TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Plague of Hats posted:

Morgoth has 666 for his attack bonuses, after all.

That book (Lords of Middle Earth: Vol I, which gave stats for all the Valar and Maiar and Elves, including all the Silmarilion characters) was Awesome Q. Bonkers in the best possible way.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 21:58

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 18, 2024 03:17

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Quarex posted:

Does Empire of the Petal Throne not count as licensed since M.A.R. Barker was actually involved?

I'd say no, it wasn't a pre-existing media property. It was just several binders of notes on Barker's shelf before it was an RPG. Same thing with my beloved Glorantha (although at least that had a wargame made of it and a support fanzine before it became an RPG).

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 03:19

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Asimo posted:

Honestly, there were a lot of rules light and genre-emulating games even in the early and mid 80's, stuff like Toon or Teenagers from Outer Space, and even a few more complex games like Marvel Super Heroes and Ghostbusters made clear attempts at genre emulation, if with mixed success. RPG rules are a technology of sorts and there's been a lot of innovation over the past twenty years or so, but people were definitely trying.

Also: James Bond 007 (possibly my favorite RPG of all time, and a decade ahead of its time) and Paranoia. Paranoia is an interesting example because it was so wonderfully thematic and gonzo from the beginning, but the first edition ruleset was the clunkiest simulationist wargame thing you ever saw (legal-case rule organization, elaborate skill trees, weapon-versus-armor matrices, having to keep track of five different kinds of resource points for each character, etc.). They cleaned it up a lot in the second edition, but the tension in the first edition (between RPGing's past and it's future) is fascinating.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 10:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

2e Paranoia art is so, so good. I love the bootlicker picture. You know the one.

They also had the best captions.

"Traitor gets a significant bonus to his Bluff roll"

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 17:33

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Going back to MiB and Ghostbusters. Yes the movies are comedies, but the stakes are lethally high in both and the protagonists are actually really competent. That's the thing that the games missed. The PCs shouldn't be schlubs.

MIBs were super-competent from the jump; it took the GBs a couple of missions to get their act sorted out - their first job ended with a wrecked hotel ballroom, a slimed Venkman ("I feel so funky"), and an incinerated maid's cart (to be fair, it also ended with a successfully captured ghost).

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 22:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Payndz posted:

WEG also did The Price Of Freedom, which at the time (the mid-80s; Peak Reagan) White Dwarf slammed for being appalling jingoistic right-wing gun porn. But reading it today, from the sample character descriptions alone it's clearly a very deadpan piss-take of exactly that Red Dawn, Invasion USA fearful paranoia that THE COMMIES will come and take away all your stuff.

It's almost exactly Red Dawn: The Unofficial RPG. It was published in 1987, just in time for Gorbachev to come to power and begin winding down the Cold War. It does get points for titling it's one published adventure "Your Own Private Idaho".

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 08:35

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There have been four (official) Conan games:

1) TSR (1985-ish): A series of AD&D 1E adventures (with Arnold whatsisname on the cover) that adapted Conan and his world to AD&D 1E. There was even a Red Sonja adventure (no Brigitte Neilsen, alas)

2) TSR (1985-ish): A standalone boxed RPG with its own system that got a couple of adventure modules as support. A vaguely recall the system looking interesting; it had a full skill system which was unusual for a mid-1980s TSR game)

3) Steve Jackson Games (1990-ish): GURPS Conan, plus a couple of adventures (mostly solo CYOA numbered paragraph things, oddly enough). Full sourcebook for GURPS, including a half-dozen writeups for Conan showing him at different ages and power levels (Conan the Thief, Conan the Pirate, Conan the Mercenary Adventurer, Conan the King) and it's fun to see him evolve over time. At his peak, Conan was a 600-point character, which if you know anything about early GURPS character creation is a hell of a lot of points.

4) Mongoose (mid-late 2000s): D20 Conan adaptation, two editions, with a wall of supplement books (seriously, there were like 50 different books which was great if you wanted to buy and read 128 pages about the Kingdom of Shem or whatever). Typical dodgy D20 adaptation (although with the world de-emphasizing spellcasters it's probably more balanced and playable than most games). Worth it mostly for the sheer amount of gameable world detail they published.

There was also a very early (late 1970s) Dragon article by Gygax adapting him to early AD&D. He was ludicrously overpowered (18s across the board for stats, 15th level in a bunch of classes, psionic powers, and a number of unique special abilities) and Gary suggested he was useful for killing PCs who had gotten out of control or were simply "brash". Thanks, Gary. Weirdly reminiscent of the sort of unkillable metaplot characters that showed up in game lines in the late 1990s (Stone, I'm looking at you).

