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jivjov posted:Y'know what, I'm just dropping this here. It's obvious that nobody here actually wants to have a civil discussion on the topic. Its all insane ad hominem all the way down. I really wanted to try to hash something out here, maybe talk about the importance of being open and up front with your backers, or perhaps organizing a campaign to convince Kickstarter to improve their survey utilities so project creators wouldn't have to risk alienating those who don't want to use third party sites. It's not that no one wants to have a civilised conversation. It's that your quixotic crusade is being conducted in such a way that you don't appear able to have one. Almost all the kickstarters I've backed have either had simple rewards with no add-ons or have done an end-run round Kickstarter's system because it is crap. And I trust Evil Hat much further than I do Amazon.
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Jul 1, 2013 09:20
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I suggested to one Indy Kickstarter and might as well suggest here that for books the international option could use a POD service like Lulu to cut the shipping costs to a minimum - print and ship from within the country. (I'm even considering it myself for a project I'm vaguely thinking of; has anyone done a walkthrough of what Kickstarter involves?)
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Jul 11, 2013 13:08
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Bieeardo posted:Big, big problem with this is that while you'll arguably save money on shipping, print-on-demand costs will usually eat those savings and come back for seconds, especially if you're dealing with things to be printed on nice stock or in colour. Yeah, colour is pretty huge. But a 300 page perfect bound paperback costs $10 to print from Lulu and from memory about $5 to ship. Or less than the shipping costs from the US come to alone. And if you use Amazon as publisher/distributor, using their shipping prices again you can get a $10 paperback quite happily. When shipping costs of the order of $20 unless you do it locally I can only consider this a win.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:13
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Moving across here as suggested by Winson.jivjov posted:I mean, the vast majority of tabletop RPGs focus on theft (if you want to define dungeon plundering as such) and murder. Atrocious acts are nothing new to tabletop gaming. This simply isn't true. If they are coming at you with sword in hand and they drew first it isn't murder. Killing, yes. But not murder. (If they are walking down the street with pockets full of skittles and iced tea it still isn't murder... but that is for another thread). Killing, yes. Murder is a legal term - and when two armed sides join battle with weapons in hand, both having set out for a confrontation there are a lot of things you can call it. As for the vast majorities of tabletop RPGs focussing on dungeon plundering, I count oD&D, B/X D&D, 1e AD&D, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeon World, Torchbearer, 1e Gamma World, and a few OSR games. And that's about it. 2e certainly doesn't. 3e gave up in short order. 4e the most loathed modules are the ones where they tried (like Keep on the Shadowfell and Pyramid of Shadows). White Wolf games don't. The very early tabletop RPGs might have been about looting dungeons. But we haven't been there since the 1980s. jivjov posted:Look at something like Caracosa; it has descriptions of rituals that involve rape and human sacrifice, but its presented as "guys, this is seriously bad poo poo" rather than "check out this cool poo poo you can do". From what little I remember of Caracosa (before I decided that it was not a book to be put down lightly - it was one to be flung away with great force) Caracosa's disapproval is presented in the manner of the anti-gay preacher whose descriptions are ... graphic, detailed, and intense. And Caracosa then gives you the option to play as a PC spellcaster, using all that stuff. Now please stop drawing false equivalencies to defend the Storygame equivalent of FATAL.
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Aug 6, 2013 13:35
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Jimbozig posted:Rape is even more fun-killing... you can expect people to sympathize with the victim in all cases Would that this were true. Many people will sympathise with the victim. A depressing number will call her (or much more rarely him) a liar. And the Steubenville victim received death threats. (By teenage girls as it happens). quote:Some people honestly want to explore issues and trauma and experience strong negative emotions while gaming, and while I don't, I think it's cool that they do. But I don't think this sword-rape thing is for them. It's not a serious examination of rape and its effects. It just looks lovely. Indeed. This isn't understanding the weaker side as in Steal Away Jordan or even trying to explain wtf was going on as in Dog Eat Dog. What it appears to be is cheerleading for the rapists. I wasn't joking when I called it the FATAL of storygames. I doubt that the mechanics are as lovely as FATAL's. I doubt it was put together by a bunch of sperglords who would come up with stats of 4d100/2-1 (or whatever it was). But it's exactly the same utterly evil centre of being rapist cheerleaders, just with fewer poo poo sculptures piled on top.
