4e's unification of resource management for martials and casters (bringing back many of 3e's balance issues in the process), it moved further towards mechanical unification in some ways (particularly the ubiquity of Advantage/Disadvantage), while simultaneously adding occasional cargo-cult bits of "old-school" subsystems. The end result does at least have the benefit of being relatively simple from a "player-facing" perspective, especially since the subculture that grew up around 5e encourages ignoring half the rules anyway, but it also leads to GM burnout.)
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Jan 22, 2024 21:09
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One more thought: I think "dissociated mechanics" are a real thing, but they aren't necessarily a bad thing. Some PbtA games, for example, deliberately use dissociated mechanics to allow conflict between player characters without conflict between players, which is something "traditional" RPG mechanics don't really allow for.
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Jan 22, 2024 21:17
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Silver2195 posted:One more thought: I think "dissociated mechanics" are a real thing, but they aren't necessarily a bad thing. Some PbtA games, for example, deliberately use dissociated mechanics to allow conflict between player characters without conflict between players, which is something "traditional" RPG mechanics don't really allow for. Aren’t those just “mechanics”? Those let characters “do” things that the players aren’t doing, as the foundation of any game.
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Jan 22, 2024 21:25
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Nuns with Guns posted:I don't think it's clout chasing? It's someone pointing out how Justin Alexander's appropriating a concept he credited to someone else. "Interesting" is a bad word to use, though, so sorry about that. I default to it when I look at something that seems like a complete mess and I'm not fully sure how to articulate why it's a mess. Having read through the past and clicked some of the links, I'm not sure the criticism is entirely in good faith either. Alexander definitely is an rear end in a top hat. The blogger (Anne? I don't see a last name) has edited out some of the details from her account that might make Alexander look less awful in the latest posts. 1. No mention that Alexander says both he and others have been harassed on social media for using the term he coined without the S at the end of Jacquays' name. If he'd gotten that right in the first place, it'd never have been a problem, but see 2. 2. Anne mocks the idea that it would take time or effort to replace "Jacquaying" with "Jacquaysing" despite Alexander explaining in the Xandering post that it wasn't a simple matter of editing a single document: he mentions both metadata (article tags) as well as changing multiple pages on the blog. In his FAQ, he mentions not doing a database search & replace because it would also edit everyone's comments, and he says he went in manually to indicate the comment had been edited. I don't accept Alexander saying this would take months, but it is more work than Anne is willing to grant. (A quick look through the site suggests Alexander is inconsistent about registering this edit wherever it occurs, because of course he is.) 3. The load-bearing quotation from Alexander in the 2023 post: "I spoke with Jennell earlier this year. We both agreed that the name should be changed, and I said it would be a large project to do it, but I’d make sure it happened by the end of the year." Anne reads this as spinning "Jacquays wanted the term to be corrected to Jacquaysing, but Alexander is leaving the impression she wanted it changed to his name and he did it for her." Of course, the post in 2018 from Jacquays is neither "speaking" nor something that happened in 2023. I'm not aware of whether an actual in-person conversation took place, or what was said, and unfortunately Jacquays has passed away, but Anne simply assumes that this conversation must have gone how she imagines: Jacquays saying "please spell my name correctly" again and not Jacquays saying "I do want credit and I want my name spelled correctly, but I don't care about having this term named for me." Was the term "Xandering" discussed between them, or did she ask that her name be taken off, or is Alexander leaving that impression and actually disregarding the wishes of a woman who entered a coma before his posting and then died? Short of a third party providing actual information about a conversation between Jacquays and Alexander (or proof no such conversation took place), I don't see how anyone can know for sure on the basis of Jacquays' past social media posts that this outcome isn't what she asked for or at least agreed to when talking with Alexander. She may have agreed he should make up a different term without knowing he'd pick a term based on his name. I'd want to know whether he still credits her work in his book (something Anne does not mention and which I have no plans to buy his book to find out); if he does, then he was awful initially for not changing the deadname and worse for defending that choice, and opting to eventually erase her from the discussion is indeed pretty low. But if he's crediting her and using her correct name, and only renaming