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sebmojo posted:1e, weirdly, it's the one that got this best, you need absolute shitloads of money to level with a bonkers arbitrary dm multiplier based on 'how well you played your class'. We just ignored those rules when we played tho. There were very good alternative rules for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at one point (in some adventure path about playing as treasure hunters) where the majority of your experience was gained by blowing your acquired loot on booze and parties and fancy clothes and stuff. You could also spend it on actual gear, but you didn't get the xp for it.
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Nov 24, 2019 02:53
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fool_of_sound posted:There were very good alternative rules for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at one point (in some adventure path about playing as treasure hunters) where the majority of your experience was gained by blowing your acquired loot on booze and parties and fancy clothes and stuff. You could also spend it on actual gear, but you didn't get the xp for it. One of the classic WHFRPG adventures (I think it is "Death on the Reik") has a section where the party get a barge and have to ferry cargo. But it ends up being so profitable that most parties get stuck just doing that and earning serious bank. The adventure path has rules written for the barge getting burnt out by bad guys which makes the adventures go on a John Wick style rampage. The best story I heard was about one player who was a minor noble. And as such he had to spend X gold a week on parties to maintain his social standing. And he had gotten addicted to stat boosting drugs so that was another expense. And he could just about afford all this, so long as the barge kept running. When the adventure path burnt down the barge this guy went bankrupt and had to go into rehab. Naturally like all nobles, he blamed the scenario writer and not himself for his decisions.
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Nov 24, 2019 11:46
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One of the more interesting tabletop sessions I ever played was run by, of all people, this real scumbag I used to know. The hook, as it were, was that our little party of 2nd-level newbies just lucked into a huge windfall of gold, and most of the game was about the logistics of actually doing something with it. Just transport was an issue, and this was 2nd edition, so this was easily a ton of metal we were trying to haul around. The campaign ended up falling apart after the DM got arrested in the middle of a session for giving booze to a minor (some cop noticed him sharing a bottle with a 17-year-old girl out on the street during a smoke break), but it was interesting nonetheless.
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Nov 24, 2019 18:53
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The Question IRL posted:One of the classic WHFRPG adventures (I think it is "Death on the Reik") has a section where the party get a barge and have to ferry cargo. James Wallis ruined my characters life (by sinking my barge) YES, I SANK YOUR FUCKIN BARGE sebmojo fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Nov 24, 2019 |
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Nov 24, 2019 20:52
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On an unrelated note: knights of the dinner table was the poo poo.
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Nov 24, 2019 21:21
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Eifert Posting posted:On an unrelated note: knights of the dinner table was the poo poo. They're still publishing it, as far as I know. My FLGS still stocks it. 
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Nov 24, 2019 22:14
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I loved KODT twenty years ago but I stopped reading it and now the backlog is so loving deep that I can't imagine dropping the scratch to catch up.
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Nov 25, 2019 02:04
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Pope Guilty posted:I loved KODT twenty years ago but I stopped reading it and now the backlog is so loving deep that I can't imagine dropping the scratch to catch up. Does it actually have a story? I read it 20 years ago and it was just "dorky guys playing D&D".
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Nov 25, 2019 07:12
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I was picking up the PDF collections for a while - they mostly lost me with an incredibly long and boring MMO digression and then bringing in a Lorraine Williams expy to explain how D&D4e was bad because women like it.  this is 2017
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Nov 25, 2019 09:30
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xiw posted:
My god, it's exactly the same as it was back in 2000.
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Nov 25, 2019 09:44
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xiw posted:I was picking up the PDF collections for a while - they mostly lost me with an incredibly long and boring MMO digression and then bringing in a Lorraine Williams expy to explain how D&D4e was bad because women like it.
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Nov 25, 2019 09:44
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Gynovore posted:Does it actually have a story? I read it 20 years ago and it was just "dorky guys playing D&D". Sorta kinda. I get the feeling that the primary author, Jolly Blackburn, got sick of how one-note it was early on and made some moves to flesh out the central cast. It's not exactly deep lore, but there are a few arcs that stretch through multiple issues of the comic and which have an effect on later stories. Some have to do with what's happening in-game; others deal with developments in the players' personal lives, or those of the other players in their area. I kinda fell out with it a while back when it became obvious that Brian was never going to catch payback for the poo poo he got up to. In a story where tabletop gaming is explicitly treated like it's serious business, and any rule-breaking can be greeted with actual (slapstick) violence, Brian is a serious hypocrite and occasional meta-gamer. The series has been hinting more and more that he's probably not well as a person (IIRC, there are indications that his childhood sucked), but I think the author considers Brian to be lovably flawed instead of just obnoxious.