Conan games are also tough because they are often just one PC versus the world, or one super-PC and his less capable sidekicks, and that's hard to do in a group setting. Lots of pulp-y properties have that problem (see TSR's Indiana Jones game, where one player got to be Indy and everyone else got to be Short Round or Willie or Marcus Brody or Sallah).

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 18:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

That's a real belief. I had already read the stuff mentioned- Leperflesh, Lemon Cursturdian, and I are probably the biggest REH Conan nerds on this forum - and so I was familiar with Robert E Howard's beliefs on civilization et al. Leperflesh was going one level deeper then I was attempting and getting to the philosophy behind the Conan stories, while I was just dealing with the narrative mechanics.

The reality was that Robert E Howard had a very unique upbringing, he lived in Texas during the 1920s oil boom and seems to be an extremely conflicted liberterian - as in, he recognized that people were ultimately bad, strove only to enrich themselves, abused others, etc. - which you would think would make him a progressive - but sorta kinda believed that maybe you should be tough enough to take it, get back up, and poo poo on the people who were making GBS threads on you.

He was also a feminist. In fairness, it also must be said he was a racist, although there is some evidence that this was softening as he grew older, traveled, experienced new things and interviewed black storytellers and other "different" people outside of his lily-white Texas circle. Unfortunately he killed himself fairly young because he was a huge momma's boy and she was dying.

He's actually a very interesting cat.

Edit: forgot about LC...I suck

There's a very interesting movie about Howard made in in 1996 (The Whole Wide World starring Vincent D'Onofrio.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 19:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Available free as ZeFRS (Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System). Kinda neat.

Oooh, nifty.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 20:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cryptozoic is solid as gently caress for stepping in to rescue the game and go out of pocket to make sure all the kickstartees got copies even though they absolutely had no obligation to do so. Good, good people.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 19:24

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I, too, am furious that the entire world doesn't share my tastes.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 17:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

He's also the self-described "Steve Jobs of MMO Marketing"

Well, Jobs was thrown out of the company he founded by its Board of Directors...

More seriously, Dancey's entire MMO resume pre-PFO was taking one of the few successful non-WoW MMOs (EVE Online) and almost running it into a ditch with his brilliant ideas.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Sep 3, 2015

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 16:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

At the same time, it's impossible not to acknowledge Dancey has some real talent: Namely, he's forever escaped from these situations and latched on to another company to ruin while continuing to get work, like some kind of mischievous trickster imp.

I'll actually give Dancey credit for launching and running L5R and managing to sell it to WotC and getting paid (as compared to the dozens of other CCGs that crashed and burned trying to be the next Magic), and I'll give him credit for launching D&D 3E which was a much bigger success than anyone had predicted at the time (setting aside the OGL and D20 and other peripheral aspects of the 3E launch). The guy is not untalented when it comes to running game companies and doing interesting and successful and lucrative things with them. But whatever mojo he once possessed is long gone, as the unbroken string of flops he's engineered over the last dozen years has shown.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 17:51

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

MalcolmSheppard posted:

Again, I don't know where the idea that Mearls secretly disliked 4e comes from.

Yeah, it's not like it's a secret.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2015 20:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

ProfessorCirno posted:

Like on one hand yes it sucks when you hire on artists and they end up being garbage but they've already taken up time and budget that you can't get back so you end up sorta having to use their garbage...

...But on the other hand managing the artists is literally part of your job, and I dunno of any other sorta big name that has these constant problems. poo poo, I dunno of any indie games that've had these constant issues. The complete inability to manage their artists seem to be a uniquely Exalted problem.

Yeah, and the usual two excuses don't cut it this time. The game is two years late so they can't blame tight deadlines, and the KS was fully funded (at almost $700k) so it isn't like they were constrained by their tiny budget (plus, they bragged about what a deluxe and gorgeous artifact the finished product would be). Lots of products have come out with jaw-dropping art several notches higher than Ex3 (The One Ring, anything for L5R 4e, Guide to Glorantha, FFG's 40K and Star Wars games, etc.) so it's not like they were promising something utterly undeliverable.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2015 20:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

There are signs things are rocky, but Palladium Books is such a small, insular company it's hard to say.

Also, Kevin is one of the oldest living grognards, the genuine article who started writing and illustrating for Judges Guild D&D supplements back in the late 1970s. He's closing in on retirement age and so it's no surprise that Palladium's output is starting to flag.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 05:02

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Error 404 posted:

Wait, what's the story here?