the term, then I'd be neutral on the change if he'd spoken personally with her and they'd agreed to change it (but rolling my eyes that he used his own name, instead). Alexander didn't deliberately deadname Jacquays with his original post (as it preceded his knowledge); I don't know whether he made a mistake in misspelling the last name in his term, or if it was deliberate because he thought "Jacquaying" read or sounded better than "Jacquaysing." If he'd done the right thing with changing the deadname, immediately, that'd make it much easier to believe the other problem was a mistake, but the offense there initially needs to be differentiated from the kind of offense of getting a trans person's name wrong. An error (or an editorial choice in term) that wasn't intrinsically offensive becomes so thanks to the later context. Disentangling the mess, then: 1. Alexander may be and may have been both an rear end in a top hat and transphobic. When he first posted about "Jacquaying" (sic), any transphobia wouldn't have affected the post because he believed Jacquays, at the time, to be male-identifying. 2. After Jacquays transitioned and people pointed that out to Alexander, he refused to change the original post and then (years later) made an extensive BS defense that mirrors a lot of transphobic rhetoric. He did not outright say "Jacquays is a man." This is a very low bar, but a depressing number of people seem to have trouble with it. 3. Two years after that, when Jacquays posted a comment complaining about both the deadnaming and the misspelling of the term, Alexander finally fixed the first problem. He did nothing about the second. 4. Alexander may or may not have met or talked with Jacquays about the whole thing sometime in 2023. He says he did. 5. Alexander then renamed the term Xandering. By doing so, he is either erasing from the term the name of a trans woman, dishonoring her as a person, or he is at last honoring her by acting in accordance with the request she made of him during their conversation. Or, IMO, doing what she asked (changing the term) but picking the most narcissistic and assholish alternative term he could have as an alternative, likely without her approval of that term. He's using enough evasive language in the explanatory post that I can believe this solution was in fact not Jacquays' preferred solution. OTOH, changing the name of the term while preserving the text about Jacquays as a designer and acknowledging her as the first dungeon designer to use this technique isn't exactly erasing Jacquays from history. It's preserving her legacy and her work. I've read plenty of work from people who deadnamed, got defensive about it, and then acknowledged they were wrong and made a change. Many are assholes, some were transphobes (active or passive), and some became trans allies or, at least, better educated and behaved now and adhering to better practices. I'm not especially concerned about someone being "unfair" to Alexander, who is indubitably an rear end in a top hat whatever his position on trans people. But Anne's post assumes repeated bad faith on Alexander's part and thus won't convince him to change his mind, meaning its purposes are instead to convince other people to use "Jacquaysing" over "Xandering" and to provide everyone else a reason to stay away from Alexander's book/site. If Alexander is an rear end in a top hat who came to believe he was wrong on this issue and finally had a conversation with Jacquays, treating him as if he were an rear end in a top hat who never believed he was wrong and is now stealing the term from Jacquays just teaches assholes like Alexander that they'll be punished whether they learn and do better or not, so why bother? Tl; dr: Alexander was in the wrong, but how wrong, and why, matter.
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Jan 22, 2024 21:31
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Silver2195 posted:This is getting to the weeds a bit, but I think there is a difference here; a Paladin's Lay on Hands is presumably channeling some sort of divine energy similar to Cleric spells, so it's plausibly an in-universe limitation that the Paladin is consciously aware of, which is harder to buy with some 4e powers. Having said that, 3e also has its share of x/day powers that are harder to justify. It feels like your argument here is based entirely on a specific interpretation of what paladins do that I may or may not subscribe to. I wouldn't personally want to be using in-game story justifications for why mechanics do or don't "feel right." I generally just assume daily effects are daily for narrative flow purposes. It's not as exciting if the Paladin Lay on Hands every round, just like there's only so many times per dungeon that a fighter can dramatically draw a line in the sand and demand the enemies Come and Get It. Once you move into "Well, it's because divine energy is on a 24 hour timer(something the game never says, so we're on equal levels of correct here)" you're opening yourself to weird in-game arguments. All "Okay, but what if I'm on a planet where a day is 10 hours" or "Well, I worship the god of accelerated time so I should have this as an Encounter Power" or whatever. It's not a super important distinction, either way the power is a daily, I'm just always wary of trying to reverse-engineer in narrative reasons that mechanics are the way they are.