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Nov 25, 2019 12:33
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Yeah like there was a slow burn arc with the bald guy moving out of his parents house, getting a job that wasn't his dad's company, becoming his own man.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:00
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oobey posted:Why even bother with country lines and other geographical nonsense? The price of an object is determined by how much a buyer is willing to pay for it, full stop.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:15
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xiw posted:I was picking up the PDF collections for a while - they mostly lost me with an incredibly long and boring MMO digression and then bringing in a Lorraine Williams expy to explain how D&D4e was bad because women like it. I thought this was the ark where their bag of holding rebelled from like the late 90s until I was halfway through it.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:16
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I think that rock is where they had a giant battle with Pit Bulls(they bought thousands of untrained pitbulls for 20cp and high availability because the equipment chart had a typo) and it's been cursed for like 20 years and every once in a while they are stupid enough to go back and try to get their old characters equipment I remember the anti 4e arc but I remember it being a little more fair. The executive Lorraine Williams analogue didn't have a connection with the player base but also the grognards of the strip were being unreasonable and the old school designers were like retreating into fetal position when they were told women player characters had to have the same stats as men, and Gary Jackson was pretty consistently shown to be a really comically lovely dad and husband. It definitely came down on the side of grognards in the end but that's the audience and true to the characters. John Wick of Dogs fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 14:23
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xiw posted:I was picking up the PDF collections for a while - they mostly lost me with an incredibly long and boring MMO digression and then bringing in a Lorraine Williams expy to explain how D&D4e was bad because women like it. Is that how that reads, I'm confused.
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Nov 25, 2019 15:24
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Top to bottom, left to right. But sometimes the text is barely above another one but still goes first. You get used to it after a while
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Nov 25, 2019 15:41
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I had a soft spot for Knights of the Dinner Table from when it ran in Dragon as a one-page strip but I could never get into whole issues of it. I think for me the static but really dense structure of it works best in pretty small doses.
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Nov 25, 2019 15:55
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The magazine itself has pretty good board game reviews and dm adventure design articles and what not to go in between the comics, and flitted back between a couple different groups. I say this in the past tense as if it isn't still coming out. I think my favorite arc from it is the FLGS(friendly local game store) owner goes to prison for some reason and is so thirsty for DnD he carves dice out of soap and teaches his cell mates to play. One of them became a regular character when he got out playing a Cleric when he's not running with his biker gang often being very confused but well intentioned. The other started hiring local players for consultant work on his "modem campaign" to help him plan in-game heists except for was actually showing them blueprints of real buildings and doing real heists. All of this kind of charming by the very limited amount of pictures and poses the author can draw.
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Nov 25, 2019 16:03
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xiw posted:I was picking up the PDF collections for a while - they mostly lost me with an incredibly long and boring MMO digression and then bringing in a Lorraine Williams expy to explain how D&D4e was bad because women like it. I don't really see how this strip is saying that 4e is bad because women like it.
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Nov 25, 2019 17:25
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Taciturn Tactician posted:I don't really see how this strip is saying that 4e is bad because women like it. Yeah I have no idea where that implication is. Like, squinting my eyes, I see that there is a woman player there, who is having a light hearted discussion with the dude, who is being a melodramatic wetblanket; describing circumstances that kiiiiiinda feel like would make sense as an MMO; and that she wants to take a look could maybe be construed as women liking 4e? But I feel like I'm missing something. Like the wet blanket seems to be complaining they'll all die again if they go, not that the whole adventure is bad.
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Nov 25, 2019 17:33
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Maybe there's missing context?
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Nov 25, 2019 17:59
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Holy poo poo do I cringe at KotDT now when I read it.
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Nov 25, 2019 18:12
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yeah I have no idea where that implication is. I think that strip is not supposed to be illustrating the anti women stuff, just the stale formula. That could be from literally any year from 2000 to now it's so generic, I think that's what the op was saying with that strip
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Nov 25, 2019 18:19
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They already did a Lorraine Williams plot back in the day where the Gary Gygax/Steve Jackson stand-in fakes his death to get out of his gambling debts and his ex-wife (who owns a very successful mass-market paperback publisher and doesn't in any sense understand RPGs or what the TSR/SJG/WotC stand-in does) takes over the company as their son's trustee and basically AD&D 2E's up the place.
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Nov 25, 2019 18:26
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Back when I read KoDT, the whole arc with Gary Jackson's ex-wife Heidi struck me as strange, but I didn't learn about Lorraine Williams until years later. It's really an arc that depends on the reader having some knowledge of and appreciation for how the sausage is made, so to speak, in tabletop circles. You've also got to have an idea of just how feckless Gary Jackson actually is (there's a running gag in the first few years about how his pre-teen son has apparently written a lot of material for the games), and how the whole company is explicitly held up by a handful of obsessed lunatics. It's an interesting parody because it's coming from a weird viewpoint. KoDT is very rarely interested in making its primary characters' obsessions look admirable; everyone in it is basically suffering in some low-key way because of their time spent with the game, and many of the antagonists are characterized by their antipathy towards it. Most of what Heidi wants to do is fairly sensible modern business moves, but since it takes a while before Heidi is actually onstage herself, you just get it all filtered through the grognard lifers who make up the executive board, all of whom come off like they really should've done something else with their lives decades ago.
