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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh yeah, I forgot about him too. The worst part about this is them being mentioned in the same breath as Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws, two actual game designers with interesting ideas and opinions worth listening to. D&D has become like that WH40K Imperium: stuck in a downwards spiral of technological stagnation and ruled by the priests of a long dead deified figure who claim complete authority over how things should be done, and the poor masses have to deal with it or be abused. By the way, if the aforementioned long dead deified figure was alive, he'd not approve of this poo poo. (I guess we storygaming swine would be the orks in Tarnowski's mind) Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 21:56
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Evil Mastermind posted:God, gently caress this hobby. I know I say it a lot but goddamn it feels like it's actively trying to push me out. Off the top of my head: Literature has Lovecraft. Music has Wagner. Even chess has Bobby Fischer. Those are all horrible, toxic human beings that are legitimized on a much bigger scale than what we have going on here (that Looking for Bobby Fischer movie fails to mention even once that the guy was a loving anti-semite). Don't start going "gently caress this hobby" just yet; this kind of situation is something that people have to deal with in every area of human achievement. That said! I really don't know how it is in the US, where the RPG-playing community is bigger, but over here, being the Guy Who GMs and the Guy Who Brings New People Into RPGs gives you much, much more power and influence than what D&D decides to do. What this hobby needs is new people, people with fresh heads. When you start playing with new people, you're their coach, so to speak – what you say is more important than what's written in the rules. And as for veteran players, finding a group is so hard that when a GM pops up people will play whatever they're willing to run. What I'm saying is if you tell everyone that D&D sucks, play with people new to the hobby, and play good games, the impact you'll do on the RPG community not only compensates for WotC's (and other's) failings, it goes beyond them for a net positive. It's how I think, anyway.
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Jul 4, 2014 03:10
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No one's saying you should ignore the problem, people are saying that you shouldn't let the problem affect your actual RPG-playing experience with your group. The people you play with don't deserve one of you becoming disillusioned about the hobby that you enjoy together, because of random dudes on the internet. Again, no one's saying to ignore the problem -- you can boycott D&D and make internet campaigns to bring awareness to the harassment issues, and in fact we all probably should -- but if you bring the issue up with the actual, living, breathing people you know who actually take time off their lives to go and play games with you, and then proceed to play good games and enjoy them, the impact you make on the RPG-playing community is bigger and more relevant. RPGs are a hobby about social interactions with people, at its core, and it still grows mostly by word-of-mouth. We should focus our fight on these layers, I think.
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Jul 4, 2014 16:31
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Mimir posted:What's the most patriotic, All-American, and idealistic RPG? Toon.
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Jul 5, 2014 14:27
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Tollymain posted:i don't get why people like gurps GURPS is just a 3d6 roll-under system. Its supplements are also the best, because instead of endless lists of locations and NPCs they delve into discussions of genre conventions and also give you lots of inspiring ideas (GURPS Biotech  ). The book has a lot of options because you might want to play a 19-dimensional magical imp fighting a creature made of the poo poo of Adolph Hitler wearing rocket boots for the possession of a kryptonite condom. Really, for most games 80% of the options don't even apply. The important part is the players figuring out what game they're playing and build characters and pick optional rules around that, but that's a necessary step for every system, really. It's just that when you don't do that, GURPS falls apart more catastrophically than most other games. I wonder if game designers have a term for "defensive game design" or whatever.
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Jul 6, 2014 14:35
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Ettin posted:And I contacted him before the Rudyard Kipling thing came up so if someone could send him that that would be tops. Is there actually an anti-Kipling sort of thing going on? I've never read anything by him, but have Kim lined up on the bookshelf, it looks like it'll be cool. I've never heard anyone "malign" him except for bringing up the fact that he was, you know, English and talking about India a 100 years ago.
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Jul 8, 2014 02:53
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TheSpookyDanger posted:You've never heard of the white man's burden? Only as a general expression, I had no idea it was an actual poem. Thanks for the link! Galaga Galaxian posted:Yeah, and honestly it takes no longer that roll up a Traveller character than it does to comb through a 3.0 or beyond D&D/d20 book and put together a character. Also, if you really want, I'm pretty sure at least 2-3 character generation programs exist for every edition of traveller. Half the fun of Traveller character creation is going back and forth between pages, though. Every mechanic you have to double-check adds a couple of seconds of tension that make all the difference, before you inevitably find out you've been fired from your character's third job, and now you're 60 and in debt and for all your efforts you get 100 credits and "a blade". Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 04:15
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potatocubed posted:Is it Talislanta? Isn't that the one with the playable race that's a walking polyp with lots of arms? e: no, wait, that's not it. What was that cult Aztec-inspired RPG? Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 13:49
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BrainParasite posted:Tekumel? Ah, that's the one, yes. I've only ever leafed through it once, but the one thing I remember is there being a playable race of radially-simetric beings with many arms, legs, and heads.