Presumably, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rift_%28video_game%29

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 05:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

e: I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're basically letting you pay them for the honor of being on the "official" D&D webstore.

IP holders monetizing fanfic just might be the next big thing.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 21:37

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

paradoxGentleman posted:

...if the plug were to be pulled on D&D, it would not drag the rest of the industry down with it, would it?

Not sure about the industry (although I suspect PF would just keep powering on as the default game for people who want that D&D sort of thing), but game stores are much less dependent on D&D in 2015 then they were on TSR products back in 1998. That was the whole reason that WotC bought TSR back then - a huge portion of WotC's retailer base relied on selling D&D books to keep their doors open, and the death of D&D would have wiped them out. Now, D&D (and RPGs) take up a much smaller part of most FLGSs, which seem to do much better business selling minis and clix and board games and CCGs than RPGs.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 00:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Literally The Worst posted:

working in a store that has stayed open and expanded over the years by, you know, acting like an actual store, stories like this always blow my mind

A non-trivial number of hobby-focused retail stores exist as:

1) A money losing writeoff from a rich parent so their useless child has something to point to as a "job" (there was a magic/ccg store near me that was pretty much daddy subsidizing his son playing businessman. It stuck around a lot longer than you would have thought).
2) Something run as a labor of love (retiree always wanted to run a model train or fabric store, now they're living the dream).
3) Something that barely meets the minimal definition of "store" so the owner can buy hobby stuff at wholesale prices (I've been in more than one hobby/game store that was clearly just a front for a Warhammer club to buy minis and stuff at a discout).

It's fun to look at unlikely little retail stores and try to figure out what their real economic justification for existing is.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2016 23:38

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

Dicemasters: City of Doom

You are going to write it up for F&F, aren't you?

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 00:52

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Asimo posted:

Yeah, it's a super groggish sort of store, in that I'm pretty sure the original owners were 70s wargaming types.

The shelves and shelves of Osprey books definitely supports this.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 00:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

Was there anything else he was holding up? I honestly don't remember.

Not a property, but he was associated with a post-apocalypse D20 setting that is now a decade late and been passed through something like four publishers.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 17:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

The problem with this is that, for most of its history, D&D hasn't really wanted to get a younger demographic. I think the 4e era was really the only time they made a push to bring in new players (via Encounters and Penny Arcade/PAX).

Early-mid 80s Red Box era pushed hard for kids, too. Available in toy stores, advertised heavily in comic books, etc.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 18:03

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

Pro Tip: If a book says "New York Times Bestseller" on the front it is more often than not referring to the author, not the book itself. Like, once you hit that list, even if it's at the very bottom, you are a New York Times Bestselling Author for the rest of your life.

There are also something like 20 or more NYT bestseller lists (best fiction, best non-fiction, best mm paperback, best trade paperback, etc etc etc) and they run 1-25 (or 1-30) and they come out every week (52x/year) so it doesn't take too many simultaneous purchases to put something on the low levels of a NYT chart for a single week, and then bingo bango you have a New York Times Best-Selling author blurb for the rest of your life.

Publishers will often coordinate bulk purchases of a new author's book so as to kick them over the (very low) threshold for NYT Bestsellerdom.

e: See the variety of lists for yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/

Essentially, if you have any audience or a publisher willing to put even a tiny bit of effort into promoting you, you can probably qualify to be a NYT bestseller

FMguru fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jan 29, 2016

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 21:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

paradoxGentleman posted:

Also, how come the people making decisions are so disconnected? It is in their direct interest to produce stuff that their consumers want, how hard can it be find out?

Because the decisions to manufacture and market Star Wars toys were made six months before the film came out, and the movie wasn't finished and all they had to go by were writeups and productions stills. Kylo was supposed to be this movie's Darth Vader, everyone loves Darth Vader, so lets build a ton of toys of neo-Vader. They probably did do research before the movie came out, and it probably showed that people were hyped about a new Darth Vader and would love to buy action figures and talking alarm clocks featuring new Vader. The thing Hasbro didn't know was that the movie's big twist was neo-Vader was actually an unstable emo dork. Oops.

Not making enough toys of Rei and Finn because historically people didn't buy action figures of women or non-white dudes is just pure backwards-looking projection and being out of touch in the changes in fan culture. Granted, fan culture is a hard thing to get a handle on and properly assess, but these companies are led by people earning six and seven figure yearly salaries to do just that, and they failed.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 14:03

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Mecha Gojira posted:

I wonder where that notion of "low fantasy" "versimilitude" actually infected the hobby.