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Aug 6, 2013 16:21
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Captain Foo posted:I would like to suggest a course of action for anyone who thinks playing rape is a good thing, it is "gently caress off forever" Depends what you mean by playing. Consenting adults with a kink can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned as long as it's safe, sane, and consensual, and real people do have rape fetishes. On the other hand I wasn't aware that that kickstarter was marketed as fetish porn or that kickstarter would accept fetish porn. Which moves it right out of the consensual territory and into Whizzard territory. At that point I agree that it can gently caress off forever.
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Aug 6, 2013 16:53
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Rulebook Heavily posted:One of them has "welfare queens" in the title. I'm going to defend that one - or would if it had something other than Welfare Queens in the title. Something like "Slumming It" or "Common People" or even for meta RPG commentary "Star of the Morning". It's a game about people who have it all and who dive into unnecessary grind and challenges because too easy a life is boring. And they can leave at any time. Or at least that's the alternate universe version where it's actually interesting and the mechanical focus is on the game of chicken to see how long the rich tourists last rather than instilling "learned helplessness" and getting the "welfare avatars" to do things they said "I will never do (Again)". So yeah, on thinking about it although I saw a genuinely good idea there it's a terrible game where the central premise is that poor people are there because they want to be and literally gain confidence from doing bad things they said they would never do. Yes, it is as bad as it looks. And I think the average game of Monsterhearts has more alienation and disenfranchisement than any of these games. And much more interesting things to say about them.
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Aug 8, 2013 18:06
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Another is about Jews being monsters, and it unironically uses the term "blood libel". Which one? I didn't spot that bit of  on a quick scan through.
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Aug 9, 2013 01:24
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So RPG.net shut down the thread on Misery Toruism on the grounds that the whole thing was a deliberate troll. Have we evidence of this?
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Aug 9, 2013 12:37
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Mikan posted:What the hell, you didn't you back Inverse World? Out of curiosity is there a way to now retroactively back Inverse World. I was on the fence at the time.
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Aug 9, 2013 22:49
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Gau posted:Likewise, I generally look down on people who engage or even like the Foglios, because they are pretty awful people. What's wrong with the Foglios? All I know about them is from their online comics. (Although Phil and Dixie was often ... unimpressive to say the least).
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Aug 10, 2013 00:37
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JerryLee posted:I can understand why the publisher would sigh, hold their nose and go to press/molding/whatever even after an artist or sculptor takes a poo poo all over the job description, but how does the artist still have a job afterwards? Good, fast, cheap. Pick two - and cheap is a given for small companies. If the artist is reliable and cheap that's enough.
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Aug 16, 2013 14:43
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I like the probably-untrue story that militaries assess new gear in part by giving it to soldiers and just seeing if they want to ditch it during maneuvers as a guide to how to integrate technology. When something gets in the way, a good group drops it. When it helps, they go after it. With RPGs, this also gives us a sense of what exactly people like doing. There tends to be too much emphasis on procedure as a means instead of an end, which I think manifests in the fact that as far as I can see (after querying almost a hundred people about it over the past couple of years) that folks generally avoid technology when it takes over certain procedures completely. They want virtual dice, but not necessarily a system that, say, automates all D&D combat procedures. Part of this is that automating all D&D combat procedures is taking away choice. I'm happy to pick a power and have that resolved automatically in 4e - but I decide what I do. I decide which spell I'm going to cast and who I'm going to attack and where I'm going to move. The computer can get the output, but anywhere I should have input I want that input. I don't want the computer to take my control of my character away from me (although I'm happy to let it roll the attack and damage). I want input every time there is a meaningful choice to be made - but am more than happy to fast forward through to the next decision point.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:41
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I will say it's a vast improvement over Kingdom Death (which made Relic Knights look classy). I just want to facepalm at it rather than stand under a shower and scrub myself clean for having looked at that stuff.
