Chill la Chill posted:

Dawkins was really patient, soft spoken, and kind to the creationist woman in that one debate. Never knew there was a controversy about how bad he was. And it's odd that some statements about how religion is child abuse is negative when there are anti-vaxxers and people around who prefer prayers over treatment.

quote:

In the 17th century, a rare ability. Most characters able to swim will gain the ability through the character background generator, through their abilities or because their fathers were fishermen, sailors, boatmen, explorers, shipwrights or buccaneers. Some characters, particularly druids and fighter classes specializing in waterborne adventuring, will be able to swim through their sage abilities.

Swimming is not possible while more than 5% encumbered - clothing and magic armor (which still has weight) must be considered in all calculations. More than 5% encumbrance will drag creatures below the water surface, making it impossible to breathe.

Clarification - after sprinting, creatures can begin
sustained swimming, then exhausted swimming

The table above indicates the water speeds for medium-sized humanoids swimming with free hands and feet (see link). Sprinting indicates the speed that can sustained for a maximum distance of 3 hexes per point of constitution. Sustainedindicates the speed that can be managed for a distance of 20 hexes per point of constitution. Exhausted shows the distance that can be covered thereafter.

Sustained swimming with a strength of 3 or less or exhausted swimming requires aconstitution check once the character has covered the maximum distance indicated for six rounds (a 18 strength character would cover 10 hexes in six rounds). The time between constitution checks can be extended by swimming slower than this distance, but a speed of at least 2/3 hexes/round is the minimum forward speed. The distance between constitution checks cannot be extended. Failing this check will indicate that the humanoid's lung capacity/heart/muscles have given out, whereupon the character will slip helplessly below the surface of the water, unable to continue swimming.

Humanoids that are naked and greased may increase their sprinting speeds and endurance (potential distance) by 10%. Transformations that provide fins, flippers or webbed-fingers can increase all speeds and endurance by 30%. Gills or water breathing can increase maximum distances by 100%.

Swimming distances should be adjusted where currents and river flow affect freedom of travel.

Travel speeds will also be affected by wind. Reduce speed and endurance by 33% during a gentle breeze, 50% during a moderate breeze and 75% during a fresh breeze. No meaningful speed may be travelled in a strong breeze, near gale or gale (the swimmer will move about in a helpless path, buffeted by waves).

Treading Water does not allow any travel but will increase endurance by 50%.

Mors Rattus posted:

Richard Dawkins is a gigantic rear end in a top hat pretty much any time he isn't literally scheduled to be on camera. See also: his twitter feed, his statements about women in the atheist community, his statements on Muslims anywhere...

quote:

Basically... that is what it sounds like. Ars Magica is dying slowly. Every new year it gets a little more irrelevant than it was the year before. But nWoD and D&D4 died quickly. They put out new editions that were bad, and saw catastrophic drops in sales. Both struggled on for a few years, but the companies behind them eventually pulled the plug. 

Ars Magica can't afford to have a catastrophic drop in sales because of a poorly done edition. D&D and World of Darkness had their market fall by an order of magnitude. If that happened to Ars Magica, they wouldn't be able to afford printing costs. It's certainly up in the air how long they can afford to maintain their slow motion contraction - but they probably couldn't afford even one year of catastrophic collapse. 

The bottom line however is that I don't know why I would even check out Magic Shoe. Ars Magica made some ground breaking innovations in the late 80s, and the name carries some weight. If people said they had modernized Ars Magica, I would be interested to say the least. It might be good or bad, but they'd definitely have my attention. Magic Shoe is just one heartbreaker among many. It would take a fair amount of positive word of mouth before I even looked it up. Without the Ars Magica name it's just another fantasy game. 

-Frank

Chaltab posted:

And most religious people think anti-vaccers are dangerous idiots who put their children at serious risk. I won't say Dawkins has never had a good idea but he's shockingly ignorant about anything outside of evolutionary biology.

