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Tendales posted:Also, they actually HIRE women to write stuff for their elf game once in a while. Gosh. Who were some of the last notable female writers, if any, for WotC? I can't think of any who have worked for them in a decade or more.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:28
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Tendales posted:Gwendolyn FM "Book of Erotic Fantasy" Kestrel? I forgot about her. Which is odd, considering she's pretty notable for a number of reasons.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:44
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Shelly Mazzanoble just proves that Wizards of the Coasts shares many of the same views about women that characters on Mad Men have. Did she even write any actual gaming materials or just some columns and a book for women to get them into D&D? It got no women into D&D.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:51
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TG is the only industry where you can associate with a neo-Nazi convicted murderer and still have a career. Varg was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the same amount as Anders Breivig, and Varg's mother and the neo-Nazis he was associated with had an actual plot to break him out of prison. He hasn't changed much either if the news stories in the last couple of years are true too. EDIT: Their plan to break him out of prison included a terrorist attack on the prison where they blew a hole in the perimeter with dynamite. It wasn't exactly a file in a cake scheme. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 03:36
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Jedit posted:Just a note on this: Vikernes got the same jail sentence as Anders Breivik because 21 years is the maximum sentence that can be given under the Norwegian penal code. So it's not that Vikernes is as bad as Breivik, it's that Breivik couldn't be punished more. Yeah, I was in no way meaning to imply that Vikernes was the same as Breivik in terms of the crimes they committed. I was more going towards the Norwegian courts feeling that Vikernes was so guilty, Vikernes claims his brutal murder was in self defense, that he was given the maximum sentence possible. Pope Guilty posted:The weirdest thing about Varg's RPG is that he's apparently into D&D 3. I would've pegged him as the groggiest AD&D player. He supposedly had a bunch of AD&D art up in his jail cell but then again he went to jail in 1994.
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Mar 24, 2015 15:20
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Pope Guilty posted:Vampire has the Daughters of Cacophony, an all-female bloodline. People whined about it and came up with the name "Sons of Discord" for male members, so eventually one of the Revised books mentioned that the Daughters had recently murdered all non-female members of the bloodline.. And oh, the crying... They were what I called a trap bloodline in high school because it usually attracted the worst players and their discipline was relatively bad. They also added in "male" Black Furies in Werewolf but they're always metis, who are naturally sterile. I guess some guys really wanted to wield a labrys and get mediocre gifts. Revised as an edition was all about male inclusion. A running trend in White Wolf books is that the all female groups all have pretty average to terrible special powers. There's no real reason to be arguing to play any of them when the other tribes had much better gifts and weren't walking gender stereotypes*. *They're almost always ethnic stereotypes. The Black Furies are a twofer because they're the tribe of Greek 90's feminist stereotypes. Evil Mastermind posted:GenCon has released a letter/statement/thingy in regards to Indiana Governor Mike Pence's support of SB101, a.k.a. the "legal discrimination against them homos" bill. This is pretty awesome and hopefully it'll get the governor and some legislators to rethink their decisions. I have a good feeling it won't but one can always hope.
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Mar 24, 2015 23:39
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I posted this in the Gencon thread but the Mayor of Indianapolis signed an executive order to protect the rights of LGBT people in Indianapolis. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/30/greg-ballard_n_6972928.htmlNuns with Guns posted:lmao quoting Shakesville as if it has any kind of legitimacy. She thinks red-heads are discriminated against and says she gets gay people because she has a gay brain. She's one of those people who writes really bad gay "romance novels" and acts like she's blazing the trail for queer people everywhere, isn't she?