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Sep 16, 2013 01:15
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I don't pick up PWYW stuff because I know what will happen. I'll intend to pay for it when I've read it, I'll put it on the To Read stack, and I'll forget it was PWYW or even to read it for a good six months until it comes up again.
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Sep 17, 2013 15:59
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Ettin posted:So I've been thinking about something for a while, and this post inspired me to talk about it. (Context: Gareth-Michael Skarka finds out a single person backed out of Tianxia because he was involved, loses his poo poo): Fred Hicks, Rob Donahughe, and co. Jenna Moran. Cam Banks. Joe Macaldando. Hell, I think that the persistent idiots (as opposed to the occasional foot-in-mouthers) are in the minority just about everywhere. As for what Skarka's done, Amazon makes him second author for Dr Who: Adventures in Time And Space and Icons - although I can't see him on the credits page of my hardcopy of Dr Who. Which is ... interesting.  (It probably doesn't need proof, but...) neonchameleon fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Nov 21, 2013 |
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Nov 21, 2013 00:41
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JDCorley posted:Yeah, ICONS Team-Up was incredibly delayed. It was announced in July 2011 for an October 2011 release date. GMS said on the 31st of January 2012 that he intended to release it in the coming week (this was when people were already making jokes about it being delayed). He also said in late May 2012 that it would be out in June. Steve Kenson was getting publicly irritated at the end of August 2012 that the information he received had been changed or at least had remained about a week away. Skarka promised it in a week *again* at the end of November 2012. And mid December. And the end of December. (And several times in 2013 but he wasn't posting on RPG.net any more by then). Actual release date 5th August 2013.
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Nov 22, 2013 03:32
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thespaceinvader posted:Buy a starter set. This is ... not my experience in the UK. My experience on the other hand is firstly that GW has more dedicated stores than the entire rest of the tabletop market (and I'll throw in both the roleplayers and the model railway buffs) combined. But no one over 18 goes in them because they are pitched to kids, and because they sell their games at RRP. On the other hand White Dwarf is normally on supermarket newsstands - and I can't say that for any other hobby mag. My second experience is that GW is the D20 of the tabletop gaming world. It's not very good. Everyone knows it's not very good. But it's what everyone knows. So ... just about any two middle class nerds in the UK have played some version of GW games at some point so they can settle on GW games as the lowest common denominator with a dose of the Sunk Costs Fallacy. Smart gaming stores are normally in the odd position of making the bulk of their money from GW games - but trying to subtly steer people to Other Stuff, whether Warmahordes, Flames of War, Malifaux, Dropzone Commander, or something else. Mostly because they don't want to be anything like as dependent on GW as they are especially when GW has a habit of saying "We have modified the contract. Pray we don't modify it further." (See the "No internet sales to Australia" a year or two back as well as other cases mentioned like "No using GW stuff to advertise"). RPGs? Unless you're Leisure Games (Angus Abranson was running Leisure Games while he founded Cubicle 7) or Orc's Nest (who are the only RPG store I'm aware of in central London) RPGs are a fundamentally low turnover piece of stock with low profit customers. They therefore normally get tucked into one small corner of the store where they don't take up a whole lot of floorspace because they are books. (Of course the sort of FLGS that's actually a gaming club taking advantages of a depressed economy and very low ground rents - as the one nearest where I live is - may be an exception. But they don't have much stock anyway).
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Jan 20, 2014 00:14
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People also seem to be missing the Tom Lehrer rule of plagiarism. "To borrow from one source is plagiarism. To borrow from two is called research". A Studio Ghibli game is very dubious. But no one bats an eyelid at all at a game that claims to be "inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan".