I honestly think a lot of it came from one of the big groups of early adopters of D&D - the medieval recreators of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Gary Gygax was a big source of it too - I always think of AD&D as his effort to add a bunch of additional realism/verisimilitude rules (weapon speeds! 22 different pole arms! 2% chance of catching a disease of the lymphatic system every month you spent in the tropics! precise costs in gp for each 10' length of crenelated battlement you build! hex-grid turn radius ratings for flying creatures! etc etc etc) to the simple, game-y D&D.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 01:01

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cheapass Games kind of swam in that particular pool back in the late 1990s/early 2000s

# ¿ Feb 26, 2016 23:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Weren't the ENnies once a juried award, and the awards tended to go to the companies that sent the jurors the biggest bundles of comp copies (suitable for flipping on the used market)?

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 15:19

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

The thing about OSR stuff that bugs me the most is that it's trying to replicate a playstyle and design philosophy that never existed.

Like, I played D&D in the early Basic days. I got my first boxed set back in 1983. We didn't have any real "playstyle" because that wasn't a thing yet. It was ages before we (the hobby) started thinking critically about things.

The game wasn't super-lethal because it was designed to be super-lethal, it was super-lethal because we didn't know what we were doing yet, and the mechanics weren't balanced because we didn't know balance was a thing yet. There wasn't a "universal playstyle" because we didn't have any way of communicating playstyle throughout the hobby outside of Dragon magazine's mail column.

It's bizarre because they're cargo culting something that doesn't exist. It's like people who design video games that are as punishing as NES games, without realizing that they were punishing because we didn't know what good design was yet.

We know that lots and lots of people played the game in a lets-have-fun and level up and play with the cool spells and magic items because so much ink was spilled (in early Dragon magazines and even in Gygax's DMG 1E) explicitly warning against giving players too much power and loot too soon. The worst thing you could be was a "Monty Haul" DM and the early definition of Munchkin was essentially a player (usually young) whose character sheet had a bunch of powerful things on it that he hadn't earned. The way that Gygax and his crew kept yelling about the importance of earning your fun meant that default mode for lots of players was to blow off the whole "start as a shitfarmer, grind your way up to competence over the course of many, many months by killing kobolds and giant rats" and got right on to the good, fun, heroic, enjoyable stuff.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 20:55

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

I legitimately cannot wrap my head around the idea that offending people is a good thing and not something assholes do.

I'm more struck by the insistence that they be allowed to offend people but that it's really unfair if those people then act all offended.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 17:27

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

At least it's no longer the eighties.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 22:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I thought YGO had a strong pay-to-win element where rare cards were strictly better than their more common equivalents (and there were something like a dozen different levels of rarity) so the only way to be competitive was to spend spend spend.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2016 21:29

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

They did some really nice wargames

Air Cav
Chickamauga
Against the Reich
Air & Armor
The Battle of Shiloh

Air Cav was fantastic.

Druid
Web & Starship
Tales of the Arabian Nights (reprinted by Z-Man, hooray!)
East Front Tank Leader
Junta
Imperium Romanum II
Knigs & Things
RAF
Rommel in North Africa
several Star Trek and Star Wars boardgames

1980s WEG owned bones.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2016 18:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

Same for psionics. At least for me, anyway.

Psionics were BIG in 1970s-early 1980s fantasy fiction, usually as a side-effect of 1970s fantasy being full of sci-fi touches. Ironically, that particular flavor of fantasy died out because the market shifted to...D&D style fantasy (Dragonlance et al)

FMguru fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 16, 2016

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 16:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Other reasons the Great Wheel is dumb:

1) Dividing up real estate by alignment fucks up pantheons. Odin (Lawful Good) and Loki (Chaotic Neutral) have to commute across several planes every day in order to hang out with Thor in Valhalla (Chaotic Good). 4Es much more casual approach to planes made a ton more sense - somewhere floating in the astral sea is Valhalla and somewhere else is Olympus and somewhere else is the Nine Hells etcetera etcetera. What is gained by locking everyone into one of precisely seventeen slots on the alignment graph?

2) The loving cosmic wheel alignments don't even match the alignment rules and player alignments. The rules recognize nine alignments (the classic 3x3 grid we've all seen a zillion times), everyone is sorted into one of those nine bins, no exceptions - except for the entire overstructure of the multiverse, which recognizes halfway spaces between alignments and has entire races and planes and subplanes filling up those spaces.