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Mar 31, 2015 14:52
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Lurks With Wolves posted:The short version: Record of Lodoss War is a series of replays (and later novels and anime and everything else) based on the creators' D&D game. They tried to make a deal with TSR, TSR refused because they didn't really care about their Japanese market at the time. This lead to the Lodoss people making the RPG that eventually became Sword World to use in their games instead. Sword World is one of the biggest Japanese tabletop RPGs, and D&D has never gotten any penetration in the Japanese market ever again. Kai Tave posted:I don't know about "no penetration" exactly, as I recall there have been Japanese translations of D&D...until Next came out and WotC terminated their agreement with the folks doing the translations, stating that they planned on bringing such matters in-house. Speaking of which, did anything ever come of that? There were D&D books on the shelf in Japan about 2 years ago, maybe 3.X and definitely 4th if I'm remembering correctly. RPGs are also a more niche market in Japan than the US so it's not like they were missing out on major money or anything. It's nowhere near the insanity of when Japanese video game publishers do the opposite to the American market. Sword World is also popular because it doesn't use a D20 system. Non-d6 dice are hard to come by in Japan for the above stated reason. EDIT: I think in order to be popular in Japan, TSR would have had to get into the market the same way WEG did with TORG and Chaosium with Call of Cthulhu. There was a period in the late 80's and early 90's that Japanese fans would have latched on to anything imported over, hence why TORG has such a cult following. By the time 4th came in, there were already domestic RPGs that knew the environment RPGs existed in and catered to Japanese sensibilities so such a thing is probably doomed now. The real untapped market is the Sinosphere but it runs into the problem that the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong school systems rob people of their creativity so when they reach the age where they have the time to play, they're no longer inclined to engage in that level of improv. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 17:47
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clockworkjoe posted:http://www.tenkarstavern.com/2016/02/how-long-before-hasbro-buys-out.html?m=1 With how Wizard's runs all their online and digital products, they probably believe it's some kind of a dark magic. Hasbro doesn't even like RPG's enough to give D&D a regular, full sized dev team. I doubt they're going to buy a company just to cut out the middleman with a minor operational cost. This also assumes that the DriveThru people want to sell and I'm highly doubtful of that.
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Feb 10, 2016 13:04
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Is this one of those things that claims to be something but is made by the people who hate it to make it look bad?
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Feb 14, 2016 02:57
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This reminds me of the time the Camarilla, now Mind's Eye Society, sued White Wolf for the World of Darkness. I'm imagining this is going to turn out the same way. http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=2593 I can't find the specifics but White Wolf cleaned house because it was even more ridiculous than this lawsuit.
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Apr 22, 2016 02:09
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JerryLee posted:Wages haven't really kept pace with inflation either, have they? I'm not an economist or anything, but that's what I've always read (from progressive sources, at least). The guy literally trying to say "inflation doesn't exist" in FMguru's quote is obviously full of poo poo, but that doesn't mean that inflation has lifted all the proverbial boats equally. They haven't, productivity has gone up immensely over the last 20 years but wages haven't gone up to match for the average worker.
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May 11, 2016 13:25
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All of this discussion is kind of moot since there's been a revolution in printing and self publishing. With POD and online marketplaces existing, average people can make a quality product. This brings down prices due to production costs going way down and competition going up, bringing down prices. Kickstarter has also drastically changed pricing models too. POD has pretty much ended the great killer of RPG companies too, being hit by the unsold back stock of games all at once isn't really something that happens anymore to my knowledge to most companies. None of this applies to Palladium though because Kevin Siembieda is probably taking all that poser art and making mock ups with it in his wax machine. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:48 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 12, 2016 11:59
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Women can't understand the elegance and comedic nuance of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 
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May 20, 2016 12:23
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ADB's original agreement was through Franz Joseph, who made the Technical Manual, and then this transferred to Paramount once they realized what they had. As stated before the manual was created during a time where Star Trek was dead and merchandising was nowhere near what it is today. ADB can't even use the original cast, only certain elements of TOS and TAS like races and governments. It's kind of like a more reasonable and civil version of the Battletech and Harmony Gold rights debacle but handled much better. http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/faqs.shtml