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Jan 22, 2024 21:34
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Now I'm wondering how the official novels and the like handle it. Do they ever mention Paladins having limited supplies of healing?
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Jan 22, 2024 21:41
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Destrado posted:I didn't know about the recent history of it, and I appreciated reading about it in this here relevant community, so jog on?
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Jan 22, 2024 21:56
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Narsham posted:Having read through the past and clicked some of the links, I'm not sure the criticism is entirely in good faith either. Alexander definitely is an rear end in a top hat. The blogger (Anne? I don't see a last name) has edited out some of the details from her account that might make Alexander look less awful in the latest posts. I have a few points in response, 1) I'm going to need some receipts on those death threats. It feels lovely to say, but we live in a world with James Somerton constantly complaining about all the straight women giving him poo poo in the comments who are never there when you actually check and JK Rowling pointing to trans women taking pictures in front of her national landmark house and saying this is proof that the Trans Agenda is stalking her. You just can't take "someone has sent me death threats over this, over there where you can't see them" seriously from someone who you already have a reason to distrust, and it sucks. 2) It's harder to do a total find/replace than she gives it credit for, sure, but you know what isn't hard? Putting "Editor's Note: It's harder to change every instance of it throughout my blog than you'd think since I used it a lot, but Jaquaying is now Jaquaysing because it bugged Jennell Jaquays" on the first blog post and tweeting about the term change. There's some defense on the "changing terms like that is hard" front, but it is thin. 3) I feel like people would be more willing to give the Alexandrian benefit of the doubt here if he renamed the term to guilding or diversifying or just... something neutral and descriptive. But my dude, you just named it after the middle chunk of your blog name, how could this not look like you're intentionally stealing credit? Because we know the origins, but if it has your name and you're notable for popularizing it people are going to make assumptions. (I'm sorry for responding to a numbered list with another numbered list that replies to the first two comments on the original list and then does something completely different.) Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 22:01
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I do find the advice to generally be pretty good and thoughtful, the game design opinions may vary. You're either up for the artifice or not, though it's weird to play d&d if you're not into artificiality, but then again, maybe people want something in between. I don't know, not being into 4e isn't some horrible sin in someone.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:03
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Panzeh posted:I do find the advice to generally be pretty good and thoughtful, the game design opinions may vary. You're either up for the artifice or not, though it's weird to play d&d if you're not into artificiality, but then again, maybe people want something in between. I don't know, not being into 4e isn't some horrible sin in someone. Oh for sure. I have my own issues with it. There's just a world of difference between "Tried it, not for me" and "I invented a flawed and ridiculous new school of discourse just so I could call it objectively bad instead of subjectively." Dude sucks. Most people that don't like 4e don't suck.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:10
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theironjef posted:Oh for sure. I have my own issues with it. There's just a world of difference between "Tried it, not for me" and "I invented a flawed and ridiculous new school of discourse just so I could call it objectively bad instead of subjectively." Dude sucks. Most people that don't like 4e don't suck. I don't think Alexander ever called 4e objectively bad, just bad. But I guess he does tend to take a...dogmatic tone about things.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:18
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3e was so loving full of 1/day abilities that were fiddly to keep track of and just abysmal for game feel and genre emulation. Like you'd have a prestige class's defining ability, the thing they're shown doing in the illustration, and turns out they can only do it once per day. So no you can't actually use that cool ability, most of the time you're gonna be auto-attacking. Even when playing PF or 3.5 I changed all of those to encounter powers or 1/hr or something similar.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:29
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Destrado posted:I didn't know about the recent history of it, and I appreciated reading about it in this here relevant community, so jog on? And what you learned is a tortured version of the truth designed by someone as outrage bait to drive engagement to their blog. Do you feel better informed?