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Jan 22, 2014 23:04
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, it seems like even a cursory Google search would have turned up results indicating that Defiance Games isn't a company you want to trust with your money, but the Torn Armor people at least aren't dissembling and acting like a bag of dicks the way Defiance is, and the thin silver lining around the whole thing is the last time I checked the comments on their Kickstarter nobody was sending them threats or having private investigators hired. Being fair to Torn Armour, Defiance's reputation has probably tanked in the meantime. It was known that they were a company to not trust when they went with them - but according to one of the threads at the time you had to hit page 3 of google before you encountered the first bit of message board bitching about them. So it's plausible they did do a cursory background check - just not an in depth one.
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Jan 24, 2014 15:05
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Darksaber posted:They just made the RPG stretch goal, and he normally gets interesting guests so I'd love to watch it, as long as they pick something better than Pathfinder or Next. I have no real confidence in them doing so, though. Tabletop has already done episodes of Dragon Age and Fiasco (the Fiasco episode is probably one of the best they've done). Wil Wheaton also wrote the foreword for the Fiasco Companion - so I have confidence that it won't just be Pathfinder or Next. Edit: Also both Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day know a bit about what will screen well (which is why they don't play Dominion on Tabletop) - so I'm expecting games that play snappily like Apocalypse World (possibly bowdlerised) ore ones with effective visual representations like Dread rather than something big and clunky. Although there will almost certainly be a Big Minis game in there. neonchameleon fucked around with this message at 03:07 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 02:55
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Quarex posted:I felt like I had taken a tiny step forward for all of humankind when I made the initial mistake of mentioning cosplayer consent problems around my token right-wing friend, but then took the time to try to turn it around at least a little. An analogy I've used IRL and really should make something like a blog post is that some people (mostly men but not always) are griefers - as in MMOs. Who pick on targets of opportunity - and do their level best to escape notice. And if you hadn't seen griefers at work would you believe half of what they got up to?
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May 7, 2014 13:51
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Again, I don't know where the idea that Mearls secretly disliked 4e comes from. It uses a number of design concepts from his prior work. Iron Heroes is a dry run for a lot of them. Maybe it's that as a representative of WotC it was his job to tell you to buy the new edition after it was time to start hawking 5e, but everybody selling a new edition tells you it's better than the old one. Saying stuff like that is just his job. If he was told D&D had to utilize rubber chickens, he'd praise the monster type: stretchy fowl. He has a passion for the game, but I doubt he's especially partisan about it. Cirno has already pointed this out to you. But it gets thrown into stark relief when you look at the books that actually have his name on the cover as lead author. * The Monster Manual 1. The least liked 4e Monster Manual of all. We can admittedly put this thing down to teething problems. * H1: Keep on the Shadowfell. 4e's single biggest PR problem is badly designed enough that I do not even believe it was playtested. It's adequate until you reach the keep, but the only thing to salvage it after that point is nuking the keep from orbit. 17 fights in a row with about three of them being plot relevant is not something that's ever going to work unless you're playing an edition with fights . * H2 had Richard "Red Hand of Doom" Baker working with him and is adequate. * H3: Pyramid of Shadows is a wannabe-Gygaxian-dungeon-crawl. Which again means it's a string of not terribly interesting fights, and that kills 4e. * Primal Power is ... adequate. Workmanlike. Less inspiring IMO than Martial, Arcane, Divine, or Martial 2. But that might just be me. * Player's Handbook 3 sucks. It contains six classes and Hybrids. Of these when I GM I place three classes (the Power Point using ones) under a hard-ban for being spamtastic, fiddly, and boring while the Seeker and Battlemind are under a soft-ban for being fiddly and annoying. And Hybrids are the biggest broken pieces of rubbish anywhere. That said, the Monk is awesome. * HoFL/HoFK are an internal 4e edition war within 4e. I consider the Thief a work of art and the first actually good Rogue/Thief in the history of D&D. On the other hand the two defenders can't actually do their jobs at Paragon tier (forced movement destroys them), the Hexblade doesn't work, Mage Supremacy is back, and the Sentinel Druid doesn't scale properly. The two books are pretty decent at giving people who don't like the basic 4e classes something to do. * Heroes of the Shadowfell was the second worst splatbook in the history of 4e. (The worst was the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide - which is basically half full of adverts for WotC dungeons and was produced after it was obvious they'd given up on 4e). The Vampire is a fun class but doesn't work mechanically. The Binder is the weakest class in the whole of 4e. The Blackguard doesn't do its job or scale properly. The Witch is a bit of wizard-supremacy no one ever asked for. The warpriest domains in that book don't work. There's some great fluff in there and I wanted to like it - but the mechanics aren't up to scratch and the interesting ones don't mesh with 4e. If you were to ask the average 4e fan for the greatest misses of 4e almost all the ones they'd name would be on that list. If you were to ask them for the greatest hits none of them would be on that list. Either Mike Mearls didn't get 4e or he did and deliberately produced all the worst major books in the run. I prefer to believe the former.