Which I suppose puts him one up on on a lot of TTRPG grogs since they're shockingly ignorant about everything including TTRPGs.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Isn't the nWoD doing alright? It produced about as many splats as its predecessor did, if I am not mistaken, and it has a rather decent following.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Isn't the nWoD doing alright? It produced about as many splats as its predecessor did, if I am not mistaken, and it has a rather decent following.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Isn't the nWoD doing alright? It produced about as many splats as its predecessor did, if I am not mistaken, and it has a rather decent following.

Plague of Hats posted:

According to Frank, anything that's not regularly stocked on an LGS shelf is a total failure.

Pope Guilty posted:

After WW was bought by CCP and CCP decided they didn't want to make RPG books, a WW guy named Rich Thomas started a company called Onyx Path that licensed the oWoD and nWoD from CCP and they've been putting out books for both, including a second edition of the nWoD rules and a couple of new nWoD splats so far in addition to starting 20th anniversary editions of the oWoD games. It'll never be the 90's again, but the World of Darkness seems to be doing pretty okay.

Chaltab posted:

Wait wouldn't that include the brilliant but tragically overlooked After Sundown?

Plague of Hats posted:

Edit ^^^ Oh, it's still vaporware according to his incredibly unique definition.

According to Frank, anything that's not regularly stocked on an LGS shelf is a total failure. Also, lots of things are "vaporware", including things that entirely met their schedules and came out years ago.

Maxwell Lord posted:

So how does 5e (which is on shelves everywhere) manage to meet that definition?

Pulsedragon posted:

Apparently they felt the need to update this. So I will too. I censored the email address in the first one because I'm not a jerk, but you know what, if they're putting it in stupid image macros then gently caress 'em.

Error 404 posted:

What

Rand Brittain posted:

Treating Onyx Path as separate from White Wolf from a writing perspective is bizarre, anyway. The IP ownership may have shifted around on paper, but it's still the same people writing for the same games.

some grog posted:

...the famous idea of Gary Gygax's that a D&D fight should resemble the sword fight between Robin Hood and Sir Guy of Gisborne in the Errol Flynn iteration.

Firstly, the notion that Errol Flynn-style combat is worth emulating is far from a universal notion. It bears no similarity to reality, it has no real risk or danger, and is extremely ill-suited to a dice-driven system like D&D.

That kind of combat exists for one purpose only: advancing the plot of a film. It's more the kind of combat you see in a story game, where the relative advantages and disadvantages in the fight reflect and comment on the dialog of the characters, and no-one gets hurt or dies except for maximizing the dramatic effect.

It is literally the exact opposite of old-school D&D combat, which is random and messy - people die and get hurt with no consideration for what that might mean for the "story". The dice reign supreme, as opposed to the story.

D&D combat bears exactly zero similarity to that style of combat, and that combat bears exactly zero similarity to real life (except that there are humans, and they have swords). That Gygax said that says it was his inspiration says little about his knowledge of combat or game design.

So much for the idea of Errol Flynn combat.

some grog posted:

Another good reason for preferring abstract combat is just that realism may be something of a fool's errand.

It may be, but as I wrote before here, realism is to be infinitely preferred to not-realism (all other things being equal).

The short version, for the lazy, is that if the system isn't realistic, then the players need to master the system to make sensible choices. The more realistic the system, the more the players can leverage their knowledge of the real world.

For example, in reality, dropping a 25lb 10ft down onton someone's head would probably at the very least stun them, and possibly knock them out cold, maybe even kill them.

In D&D, it would have one of two effects: none, or kill them stone dead. Since that's not what would happen in the real world, a player needs to know the system well enough to understand that even though in the real world X would happen, Y will happen in the game.

some grog posted:

I really like the idea of Western Martial Arts but I'm not persuaded that they are entirely realistic; until people start actually fighting to the death using these techniques, and agreeing that if they are injured they will only use medical techniques that were in use in the 14th century, I think that "what happens in a real sword fight" is still a matter of considerable conjecture and will likely remain so.

Sorry, but that's just ignorant. I don't really know what else to say to that.