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Jan 22, 2024 22:42
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Terrible Opinions posted:3e was so loving full of 1/day abilities that were fiddly to keep track of and just abysmal for game feel and genre emulation. Like you'd have a prestige class's defining ability, the thing they're shown doing in the illustration, and turns out they can only do it once per day. So no you can't actually use that cool ability, most of the time you're gonna be auto-attacking. Even when playing PF or 3.5 I changed all of those to encounter powers or 1/hr or something similar. Yeah, that's part of what I meant about other x/day abilities in 3e being harder to justify. I think at least some of them should have used a unified "stamina point"-type system instead, like Psions or Factota.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:43
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Lurks With Wolves posted:
If you've generally shown a willingness to not to be an obtuse rear end in a top hat then people acting in good faith will be understanding if they come across a stray use of the old spelling. But this would require Justin Alexander to not be an obtuse rear end in a top hat.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:52
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Martials getting daily abilities is a sticking point that breaks the brains of a certain kind of gamer for reasons that ultimately boil down to "That's not the way Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to work". It breaking verisimilitude is bunk because there's a million other things that break verisimilitude but are apparently okay (lack of wound penalties is the big one). D&D just has to be shaped like itself to a certain kind of person.
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Jan 22, 2024 22:54
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Silver2195 posted:Now I'm wondering how the official novels and the like handle it. Do they ever mention Paladins having limited supplies of healing? This is drat near the most loving D&D a book has ever been. I can figure out the level of a main character spellcaster because of her spells memorized. They recognize a magic item can use its power 3x/day. They proceed to go through the titular White Plume Mountain, and you can open the module and follow along with their progress. The approach to magic in general is very... clinical? The ranger main character "shoves healing spells" into himself and he needs to rest overnight to recover them... At which point, casting them is the first thing he does. In the second book they're fighting Drow (for Descent into the Depths) and recognizing the 50% magic resistance in-universe. It's fuckin wild, my goon. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 22:59
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theironjef posted:Oh for sure. I have my own issues with it. There's just a world of difference between "Tried it, not for me" and "I invented a flawed and ridiculous new school of discourse just so I could call it objectively bad instead of subjectively." Dude sucks. Most people that don't like 4e don't suck.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:03
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Silver2195 posted:Yeah, that's part of what I meant about other x/day abilities in 3e being harder to justify. I think at least some of them should have used a unified "stamina point"-type system instead, like Psions or Factota.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:05
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aw frig aw dang it posted:And what you learned is a tortured version of the truth designed by someone as outrage bait to drive engagement to their blog. Do you feel better informed? Hey I think you misclicked and meant to quote and respond to this one instead: Nuns with Guns posted:I don't want to post something that's empty ragebait, is there a better or more updated place this discussion happened? The most recent things, like Justin's justification for why he changed the dungeon design term are from November 2023, so it's still pretty recent, right? The republication and deletion of old blogs all feels really scummy upfront unless some important information's been omitted. But to answer your question: Yes, I do. And?