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Jul 8, 2014 14:45
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Tulul posted:Are there any good steampunk games, which focus on the downtrodden soot-stained underclass and the grinding oppression of a Victorian society, instead of Baron von Zeppelin and his Vitreous Trousers? I was thinking about trying something myself, but I'd be interested to know what's been done. There's also Perfect Unrevised. I've never played it so I don't know if it's any good, but it's by Joe Mcdaldno, the same guy who wrote Monsterhearts, which is a really great genre-savvy incarnation of Apocalypse World. It's apparently a game about the price you pay for being a subversive criminal in a dystopian steampunk Victorian England, so it might interest you.
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Jul 14, 2014 00:08
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Lemon Curdistan posted:That is a pretty good argument in favour of replacing them with "hang out with someone/share a moment of reflection" or whatever moves, with a more general trigger. AW is already designed to emulate the structure and pacing of a TV series, so having those moves trigger off quietly contemplating the sunset or sharing a beer or whatever with another "cast" member would make more sense than them just being for fuckin'. I really dislike the prevailing notion that all games have to "emulate" a genre. If a game wants to come up with a genre that's not seen anywhere else, let it do so. I think AW is a game that tries to do this, which is also why it's written in such a strong voice. Everything is done to evoke its atmosphere. I think is about being chaotic and messy. There's dirt, and grease, and blood, and guts, and sex. AW's inhabitants are reduced to animals. Making sex moves represent a moment of peace instead of another messy, dirty, animalesque situation would be introducing a thing in AW that's clean and safe, and that goes completely against the entire premise. That said, I don't know if PbtA is good for newbie GMs, but from experience it is excellent for newbie players. Newbie players have this idea that there are "correct actions" to take in the context of the game, because that's what video games and every other game teaches them. PbtA does a wonderful job of teaching them to just say what your character would do, never mind what you think they should do.
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Jul 16, 2014 00:14
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Today in class we were discussing the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and there's a step in the thing where you have a random chance of doing something and you have to generate a random number between 0 and 1, check to see if it's lower than the chance, and determine success and failure accordingly. It's amazing how long it takes for a bunch of grown-up graduate students understand the concept. Today I learned that RPGs help you academically.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:35
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zachol posted:Hold up. Pick a random parameter value and compare it with the previous value you had. If it's better, accept the new value. If it's worse, accept the new value with a certain random chance. This is one iteration. Repeat for millions of iterations. At the end, if you did it right, you can reconstruct the posterior distribution of the parameter based on the amount of time the process spent on each parameter value. Basically Metropolis-Hastings is the basic way to deal with Bayes' formula, which has as its denominator a hairy integral that's usually impossible to compute analytically. It makes Bayesian inference achievable. Bayesian inference is super useful; off the top of my head, it's used for weather forecasting, face recognition both in standard digital cameras and police systems, and google choosing what results to show you at the top of the page, among thousands of other applications. It's cool!
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Jul 17, 2014 00:20
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What's so special about Goblins anyway? The SJ Games blurb is a whole lot of fluff and flavor but doesn't tell you what you're supposed to be playing. Another supplement I've heard super good things about is GURPS China.
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Jul 17, 2014 22:20
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Discworld is complicated. Its charm and comedy come from the prose and rich characters; take those away and it's just a quirky setting with good, if standard, plots. Those you can present in almost any system and you're as good as done. However, if you want a RPG system that directs you toward rich, human-like characters and sly humor, I don't think it exists yet.JDCorley posted:The big disappointment of GURPS Discworld wasn't the system (because frankly early Discworld had a ton of AD&D jokes in it so having a complicated system doesn't really matter to me), but the almost complete lack of analysis of Discworld comedy and how to create your own. This, by the way, although it would make for brilliant play, would also make for a really boring book. My biggest issue with the RPG industry is how few good genre analyses there are: supplements that detail genre conventions, what's cool about them, and approaches to make those conventions work in a gaming table. You can say what you will about GURPS' rules, but at least it has a bunch of supplements that try to do this.
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Jul 17, 2014 23:57
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FMguru posted:The great big giant final authoritative world-defining guidebook has just been released. 40 years in the making! 50 dollars a PDF  I get what this product is, but if they want people to actually try their setting out in a gaming context they should come up with a final authoritative world-defining guidebook that's not big and giant. I tried getting into Glorantha through Heroquest; the material is well-written and flavorful, but extra confusing. People praise Glorantha's unreliable narrators but I just found it really hard, as a GM, to come up with a coherent picture of the setting in my mind that I could convey to players. It's like system mastery, but lore-driven instead of math-driven. I didn't like it. It's a wonderful setting if you're looking for excellent world-building, though. Totally worth a read.
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Jul 18, 2014 02:48
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Tatum Girlparts posted:So hey any good RPGs that capture that whole 'Arabian nights' thing? I know like, AD&D had a not-Arabia thing and there's Fire and something from the people who did Legend of the Five Rings, but is there anything more? I can't recommend In a Wicked Age enough. The conflict system is a bit fiddly but the game is built around rotating GMs and recurring characters and is explicitly built for telling the kind of mythical-political story I think you're looking for. e: Play around with the four oracles a little bit and you'll know whether IAWA is right for what you want to do.
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Jul 19, 2014 04:04
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