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Help! I'm a gm who doesn't know how to describe a ghoul, if only there was some boxed text i could read. Complete roleplaying game, my rear end. Okay, okay, ecology fluff is useful sometimes, I'll give you that. My favorite recent grognardery is the spat of people on ENWorld who think that the Martial powersource either needs to be nerfed for realism, or else Wizards should just admit, drat it that Martial actually is magic, since real people couldn't do that stuff. SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Jul 10, 2009 |
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Jul 10, 2009 14:26
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That was pretty funny to see him being honest about his writing style. "Oh, maybe I should write rules that I would actually use if I were GMing this."
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Jul 16, 2009 17:42
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I see your point, but I have to weight it against "Oh god if I don't nail it down to the least possibly offensive option, players will make changeling fetuspults out of their PCs" or something.
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Aug 1, 2009 17:57
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Yeah, there really is. I get irritated as gently caress with the idea that the stuff in the book is a REAL and totally accurate description of a world that's totally loving fictional anyway, but you know how gamers are, lots of them aren't comfortable with the reality that they're making poo poo up using some guidelines, they want those rules to be real. And to encompass every possible option, even if doing so makes the material overspecific and less useful than "Here's a thing you should decide for your group, because we can't read your minds." So I'm just guessing that Baker was like, okay, changelings can have kids, so they have sex, that shouldn't need explanation, but how do I write it up to minimize the interpretation of them as something out of a hentai? Yeah, it's dumb to have to discuss it at all if you ask me, no argument there. But D&D boards are full of poo poo about how, say, the 4e Monster Manual sucks because it only tells you what the combat stats are for an orc, how am I supposed to figure out what their lairs are like without a full writeup of their biology and mating patterns. No I can't just make it up I have standards!!! SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Aug 1, 2009 |
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Aug 1, 2009 21:35
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Another grognardy favorite that I wish I could find the original for: Enworld had a huge slapfight of a thread a while back about how minions with 1 HP are unrealistic, because as DM I have to take into account the fact that one of those dudes might have fallen or gotten scratched by some briars, so with only 1 HP he wouldn't even make it to the fight. They got really mad when someone suggested that the drat monster was only there in the first place because he, the DM, made it up. It eventually turned into some big argument about how even if it didn't affect play, it ruined his immersion. During prep. Striving for immersion as a DM doing campaign prep makes as much sense as putting your arm to sleep then using it to jerk off so you can pretend someone else is doing it.
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Aug 1, 2009 21:47
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Kerison posted:Could we not have the same argument we had a few pages ago in a thread about copy-pasting nerds arguing? Sorry, that's a good point. Discussing what's "missing" from 4e is totally a magnet for that stuff. There's some middle ground between 'not enough for game prep' and 'extensive discussion of reproductive organs' to be sure. 
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Aug 2, 2009 09:14
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Countblanc posted:and completely ignoring short rests In 3.x, "encounter" is defined as "that one fight between times I stared at my spellbook for 8 hours" and I'm damned if I'll change that
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Aug 3, 2009 08:17
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well yeah, in the real world, whether or not the people in a group get along and are able to honestly communicate about what they like and don't like is 90% of what you need to have a good time. Kind of like if you were getting people together to do anything else other than roleplaying. In grognard land, though, social contracts don't exist, and if people act like dicks it's either because their GM didn't take a "strong enough hand", or the rules suck.
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Aug 4, 2009 19:58
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The General posted:I'm just saying social contracts are loving useless. quote:If you don't like how someone plays don't play with them. Don't make them have no fun on your account, don't have no fun on their account. There are more than enough roleplayers that everyone can have a group they enjoy. the second part of your goddamn quote is a social contract, they ain't fancy rear end roberts rules of orders or anything
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Aug 4, 2009 22:08
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Amish Ninja posted:Ugh. What in the hell. Not only do they have 5vs1 arguments going on, but they have half the members fellating FrankTrollman. From what I can tell of that site, they don't like 4e, they don't like Pathfinder, and they don't like 3.0 or 3.5 by the book, either. They do, however, really like 3.5, as long as you replace all the classes and a fair amount of the rules with "Tome material". I finally figured out what Tome was (No, it's reeeeally not Tome of Battle): "Tome" is a gigantic houserules document FrankTrollman wrote. So he's sort of their Moses.