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Jan 22, 2024 23:07
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Froghammer posted:Martials getting daily abilities is a sticking point that breaks the brains of a certain kind of gamer for reasons that ultimately boil down to "That's not the way Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to work". It breaking verisimilitude is bunk because there's a million other things that break verisimilitude but are apparently okay (lack of wound penalties is the big one). D&D just has to be shaped like itself to a certain kind of person. it's been discussed to death a million times but a terrible curse compels me to remind the thread that the argument about dailies/limited martial powers has never held any water even if you take limited martial powers breaking verisimilitude seriously because 3e does the same thing all over the place, including base game core features quote:SRD:Stunning Fist it is pure bullshit and tummyfeels that have more to do with the formatting of the page than the reality of the game mechanics in play at the table
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Jan 22, 2024 23:09
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Terrible Opinions posted:3e was so loving full of 1/day abilities that were fiddly to keep track of and just abysmal for game feel and genre emulation. Like you'd have a prestige class's defining ability, the thing they're shown doing in the illustration, and turns out they can only do it once per day. So no you can't actually use that cool ability, most of the time you're gonna be auto-attacking. Even when playing PF or 3.5 I changed all of those to encounter powers or 1/hr or something similar. God, in hindsight the 3e purists were the most nonsensical faction in the 4e edition wars. At least with the old guard that longed for the old school style of play there was a certain degree of internal consistency in their desires: The game legitimately did shift in its mechanical priorities over the course of 30 years, and the type of resource-management heavy dungeon crawler type of play wasn't as directly supported by newer editions. But the guys who thought 3e was the height of true D&D and claimed 4e was somehow a betrayal of that just boggle my mind because 3e and 4e are much closer to one another mechanically than 2e and 3e were.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:02
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D&D books are always hilarious like that. Mostly because they bring to light how dumb the levelling system is. Forget giving your character a big epic backstory, you'll end up like Raistlin selling his health and soul for the phenomenal cosmic power to cast Feather Fall very occasionally.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:41
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Narsham posted:Having read through the past and clicked some of the links, I'm not sure the criticism is entirely in good faith either. Alexander definitely is an rear end in a top hat. The blogger (Anne? I don't see a last name) has edited out some of the details from her account that might make Alexander look less awful in the latest posts. I'm split on this because it does feel like a situation where you'll fall on one side or the other depending on how much goodwill you're willing to extend Justin Alexander. Like, the author of that blog does allude to or acknowledge some of the points you raise, but she also doesn't seem to take his feelings charitably. And in a case like this, it's hard to if you think he's already trampled over another person's severely. As far as the harassment goes, I did go read over his reasoning blog post where he brings that up: quote:Second, Jennell’s preference for a change in the term had been mentioned in some interviews. Unfortunately, this began a harassment campaign: Whenever somebody used the term “jaquaying the dungeon” they would be targeted. Some of this just took the form of saying, “You shouldn’t use that word.” Some of it escalated to claiming the word was bigoted. In a few cases, I’ve had people tell me they received death threats. So Justin's saying he's received some heat for it and (perhaps worse?) people unknowingly saying "Jaquaying" instead of "Jaquaysing" are getting harassed and threatened. So he's indirectly opening his readership up to this danger and had also abstained from following Jennell's request to correct the spelling. And the only reason he supplies for why it hasn't been done so far is that it would be substantial work? quote:First, Jennell Jaquays wanted a change. She didn’t like that the term dropped the “s” from her name. Her name is very important to her. This wasn’t a problem. In fact, Jennell had previously requested some sweeping changes to the article for similar reasons, and I’d made those changes. Based on that experience, though, I knew that making this change would not be a quick or easy process: It took weeks of effort, followed by months of extra work to make sure all the metadata had been properly scrubbed on the site. Making this change would be even more substantive, because I’d been using the term for over a decade and I’d need to track it down in every single article. (As I’m writing this, in fact, I’m still in the middle of that work.) And, I mean, maybe it would be work to go back through all his archives and look for every time he said "Jaquaying." Like Lurks said though, I don't see why he couldn't start with the two