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Nov 25, 2019 20:16
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Oh yeah Sara is the closest thing to a healthy, well-adjusted person in the strip (maybe Sheila?) and even she's not perfect. Meanwhile Gary Jackson is a huge rear end in a top hat who's been known to force employees to roll 2d6 to determine by what percentage to dock their pay and got a teenager to work free as Hard Eight's customer service department for years by convincing him it was a LARP. Their playtesting is done by volunteers who think they're at a gaming summer camp and occasionally revolt when mistreated or angry at rules changes. It's a world where RPGs are way, way more Serious Business and yet they're still the province of utter turbonerds and scumbags at every level.
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Nov 25, 2019 21:14
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Most of the characters are completely broken people, but completely broken people that if you play DnD you have personally known at some point and can empathize or laugh with or at.
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Nov 25, 2019 21:29
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Yup that's the appeal.
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Nov 25, 2019 23:35
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Pope Guilty posted:Oh yeah Sara is the closest thing to a healthy, well-adjusted person in the strip (maybe Sheila?) and even she's not perfect. What's genuinely weird is that if it's not Sara, it's Dave. He rarely has anything close to center stage, but he's got a reasonably healthy relationship with his family, he'll blow off game stuff to do other things like go see basketball, and it's easy to see him going on to be a productive adult. It's already way too late for Bob and BA, Brian never had a chance, and even Sara is as obsessed with the game as Brian but slightly more common-sense about it. The last time I read the book, Sheila was the kind of table poison who thinks she can routinely backstab everyone else without it causing problems outside the game. She's got a vicious streak that she's sublimating into her characters. In the real world, this kind of player ends up going into online RP forums because every actual game within her area code wouldn't have her.
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Nov 26, 2019 00:31
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I sure hope Rich is OK.
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Nov 26, 2019 01:07
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Wait am I thinking of Sheila or Patty? Which one was on the defending end of the tournament crossover invasion scam? Jesus, it's been a long time.
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Nov 26, 2019 01:40
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The recurring bit where there underlings spite them is definitely the high point. The bag wars owned.
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Nov 26, 2019 02:19
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Pope Guilty posted:Wait am I thinking of Sheila or Patty? Which one was on the defending end of the tournament crossover invasion scam? Jesus, it's been a long time. Sheila was the one who was in on the character assassination thing; the conclusion to that arc is one of the few KoDTs I have in hard copy here. Patty is the kindergarten teacher who runs her own group and has a thing for Dave.
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Nov 26, 2019 02:28
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Wanderer posted:In the real world, this kind of player ends up going into online RP forums because every actual game within her area code wouldn't have her. Well this clarifies something about the RP forums I used to visit and mod all those years ago.
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Nov 26, 2019 02:34
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ultrafilter posted:I sure hope Rich is OK. The book starts shipping on the 1st of December, no? We must be like one strip from hiatus.
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Nov 26, 2019 10:27
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Wanderer posted:Sheila was the one who was in on the character assassination thing; the conclusion to that arc is one of the few KoDTs I have in hard copy here. Patty is the kindergarten teacher who runs her own group and has a thing for Dave. Right, drat, sorry. Now I'm getting nostalgic; I should see if I still have my old hard copies.
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Nov 26, 2019 16:53
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As someone who has kept up with KODT there are a few things worth mentioning. Blackburn has talked about his regrets regarding the strip on several occasions, most notably how he feels about portraying abusive and bullying behavior at the table in a positive way and has made attempts to change it. This was even part of a storyline when the Black Hands caught flak during livestreams for how they treated each other. There have also been attempts made to change Brian, B.A, and Bob. There was a long-running storyline about how Brian was screwing over Bob, which almost cost him his relationship with Shiela. The end result is Brian slowly becoming a less selfish person (with Sara's help) and it seems to be sticking, while Bob made efforts to fix his relationship and put it ahead of the game. There has also been a long-running 'will they won't they story' between B.A. and Patty which has seen him try to become more of a functioning adult, even if it is just to impress her. KODT and its characters were stale for a long time, but there has been an attempt to change and grow over the past few years. The current storyline involving Sara as the DM for a sci-fi campaign has also been a refreshing change of pace. Trying to read the entire series is a daunting prospect (I think it has been going for almost 30 years now) but KODT has definitely tried to shake things up in recent years.
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Nov 26, 2019 16:56
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Rich Status: OK! http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1188.html Nice denouement strip here. I love Belkar actually giving a poo poo about something for once.
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Nov 26, 2019 19:31
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