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Aug 5, 2009 20:32
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http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48453 has links to a bunch of Sacred Frank Tome material as forum posts. There's a PDF, but it's not in any particular order, looks like it's that stuff but mashed together.
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Aug 5, 2009 20:51
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"the pundit" is unintentionally awesome. He's a classic pipe and fedora guy and there's a simple reason the posters love him -- 90% of the posts on the board are people aping his style. They all get to be all Spider Jerusalem and he keeps them stoked. Like half the threads are started by him and they're all Drudge report style bulletins to get frothed up about.
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Aug 25, 2009 06:16
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therpgsite had a thread recently where people could discuss in depth exactly who counted as The Swine. It's pretty funny to see Sorcerer and Mouse Guard thrown in the same category as 4e and Exalted. (Exalted was in there because it's "so railroady". I got a kick out of that.) Oh, and I almost forgot, they also have a huge mad-on for about half of the D&D retroclone movement, for reasons that I couldn't untangle at all. Something about a Grognardia-Dragonsfoot slapfight or something. None of these drat forums have more than like ten or twenty regular posters so I guess it's no wonder there's so much cliquishness.
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Aug 25, 2009 20:03
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The funny thing about either loving or hating The Forge is that it pretty much all but died off in 2005 or so. Ron closed the "Theory" forums and that was probably a really good idea. Most of the discussions (and posters) went to story-games or various blogs and sites. So for the last couple of years, there's a couple of posts a week in Actual Play, half of which are Ron gently explaining "This isn't about Actual Play, you need to post it somewhere else", and the rest of the traffic is stuff like the game support subforums where Luke explains something about Mouse Guard or something. Literally nothing goes on there of importance and hasn't for several years. Those guys might as well be copying and pasting RPG.net rants about The Forge from five years ago. The thing people really hated Ron Edwards for was "D&D causes brain damage", which in the context of where he wrote that, he was talking about the same thing as this thread. "D&D makes grognards that believe stupid poo poo". So it's kinda hard to get worked up about. Counterpoint: The Forge circa 2005 produced so many people making GBS threads up every other forum out there with "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT GNS" did provide a pretty good reason to hate the place, I have to admit. SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Aug 26, 2009 |
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Aug 26, 2009 20:13
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Also, tangency. RPGNet's Star Chamber, where the pro posters hang out and talk about important non-gaming stuff. Their lower-quality GBS copy is their cool kids club, just let that sink in. SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Aug 28, 2009 |
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Aug 28, 2009 14:55
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RagnarokAngel posted:No seriously what the gently caress? Yeah, really, it'd be a lot more realistic to roll 1d4 for flaccid length and then +d8 or something while erect.
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Sep 22, 2009 17:22
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Gotta jump in here purely for the Holly Lisle-chat. She definately counts as grognard -- she's from my hometown, and I picked up a copy of her first book and got it autographed. She put a unique in-world saying from some fake culture or another in the book. Years later I checked our local used bookstore and found several of these, all with their own precious little piece of lore that had just about nothing to do with the book itself. I figure coming up with a dozen made up fantasy folksy sayings is a pretty good indicator that her Wannabe Tolkien level was off the charts. I tried to read the drat thing but when an innocent farmboy has his parents murdered and finds out he has MAGICK POWERS in the first twenty pages I said gently caress it.
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May 11, 2010 20:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:If you can find it, the thread where RPGPundit (a.k.a. "Nisarg") got banned/banned himself/took his ball and went home from RPGNet was pretty goddamn classic. Oh, hey, I remember that thread. I was the one who registered the "Nisarg" account, the very moment someone mentioned it would lock him out from the name he liked using. I had forgotten how pissed off he got about it. it's me, i'm the vast Forge-wing conspiracy
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May 18, 2010 14:38
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The Swedish Jeepform LARP stuff is more structured improv theater workshop and not so much dressing up like a wizard. You can find English translations of some of their scenarios around on the web without too much trouble. The ones I've seen are mostly modern day, like I remember a small scenario involving a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father, the mechanics involved poo poo escalating when the level of beer in the bottle got below a mark on the side. Avant garde poo poo, mostly. Sure, they're very much up their own rear end about it as far as the process (Jeepform doesn't really have a definition, it's kind of "we know it when we see it"), but to an outsider that's totally true about just about any roleplayers.