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Jul 21, 2016 22:02
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LatwPIAT posted:Kenneth Hite, who complimented one of Zak's games or something, co-authored The Dracula Dossier. Ken Hite to my knowledge has not worked with Zak and his endorsement of Zak has been anything but professional courtesy. It was the equivalent to a book jacket line. On Ken and Robin they seemed to be nonplussed by A Red Pleasant Land. They generally think OSR isn't that great because it's 2016 and they want story games. Hite did author a Lamentations book but it pretty much came down to Raggi pays well and on time and Ken Hite is a full time game writer with no other source of personal income. Qelong was also an early book and written before Raggi leaned in on his persona.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:58
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FMguru posted:Interesting. I remember BDG going in big for Pathfinder when it first arrived (they were really surprised by how strongly it sold initially and shifted their ordering to match). The guy who owns/runs BDG is really good about aggressively following where his sales data leads and getting rid of dead stock when it stops moving. As crazy as that seems, that's a good way to run a store. You don't want to be the store that still has the remnants of D20 shovelware books and 90's treadmill supplements from publishers like White Wolf still on the shelves. It's not really that surprising for someone to proclaim that Pathfinder is done. It would be like being shocked when a 90 year old person dies and in the case of Pathfinder, one who drinks a bottle of Jack Daniels a day and smokes a pack and a half a day. Pathfinder lived a lot longer than it had any right to with the amount of books they put out.
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Aug 12, 2016 19:44
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Paizo is pretty much going with Starfinder because if they make Pathfinder 2.0, it'll be edition wars all over again. The revolution devours its own 2d8 children per round.
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Aug 12, 2016 20:24
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Sadly, Pathfinder will never be Dungeons & Dragons, and just will never have the name recognition of the latter. It's sad, because Dungeons & Dragons is half-assed in just about every way a game can be half-assed save art assets. I think for all of its clunkiness, Paizo is doing much more interesting things, while 5e is largely coasting by on its name. This is pretty true. Even if it's an uninspired game set in an uninspired setting, they're at at least working on stuff for that system and introducing new things. 5e is mostly outsourcing and shrugging their shoulders.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:16
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It would make sense if Starfinder is the test bed. Star Wars was used as a test bed by WotC when they had the license, especially Saga Edition.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:26
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Kurieg posted:From what I've gathered from the limited information I've gathered, it's a game of playing the secret awakened class of humanity in a world of societal intrigue, and the Suns sound almost exactly like Spheres. And the Art Style is screaming "Planescape" so I guess Planescape the Awakening? Alvin and the Chipmunks' Kult/Unknown Armies
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Aug 16, 2016 17:18
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Can we just have a filter that changes mentions of his name to "that guy with an awful haircut" or "that failed porn actor"?
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Aug 29, 2016 12:38
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Like 4-6 people with about an equal or larger number of freelancers at any given time? I think I've met nearly everybody who actually works for the company outside of their webmaster. I'm pretty sure their only full time staff writer is Ken Hite. He's one of the few game designers that just writes games and games fluff material for a living. Robin Laws is an editor and creative director at Stone Skin Press.
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Aug 30, 2016 04:43
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Dr. Clockwork posted:I get the occasional request, but I wouldn't dream of bringing in comics at this point in time. Diamond is an absolutely awful company from what everyone says, and comics requires a lot of process and maintenance to pull off. I'd rather just sling cards and board games. You pretty much have to sell off your unsold stock, offline or online, within a month to stay on top and for your stock to retain its value. Having a big back catalog is a bad idea, especially today with Marvel Unlimited, and you want to be as lean as possible.
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Dec 17, 2016 22:08
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SunAndSpring posted:Imagine being a person so loving lame that you send death threats to protect the honor of a 40 year old who has a side cut and makes terrible art This is probably one of the saddest things I've read in last week. I didn't realize Zak was 40 and that just makes everything about him even worse.