Your ignorant, uninformed opinion based on literally nothing compared to 30 years of dedicated scholarship and experiment? It's easy to see where the weight of evidence is, and it's not on your side.

I mean, what would you think if I said something like (I seem to recall that your field is philosophy of law, or something related - apologies if it's not), "I really like the idea of the philosophy of law, but I think that scholarship in that field has revealed nothing and that everyone who has ever studied it has completely wasted their time"?

That's literally what you just said about students of historical Western martial arts.

Bob Quixote posted:

Were these the guys doing those games that were essentially just White Wolf games but with different titles? I remember seeing the images from the covers getting posted a few years back but I can't remember any specific detail for the life of me.

Pulsedragon posted:

Apparently they felt the need to update this. So I will too. I censored the email address in the first one because I'm not a jerk, but you know what, if they're putting it in stupid image macros then gently caress 'em.

Pulsedragon posted:

Apparently they felt the need to update this. So I will too. I censored the email address in the first one because I'm not a jerk, but you know what, if they're putting it in stupid image macros then gently caress 'em.

moths posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

How far off the mark would my suspicion be that a big reason for Dungeon World explicitly writing "standard DMing poo poo except with its own terminology" is specifically because grognards are so hidebound to D&D that it's essentially a form of deprogramming?

Night10194 posted:

Well, there's poo poo That Didn't Happen right there. Christ, that reads like a terrible fanfiction.

Bob Quixote posted:

The guy who invented the game of pretend fantasy-man's combat didn't do it right because he didn't do it how I would have done it.

gradenko_2000 posted:

How far off the mark would my suspicion be that a big reason for Dungeon World explicitly writing "standard DMing poo poo except with its own terminology" is specifically because grognards are so hidebound to D&D that it's essentially a form of deprogramming?

Pope Guilty posted:

It actually did happen, and then there was a massive internet blowup about how loving creepy and horrible it was.

osirisisdead posted:

Idk, a number of girls have been pretty forward at conventions and otherwise.

It's not always tits. Sometimes kisses, sometimes free hugs, sometimes "touch them anywhere covered by their cosplay outfit", sometime it has to do with violet wands, but maybe y'all haven't been invited to the same convention parties as me...

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Otisburg posted:

You would think "a thread where we point out dumb elfgame opinions and say 'get a load of this guy'" wouldn't be a diffucult concept yet here we are.

Much as I groused at it, maybe the grog tax supported needed thread infrastructure and basic services like sanitation.

Actual Discussion posted:

This solution is a good one but it ignores a large problem which is that Martial players NEVER actually get to play the concept they wanted: a character who is a great combatant.

Grog posted:

Who gives a poo poo what they want? No, seriously, in the context of designing a framework (i.e. a TTRPG) that will help users create stories that appeal to themselves and more importantly the people around them, who gives a poo poo what they want?

Serious action-adventure high fantasy has been trending away from the determined, callow or gritty mundane badass Everyman protagonist for quite some time now. Characters like Sokka are a last gasp of a dying paradigm and will soon only exist in deliberately retreaux high fantasy like the DC Conan comics and the Hobbit movies. And I say that it's for a good reason.

Unfortunately, there does exist a band of power in which Madmartigan is the equal of Willow and even where James Bond Jr. is the equal of Harry Potter. And this band can exist without the plot or author cheating for the characters. However, I claim that this band shouldn't be extended by looking for ways to universalize magical and reduce the effective of specialists: but instead the band should be shrunk. Even in Casterfinder pure martials have a place in the game at level 5 -- I think that this doesn't go far enough. They should be retired by level 3, tops. Instead of that silliness where a 7th level muggle can go up against a hill giant or a troll with no magic and have a non-zero chance of winning, they should get the living poo poo kicked out of them. Fights against anything stronger than a bugbear when you don't have magic should go like this. Then maybe people will stop chasing rainbows and twisting the games into knots to enable these worthless goatfelchers' uselessness addiction.