major articles where it came up first, and put addendums at the top of them, both to correct the term and caution people to use the appropriate name out of respect. He also apparently edited every comment that used the term? That wasn't part of Jennell's request. I remember her post on the deadname blog entry and it was just "please refer to me as Jennell Jaquays when referring to all my past, current, and future works." It's nice to be thorough, but honestly stacking on all these challenges like digging through meta data, editing every comment, blog tags, etc. and saying "This is all too much work, so I couldn't do any of it!" for years and years feels a lot like weaponized incompetence. You can't set aside a timetable to accommodate the creator you deadnamed and whose last name you continue to misspell. Meanwhile, your readers are obliviously opening themselves up to possible harassment because they're repeating an outdated phrase you wouldn't issue any kind of correction on for years? That all smells off. The ambiguous way he describes the discussion he had with Jennell is weird, too. It starts out fine, but vague: quote:I spoke with Jennell earlier this year. We both agreed that the name should be changed, and I said it would be a large project to do it, but I’d make sure it happened by the end of the year. They agreed it would be changed, and it would take time, but it would be done by the end of the year. No indication they agreed on what it would be changed to. Then it sounds like he reached out to his publisher and said it needed to be changed. And resolving to do this "created a legal question" that apparently hadn't come up before: quote:The final factor here is that I had also been working on So You Want to Be a Game Master, a book in which I discussed non-linear dungeon design that had originally used the term “jaquaying.” So I contacted the publisher and said, “We need to make sure we change this term.” The language here is still vague, and I don't see any indication that Jennelle was consulted on the specifics of the new term, so I'm left to assume this discussion and new term were discussed with his publisher alone. So I'd agree with your suspicion here: Narsham posted:Or, IMO, doing what she asked (changing the term) but picking the most narcissistic and assholish alternative term he could have as an alternative, likely without her approval of that term. And again, it would be easy enough to avoid looking narcissistic with using any other general term. Or just changing it to Jaquaysing the whole time, because frankly saying there's "legal concerns" sounds like complete bunk to me.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:46
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Hey, it's kind of lost in how lovely George Costanza the DM is in general, but, uh, I find the legal reason provided for compelling the renaming of Jaquaysing weird. I am not any kind of lawyer, but referring to a phenomenon by the name of one of its pioneers seems like the kind of thing that happens relatively often and won't land you in meaningful legal trouble unless one or the other of you is a huge rear end in a top hat about it. It seems like it would be even less legally actionable if this term of art has been meaningfully in use for the decade it's existed. This sounds a lot more like he was fishing for an excuse, and it's technically true that if Jaquays wanted to she could sue him over it because you can sue nearly anyone for nearly anything. As much as his questionably vague recounting of events, this compels me to ask "okay but why really?" If Jaquays was okay with or actively wanted the total renaming thing, there's a much easier and more straightforward way to say all this poo poo.
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 00:46
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dwarf74 posted:So I was in the mood for trash D&D fantasy audiobooks and found a "greyhawk" series starting with White Plume Mountain, written by Paul Kidd. The Justicar trilogy are the best D&D books hands down, they're fantastic. By the third book the party includes a teamster accidentally reincarnated as a talking badger, a prissy magic sword, and a living hellhound pelt, the party kills Lolth with a Looney Tunes pit trap, and then goes on to raid the Egyptian afterlife to recover a dead teammate's soul that climaxes in knocking Thoth onto his rear end with a Grease spell. It takes the setting exactly as seriously as it deserves.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:48
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re: books that reference D&D mechanics- I remember reading a couple of those little chapter books WotC published when 3e came out that starred the iconic 3e characters, and those did mention D&D mechanics. The ones that starred Regdar the fighter, Mialee the elf wizard, etc. At one point the paladin (Alhandra?) was talking about how she passively casts Detect Evil on every person she meets. Also one involved a wizard who was Regdar's girlfriend and she kept checking her spell component pouches.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:55