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Jun 7, 2010 16:33
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Turing sex machine posted:
He did get a chuckle out of me when I saw him get to "Based on my assumptions, there would be 2500+ new spells invented every year", realized there was no way anyone wouldn't laugh at that, and started chopping away at it. But my favorite is the unstated assumption that divine casters do exactly as much spell research as arcane casters. "Hey Bob, I just made up a brand new prayer for -- " *gets stoned to death"
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Jun 8, 2010 15:24
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Hey, it's totally fine if somebody's like "I hate Wushu", but it does have an actual use. As far as I can tell, it's just "Break people forcibly of playing entirely in the mechanics, and actually loving have their characters do poo poo and describe it all cool-like." It's like if someone took the stunting rules from Exalted and made that the primary and only game mechanic. I prefer FATE because it includes that within a mechanical framework that you can actually do poo poo with, but there is an audience for Wushu precisely because it's a system that isn't really a system. Yes, most people posting in this thread could just freeform RP instead if that's what they were going for. If you're comfortable with the thought of freeforming, Wushu's probably not up your alley by definition. Besides, the drat game's like ten pages long, and free, not like it needs to cure cancer or anything. edit: hey, if it makes you feel better, Wushu's hosting site is gone and the only copies I can find on Google point to like Megaupload links or something, so it's basically disappeared anyway. SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jun 25, 2010 |
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Jun 25, 2010 21:02
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For reasons I won't get into, a couple years back we had a woman join our game group for few months who was a triple threat: - self-diagnosed Aspbergers' - proud grognard - "her soul contained a wolf spirit" The last one only came up in a conversation where people were talking about what forums they hang out on. I mentioned SA, she mentioned her board "where people who feel particular affinity to other creatures, like in a shamanistic way" hung out, and how MY forum had attacked and marginalized them and so by the communitive property I was a big meanie. Then it wasn't mentioned again, except for the fact that she pitched a half-human,half-animal character for EVERY game we proposed. She would pick up roadkill deer and butcher them in her bathtub. She brought deer tartare to a session one time. I'll have to write up the short campaign she GMed in the Worst Experiences thread sometime. It was a perfect storm of freeform and grognard -- you told her what you were doing, rolled d100, and she told you how it went horribly wrong. We ended up making it fun but without help from her. (Basically, that kind of GMing doesn't work if you declare only actions that will be boring if they succeed, and interesting if they fail. We failed our way to winning.) Fortunately the EXTREMELY VALUED MEMBER of our group who was dating her eventually came to his senses. And at the time, the whole thing was just so loving weird, we went with it just to see how deep the rabbit hole went. So, anyway, yeah, that's why I feel comfortable that my loathing of furries and otherkind is a healthy, well-reasoned one. SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jul 8, 2010 |
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Jul 8, 2010 21:35
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ahahahahha I never realized you could choose to be black.
SweeneyTodd fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jul 8, 2010 |
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Jul 8, 2010 22:51
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Dominion posted:There's tons of plot, you just happen to be doing the random sidequests first. Seriously, that's about 30 minutes plot-wise into the game. I'd argue it's a design flaw that they let you go "Welp, do whatever you want, only all the more interesting things are going to stay unlocked until you go back to finish the tutorial." The game's built so that you should do all of Bonnie's Ranch first, but you don't have to, and hell, they send you into Armadillo very early on without explicitly saying "you need to get your rear end back to the ranch ASAP." it's me, i'm the RDR grognard 
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Jul 15, 2010 21:10
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I broke down and googled "soarwood", it's used to make flying ships or something. So I think the whole "replacing it with iron" thing is even more what the fuckery than it seems at first. Somebody wants to tell their player "no" but needed bad math to justify why they can't build a flying ship out of iron, that is a fresh slice o' grognard, though.
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Jul 23, 2010 20:38
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The best Pool of Radiance version I played was, oddly enough, a NWN2 module. I didn't enjoy NWN2 at all but it was just a very faithful port of the Gold Box game. It was weird, it just clicked (and was probably the only NWN2 mod I ever played all the way through).
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Aug 4, 2010 07:04
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Doc Hawkins posted:That is one incredibly broad brush you've painting with there. {indie-games fistbump}
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Aug 11, 2010 06:22
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Doc Hawkins posted:They should have let the Broadsword skill default to History Channel skill at -2.
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Aug 12, 2010 06:19
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