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Sep 30, 2015 01:06
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Halloween Jack posted:I thought MWP was going to rerelease that game as just Heroic Roleplaying some time soon. I've been doing a little research on the Sentinels RPG - and it's looking good. It isn't actually Cortex Plus, although it is from the same team that made MHRP (Cam Banks is now at Atlas Games and the rest were freelancers), but a lack of MWP given their various fiascos over the years doesn't seem like a bad thing. And it is effectively MHRP Mk2: This time we won't lose the license. And don't have to use "pure" Cortex Plus and can add some nifty stuff. For more useful things Character sheets (note that you need either the character or the scene to be at a given stress before you can break out the big moves by default) and a video
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Nov 6, 2015 23:40
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ProfessorCirno posted:To add to the list of problems I just mentioned above, monks suffer very strongly from, you guessed it, not being examined mechanically. Take the 3.x monk. Lots of vaguely flavorful abilities, right? But there's no synergy between any of them. Monks get super big movement speed, and can only flurry when they full attack - aka when they don't use their movement speed. They have immunity to all mundane diseases and poisons, but already have good fortitude saves. They can speak to any living creature, and have little to no charisma. They get a shittier version of feather fall with way more restrictions. They get immunity to non-magical damage at a level where nothing is non-magical anymore. They can heal themselves, but for so little it's not even worth remembering. I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Monks were actually designed relatively carefully by E. Gary Gygax in 1e. If you take the 1e Monk and compare it to the 1e Thief then you'll notice that Monks are basically Thieves with a fresh coat of paint. Thieves get thief skills? So do monks - and IIRC as a level higher but with a worse XP track. Thieves get backstab? Monks get flurry. Thieves get d6 as their hit dice? Monks first get an extra d4 - then a little self healing and it comes out in the wash. Thieves get magic armour? Monks can't wear armour so they get an AC bonus. And then there's some weird stuff like the abilty to fake your own death that very seldom comes up. In short 1e monks are 1e thieves with a fresh coat of paint and a little bling in exchang for a slightly worse XP track. And 1e monks are terrible because they are 1e thieves and 1e thieves are terrible. (Those absurd high level abilities? Were over the soft-level-cap at level 9 or 10 and were just Gygax playing around). The 3.0 monk on the other hand is almost a direct port of the 1e monk by people who didn't understand what the 1e monk was - they basically just copied the level and ability list. A 1e monk can sub in for a party as a thief (although both of them are terrible). There's no way a 3.0 monk can sub in for a rogue. It's more cargo-cult design. "We want the Monk and it has the abilities of X at level Y because that's what Gygax gave it".
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Apr 16, 2016 13:24
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Aaod posted:Wages stagnating in America and comparing it to similar entertainment, for 30 bucks I can get a video game that lasts me 30-40 hours. So if your average RPG session is five hours (a generous estimate) that means I would need 6-8 sessions to reach a break even point compared to a computer game. It is even worse when you compare it to things like netflix or god forbid a time waster mmorpg. Looking at my multiple book shelves of books I most assuredly did not play anywhere near that many sessions either OK. Let's fix this comparison. For 30 bucks you can get a video game that lasts you 30-40 hours. If your average RPG session is four hours for five people (a not unrealistic estimate) you would need precisely two sessions to break even. That assuming you did no reading of the book or preparing for the session. So the only question in terms of your own metric is is the RPG good enough to play a second session of. (And let's face it, some video games are terrible and you don't want to play more than two hours).