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That Old Tree posted:Hey, it's kind of lost in how lovely George Costanza the DM is in general, but, uh, I find the legal reason provided for compelling the renaming of Jaquaysing weird. I am not any kind of lawyer, but referring to a phenomenon by the name of one of its pioneers seems like the kind of thing that happens relatively often and won't land you in meaningful legal trouble unless one or the other of you is a huge rear end in a top hat about it. FWIW that is exactly the kind of thing lawyers for publishers get worried about during pre-publication review - there’s enough there there to generate a lawsuit that’d last past a motion to dismiss. Which is expensive. So publishers will often ask for those kinds of changes out of caution - it’s easy enough to change pre-publication and avoid the problem so the lawyers request it even if the legal issue is marginal at best.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:33
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kvx687 posted:The Justicar trilogy are the best D&D books hands down, they're fantastic. By the third book the party includes a teamster accidentally reincarnated as a talking badger, a prissy magic sword, and a living hellhound pelt, the party kills Lolth with a Looney Tunes pit trap, and then goes on to raid the Egyptian afterlife to recover a dead teammate's soul that climaxes in knocking Thoth onto his rear end with a Grease spell. It takes the setting exactly as seriously as it deserves. Pauli (she transitioned within the past few years) Kidd also wrote a fantastic Gamma World 7e novel about Australian mutant animals, including a quoll and a swarm of psychic earwigs) searching out an ancient installation on a sail-powered dune buggy, she's great.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:37
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Lumbermouth posted:Pauli (she transitioned within the past few years) Kidd also wrote a fantastic Gamma World 7e novel about Australian mutant animals, including a quoll and a swarm of psychic earwigs) searching out an ancient installation on a sail-powered dune buggy, she's great.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:10
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Colonel Cool posted:For me, roleplay the pitch, then roll if there's a chance it might work, is the sweet spot. I'm always against this because it limits people from playing characters against type. Just because a player can't on the fly articulate a clever ruse doesn't mean their character shouldn't be able to. poo poo like that is how people get pidgeonholed into playing the archetypal Big Dumb Fighter, and it's bullshit. Froghammer posted:Martials getting daily abilities is a sticking point that breaks the brains of a certain kind of gamer for reasons that ultimately boil down to "That's not the way Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to work". It breaking verisimilitude is bunk because there's a million other things that break verisimilitude but are apparently okay (lack of wound penalties is the big one). D&D just has to be shaped like itself to a certain kind of person. I will never not find the verisimilitude argument hilariously bad faith because Vancian casting exists and is a tentpole of that certain kind of person's view of D&D. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 04:11
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Lumbermouth posted:Pauli (she transitioned within the past few years) Kidd also wrote a fantastic Gamma World 7e novel about Australian mutant animals, including a quoll and a swarm of psychic earwigs) searching out an ancient installation on a sail-powered dune buggy, she's great. Oh dang. Those Greyhawk novels were stupid fun, I hadn't even thought to look more into her stuff. Gonna have to keep an eye out.
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Jan 23, 2024 05:14
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Silver2195 posted:This is getting to the weeds a bit, but I think there is a difference here; a Paladin's Lay on Hands is presumably channeling some sort of divine energy similar to Cleric spells, so it's plausibly an in-universe limitation that the Paladin is consciously aware of, which is harder to buy with some 4e powers. Having said that, 3e also has its share of x/day powers that are harder to justify. "I can call on my god and he answers, any time I ask. But this one prayer in particular, he stops answering once I use it until I've had a good night of sleep." makes about as much in-universe sense as "Yeah, it's against fighter's guild rules to use this maneuver more than once a day. You want to blow out your ACL? Safety regs are there for a reason, bub." That is, neither make any loving sense - the game has rules because it's a goddamn game!
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Jan 23, 2024 05:19
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm always against this because it limits people from playing characters against type. Just because a player can't on the fly articulate a clever ruse doesn't mean their character shouldn't be able to. I don't mind fuzzing over a few details sometimes. Give a few lines, summarize the gist of the argument, make a roll for it. But even then if the summary of the argument is X, Y and Z, and X, Y and Z wouldn't work, then I don't think it merits a roll. If people feel otherwise and want a game where you can always just turn it into a dice roll that's fine, I don't think they're playing wrong or anything. But for me, at a certain point, I'm probably just not going to play with someone who can't roleplay very well, because that's just not fun for me.
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Jan 23, 2024 05:36
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