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Feb 19, 2017 07:02
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Lightning Lord posted:I have pretty western tastes too, but seeing Glorantha depicted in a style similar to the color pages at the beginning of a Berserk collection is pretty great I want all of those along with the Battletech books/boxes that cost $80+. Lightning Lord posted:It's cool to see a Japanese nerd who loves Western stuff, helps alleviate my 16 year old self's inferiority complex, when wild otaku told me that all of Japan universally hated American nerdery and comics. Had they even seen the Daicon videos? Shameful.
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Apr 15, 2017 02:06
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fez_machine posted:You can play non-western style Mages, yes. But Tibet canonically does not exist nor does anything south of the equator. The setting is the world according to an educated European/near Eastern mystic, so it operates in ways the ME perspective would understand the world as operating, and large parts of our world just do not exist, as contact between East and West was so constrained. Do they even have a Chinese magical tradition in Ars? The farthest East they go with Tribunals is Byzantium unless they added some Asia stuff recently. I've only ever seen the Middle Eastern and African stuff.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:43
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Kestral posted:A Ken Hite-led V:tM has the potential to be incredible, insofar as you can really do anything new with Vampire. Alright Onyx Path, color me cautiously interested in the full release, but after the fiasco of the Exalted Kickstarter, I think I'll pass on backing this one. It's not Onyx Path, it's Paradox's White Wolf subsidiary.
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May 12, 2017 18:37
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Pope Guilty posted:I started reading Designers and Dragons based on seeing it mentioned here and it's very good. About to the death and sale of TSR. They're great books, although dry at times. A buddy of mine complained they required too much knowledge for a casual player of RPG's, he is one, but he said they were entertaining nonetheless.
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May 14, 2017 03:46
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Dr. Quarex posted:Are divides in anime fandom that deep, though (not that you, specifically, are saying they are)? I have seen some pretty angry exchanges over the merits of CRPGs versus JRPGs, though I think they get less heated the farther we get from Final Fantasy VII's release. In Japan there's been bomb threats over a basketball anime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuroko%27s_Basketball#Controversies
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Jul 12, 2017 22:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:A big part of RPGs is the buy-in they require is often far higher than anything short of videogames, so when you say "actually this game is really flawed" often you're saying it to somebody with hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours sunk into it. The strengths and weaknesses don't matter with that level fo buy-in. I was standing in line at GenCon about a week ago and talking to somebody who described his walls of Pathfinder / d20 product. Not, like, one bookcase, one, wall. Many bookcases, multiple walls. And here I am, with my Palladium collection being my biggest at two shelves, and most of that is at the bargain prices you can find those books at. It hurts my head to even think about, and I sold off over $1000 in d20 product several years ago. Trying to argue the merits of Pathfinder is like trying to tell my friend's parents that, y'know, ten cats was enough. They just don't care about the smell anymore. There's no critical argument to be had. Paizo, despite the poo poo they get for being uninspired and having terrible mechanics for terrible reasons, knows how to market and monetize this hobby in a way few companies even scratched at before. They also come out with enough stuff and market themselves in just the right way that they get the hook in.
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Aug 24, 2017 00:06
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Lemon-Lime posted:That sucks. Didn't they just launch a new Kickstarter earlier this month, too? It was just canceled. I could have sworn they were at Gencon too but that might have just been a vendor selling their stuff. They don't show up on the map so I'm probably sure that was the case.