3) The giant overstructure that encompassed all known and possible D&D worlds was actively ignored or contradicted by the vast majority of published D&D worlds. Faerun's planes were organized not in a Great Wheel but a big Yggdrasil-style tree. Dragonlance only had one outer plane, called The Abyss. Eberron had its orrey of outer planes that would into and out of alignment with the world as plot required. Dark Sun and Ravenloft took place in weird, edge-case, one-off exceptions to the Great Wheel. And on and on. Why even bother with a giant overstructure (much less pitch a fit when it gets modified) if it's so lightly discarded by the actual settings that are obsentsively placed within it?

# ¿ Apr 29, 2016 14:30

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Yog-Sothoth.com, the premiere fan news/discussion site for Call of Cthulhu, had to strictly ban all edition discussion when the D20 version was released and for several years afterwards. D20 CoC vs.BRP CoC nearly burned that entire forum to the ground. So it's not like CoC has been entirely free of edition warring...

But for the most part, most editions of BRP CoC were just reprints with errata and tweaks applied and additional material from scenarios and supplements (additional spells, monsters, magic items, etc.) folded in, and some editions would get a graphic overhaul. Most importantly, scenarios from any edition could be played with any edition of the rules. You could run 1982's Shadows of Yog Sothoth with 2005's sixth edition rulebook, or the scenarios from 2012's Terror From The Skies with the original box rule set.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2016 04:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

ProfessorCirno posted:

Again, Dancey has an almost supernatural ability to get cozy with people and products that anyone should be able to just glance at and immediately know it's a bad idea. It's not that he ruins everything he touches that's amazing, it's that he keeps being given more chances.

Another thing about Dancey was that his 1990s track record was really good. He launched the L5R CCG, probably the biggest hit of the wave of post-MtG clones (and with an original property!) and got it sold to WotC and got paid, while pretty much every other game of its generation crashed and burned. And when he was at WotC he oversaw the design and launch of D&D 3E, which was a huge success. Not everything he touched back then turned to gold ("Rolling Thunder", anyone?), but he really was something of a credible TTG visionary back then (granted, the competing visions were things like "I'm gonna make AD&D but with more complicated rules" and "what the world really needs is another hex-and-counter re-enactment of Gettysburg"). Hell, I'll even stand up for part of the D20 license - outsourcing the production of low-margin setting books and adventures to small publishers to drive an ecosystem that sold high-margin WotC core books is actually a good idea, it just wasn't fully thought out and implemented well.

After 2002, though, his career has resembled that Simpsons scene where Sideshow Bob keep stepping on rakes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbd4t-ua-WQ

Yeeesh.

---

As for why GW is currently under siege, I think there was some kind of change in the cost of making good miniatures. I got the sense that GW reigned almost unopposed for the 1990s and most of the 2000s because the capital costs of starting and running a full-line miniatures company was just so high, especially to go into a market with one giant entrenched incumbent. But every time I go to the game store I see yet another new standalone minis game (Mars Attacks? Team Yankee? Seriously?) so something in the production/distribution economics must've changed in the last decade or so. And GW was so safe behind its moat for so long that they really have no idea how to compete in a world where they can't rely on their former commanding superiority in distribution and economies of scale.

# ¿ May 1, 2016 19:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

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.

I always thought Golarion worked as a place where all the fantasy cliches are there somewhere on the map. If you want to play a viking or a samurai or a native american shaman or a greek hoplite or a bedouin in your D&D campaign, well, Golarion has a place on its map somewhere that you can say you come from. And the DM has someplace to put any kind of dumb adventure he wants - here's where the pyramids and deserts and mummies are, here's the island full of swashbuckling pirates, here is the swamp full of undead and evil wizard towers, all in the same world. It runs into problems when 1) people insist on treating all these pastiche lands as one giant, coherent setting with tons of fluff and lore and coherent backstory and 2) a lot of beloved traditional fantasy cliches are more than a little problematic in the harsh light of the 21st century (my primary interaction with the PF setting was playing a friend's copy of the card game, whose first scenario has you hunting down and slaughtering a bunch of not-Gypsies because everyone knows the not-Gypsies are untrustworthy thieves who are always up to something).

# ¿ May 2, 2016 03:45

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 18, 2024 03:17

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Slimnoid posted:

Holy poo poo gently caress that Celebrim guy.

He was a semi-regular fixture in the old grognards.txt threads, with the same whining about how books today are too fancy and expensive.

# ¿ May 9, 2016 05:11

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future

«‹›5 »