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Apr 24, 2016 02:39
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Gravy Train Robber posted:As someone who, bizarrely, likes Pathfinder/Golarion while fully aware of its staggering weaknesses, the broom closet they chose is smack in the middle of more interesting locations. You've got Hammer Horror land to the west, barbarians and science fiction robots/aliens to the northwest, and a literal gateway to the Abyss to the northeast. To the south is perpetual French Revolution land. And if there's one thing that makes me really dislike Golarion as a setting it's perpetual French Revolution land. Not because the French Revolution is bad for a setting; far from it. But because a perpetual French Revolution takes away a huge part of what makes the French Revolution great for a setting. I mean sure you can play Scarlet Pimpernell there or a black comedy (either Blackadder Goes Forth or a sitcom). But most stories are about change and one of the key things about the real French Revolution was that almost anyone could make a grab for power and no one had a clue where it was going to end up. Who would end up on top and who would get the chop. Whether there would be an Emperor at the end of it, whether some group of oligarchic chancers would take control, or whether it was going to live up to its ideals. And you have the War of the First Coalition going on where every other major power in Europe deicdes to try to reverse the Revolution by force of arms - and get their asses kicked. Seriously there is an absolutely awesome adventure path to be written that's only a thinly fictionalised version of the French Revolution, and it's one of the few places in history that can actually take Pathfinder's power curve. And the one place in the setting where you absolutely can not run it? Perpetual Revolutionary Land. Because a perpetual revoluton is simultaneously static and gets everyone smart to leave however they can.
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May 2, 2016 13:54
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Subjunctive posted:We need more Paizos -- more companies that understand the economics of building a viable RPG business -- and fewer indie at-cost indiegogo darlings. There needs to be enough money in the system that people who are great can make a great living, and people who are just ok can make a decent living being directed by the great people. The depressing thing is that I've had more fun with Kickstarter darlings than I ever have with Pathfinder. Part of the reason indie at cost darlings do well is that you don't actually need much in the way of rules to make an RPG. That said I've had thoughts of the idea of a 4e clone on android and apple mobile using microtransactions - $2 for a class beyond the core, and $1 for a monster pack with half a dozen linked monsters to a theme. Thoughts?
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Aug 24, 2017 00:23
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Kai Tave posted:The lesson you can take away from Paizo and Pathfinder is that the economics of building a viable RPG business involve everything but actual good game design because Paizo's customers clearly don't care about that in the slightest, and I've long held the suspicion that you could make decent money selling "RPGs" that are nothing but flashy art, warmed-over cliche worldbuilding, and simply having a Markov chain handle the mechanics and a non-zero number of people not only wouldn't mind that the rules are garbage but would actually defend them against critics Don't forget that White Wolf's own writers didn't understand the probabilities of their games. And that was the last game to really challenge D&D.