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Aug 25, 2017 17:11
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If I were going to run Shadowrun -- and this would be a big project and I probably wouldn't really be up to it, to be honest -- I'd run it as a hack of Unknown Armies. I would run it in a hack of Fragged Empire, which is the popular thing right now, but I feel it's the best system for modern to future combat game like that. As much as I love Shadowrun, it was probably my favorite game as a teenager, it's not a game I would bring to the table anymore in its current form. It needs a lot of work and level of system knowledge and mastery that I don't want to commit to. There's also a lot of problematic stuff in the metaplot that is super 90's but not really acceptable today. Shadowrun tonally kind of throws off the whole cyberpunk theme with magic in my eyes. Cyberpunk is all about using technology to overcome adversity and your oppressors but you can have magic in this world and it's way more powerful than cybernetics. Why would you literally destroy your soul to get a robot arm when you can just train to be a magical martial artist? Adepts can still improve while a Street Samurai has to save up enough nu yen to buy a slightly better arm that may or may not take more of their soul. It's never sold the benefits of the technology it holds up as being amazing and more often than not, outside of nearly identical weapon blocks, it's all stuff that's a dead end relative to other options. As others have stated too, there's a large amount of tonal dissonance in Shadowrun and legacy bullshit that doesn't really have a good reason to be there anymore as it is, such as the Matrix. This is mostly because the writers are constantly at odds with making a believable mundane and technological future where magic exists and making the diehard fans happy. They really should be rebooting the game every edition but they're sticking with the 90's as gently caress, each edition advances the metaplot model, and it's not really keeping pace with the world we live in today. For more recent stuff, Catalyst stopped paying their freelance writers and had to pressgang in Battletech people, although that might not be the case anymore, and it really shows.
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Aug 31, 2017 04:39
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think that's putting much too optimistic a spin on traditional cyberpunk. I'm thinking of something like Dogfight. It's one of the earliest cyberpunk stories -- if I remember correctly it even predates Neuromancer -- and it's really not about heroically overcoming oppression; it's about a lowlife criminal obsessed with winning a pointless conflict, who's willing to torture the only person in his life more vulnerable than he is to do it. I probably should have clarified, the character is not overcoming them for some greater good. It's all about accomplishing what you want through technology by overcoming those things to meet your personal goals. Most cyberpunk characters, as you stated, are very selfish and amoral.
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Aug 31, 2017 04:56
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Kai Tave posted:Because you can't "just train" to be a magical martial artist? Magic in Shadowrun isn't something you can just go take night classes for in your spare time, it's an innate gift some tiny fraction of the population possesses and then of that fraction only an even smaller fraction is a full fledged mage/shaman/whatever while everyone else is some sort of less diverse magical specialist. This is something I actually forgot about.  I was mostly looking at it from the angle of a player making a player character, which is as usually the 1% of the population.
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Aug 31, 2017 14:12
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Liquid Communism posted:Recall that this kind of behavior in The Camarilla (White Wolf's LARP fanclub) is a huge part of why CCP first took it over entirely, then divested themselves of it and denied the new org access to even the name. It was pretty much that from what I understand and that they didn't want to be bothered. CCP was very hands off and honestly just wanted the IP. The whole reason the Camarilla was owned by White Wolf in the first place was because the Camarilla tried to sue White Wolf and unsurprisingly lost. It was originally loosely affiliated with White Wolf and White Wolf had to reign them in after that incident.
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Oct 15, 2017 01:36
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That Old Tree posted:The James Ward thing is sadly unsurprising. (Not specifically coming from him, cuz I don't know him, but just the general shittiness of responses to sexual harassment.) What can they add to enabling sexual harassment and alcoholism to make it a hat trick? gradenko_2000 posted:in tangentially related news, it looks like The Escapist is well on its way to getting shuttered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roRQ2mNwMMQ They've been treading water for a while so it's not that surprising.
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Oct 22, 2017 16:16
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Kai Tave posted:^^^Uh woah, well that escalated quickly. If they make a Designer's & Dragons for the aughts, it's going to be a crazy read.
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Oct 23, 2017 03:41
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Traveller posted:I'm looking forward* to the newfound love and respect for Beast in the usual lovely tradgame places. I don't think anyone really liked Beast, not even the creators once it was all said and done.
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Oct 26, 2017 03:49
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I like how edgy assholes feel like they're being progressive and accommodating by telling people they don't give a gently caress about who someone is but heavily implies that if your identity crosses a line, you're gone. This man is the nerd social fallacy made flesh too. "Frank and Bill are gamers. Unless I see it, it doesn't exist and they're free to play in OUR safe space, the GAMER space."
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Nov 6, 2017 01:08
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