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Aug 24, 2017 02:39
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Kurieg posted:And then it introduced poo poo like the seeker and the binder. The Seeker was the PHB 3. And I actually liked there being the simple martials - but only once the Elementalist turned up. D&D has long been crying out for a simple blast mage. And as well as Cubicle 7 there's Evil Hat and Pelgrane Press.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:33
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Liquid Communism posted:What is your point then? Lay it out in nice, clear language. Because all I've seen from you so far has been various takes on the stance that if abuse of a game system is possible, then it is justified, and if people don't enjoy that at their table they should not play games where it is possible... which amounts to not playing the vast majority of TTRPGs. To step in as I'm agreeing with Kai Tave here can you lay out in nice, clear language what exactly counts as abuse? I'm going to use D&D 3.5 as my example; I know that system better than Shadowrun. There are a few things that clearly do - Pun-Pun style exploits and Ur-Priest/Nar Demonbinder or other loops pretty clearly do. But what about the bear-druid who turns into a bear, has a bear as a companion, and summons bears? Our aggressively hegmonizing ursine swarm is not even especially trying to min max - but he's going to make a fighter of the same level look like a chump. This just because one player liked the idea of a bear druid and took the only druid-only feat (Wildspell) and the feat to make his summons better and the other liked the fighter and followed the guidance in the rulebook that said Toughness was a good feat. We've got a problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with playing either a razor-optimised character or a well rounded character. But. A well rounded character at a table of razor-optimised characters is going to be utterly incompetent and the player is almost certainly going to have a bad time. A razor-optimised character as part of a group of well-rounded characters is likely to cause trouble because it's almost playing a different game. But none of the players are in the wrong. So who is in the wrong? The entire point of a character creation system is to get the players onto the same page to play the game. If you need a meta-ettiquette to say how this group of players makes characters then the character creation system has failed. And Kai Tave is suggesting pushing the system (and I'm talking about deliberately creating aggressively hegmonizing ursine swarms, not about creating an Ur-Priest/Nar Demonbinder combo) because that's the easiest place to meet. And because characters are supposed to be facing challenges and the in character choices should reflect their desire to stay alive. And yes you can have table ettiquette to not push the system - but table ettiquette in this case is close to a synonym for house rules that are needed because the system fails to have a character creation model that leads to outcomes you like.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:26
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Liquid Communism posted:Not blaming the players for the flaws in the system does not absolve them of agency. When they choose to take advantage of those flaws in ways that interfere with an enjoyable game for the rest of the people at the table, that is their choice, not the system's. I challenged you earlier to give a clear line where things should be drawn. As I mentioned it is fine to say in D&D 3.X that Pun-Pun is out as is the Ur-Priest/Nar Demonbinder. But until you can give a clear and consistent way of describing "flaws in the system" and "interfere with an enjoyable game for the rest of the people at the table" you are demanding either a group that knows each other extremely well or for the players and not just the characters to be telepathic. And bear in mind that the easiest point for the table to agree on is everyone building a character who is an expert in what they do. I expect things from my players. Telepathy isn't on the list. I also expect things from my game designers. Allowing players to play together when they set out to play the game based on the rulebooks they have been given is on that list. And as a GM I also expect things from myself. Getting my players on the same page is a part of it - and a part of that is making sure that they don't end up with characters that are unfun for themselves and each other. And they don't end up in a maze of twisty passages all alike at character creation because I'm wanting them to pick up telepathically what my own personal ideas of the power level should be.
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Sep 28, 2017 15:00
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:They're two separate points, both in response to the original post about how people remember earlier editions. I too have never played a version of D&D that literally separated most non-magical abilities into Weapon Proficiencies and Non-Weapon Proficiencies. (And there was a lot more balancing done by Gygax than he wanted people to notice). And no one seems to have pointed out the biggest difference between the 3.X family and all other versions of D&D. In D&D 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder, the rules made up a physics model for the world with all monsters supposed to be created using the same rules as PCs, skill points, and the works - and the game included an entire economic model that didn't work but was over the top enough that someone at one point under 3.0 rules literally sat down and calculated the number of chickens in Greyhawks. Meanwhile in oD&D, AD&D, 4e, and now even 5e the rules are player facing. You expect the monsters to do fairly expectable things but no one expects monsters to be built using the same rules as PCs. There isn't a DC to climb a D&D Standard Tree (DC15) - instead there are guidelines for the GM and therefore deliberately more woolly as the guidelines and tools are there to help the GM and not to actually simulate the world. The thing is that no one noticed at the time. People who'd been playing AD&D normally continued to play AD&D using 3.X rules because they didn't really see any difference. The rules still looked similar so they did what they had learned to. Meanwhile people new to 3.X played 3.X using this demented physics engine because that's what the rules told you you were supposed to do. It's just like the biggest change in the history of D&D (the deprecation and then removal of the XP for GP rules) being something that was incredibly easy to miss.
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Nov 25, 2017 17:05
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