TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

I feel the need to tell more people that I made a Maid class for Dungeon World. The good (?) news is that I'm starting some freelance work so I'll have less time to put into increasingly weird little RPG things.

Quarex posted:

I am only a minor Gygax apologist (really I am just a general apologist), but I know a fair number of people thought Dangerous Journeys had a lot of great ideas ...even if, well, it was apparently even more complicated than AD&D, unsurprisingly. Though I suppose that would speak to his strength as an Idea Man rather than an actual designer, now that I type it out. Certainly I do not know many people who spoke praise of Lejendary Adventure. And certainly nobody liked Cyborg Commando.

For the time, I believe his actual-wargames were fairly well-received? Though that is pre-D&D for the most (entire?) part.

To me the thing with big Gygax is that he was bad at figuring out what to write down and how. The original D&D game that he published was simply not playable per se as written, but by all accounts he was a pretty amazing DM, and not just by virtue of having been one of the first to ever attempt to do such a thing. Some parts of OD&D are incredibly fine-tuned, but virtually no part of it is well-explained, hence we have people repeating the general patterns he established even while making changes that make those old patterns obsolete or actively harmful.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 02:31

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:54

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

Not sure if this is the right thread for it, but a fan went and made online employee, boss, and store generators for Retail Magic.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2014 15:40

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

AmiYumi posted:

@Ewen Cluney: I've been wondering, do you still have any contact with Kamiya? Has he had any reaction/impressions to how the English-speaking world has taken to his games, or to any of the new stuff you and others have made for them?

He's been pretty insanely busy with his own current projects (Nechronica and his Ma-Gungi card game), so while I'm still in contact with him, it's mainly business stuff, but he's generally happy to hear that his games are succeeding, a little jealous of the quality of the layout Clay Gardner did for us, and enough of a fan of our original material that he said he could see doing a Japanese translation at some point. (Though there are apparently fan translations, and one guy has been running online games of GSS making heavy use of our original material.)

Lynx Winters posted:

Oh this is pretty great! I ran a one-shot of Retail Magic last week when two of my players were out of town and I thought it was really fun but one of the players was being a grumpy Gus about it.

That's pretty phenomenal, and pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when I made the game.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2014 21:05

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

Siivola posted:

Beyond a certain threshold, ultraviolence is inherently funny.

Also, right now I'm thinking a big failing of D&D-style heartbreakers (including D&D itself) is that the combat part of the game works really hard to disconnect itself from the discussion that makes up the meat of playing role-playing games. There's all these extra rules on who gets to talk when and say what and how many charges you've got left and can I use Ability X to even do this and ~phhhbbtttt~. You basically have to switch between two different dialects - hell, whole languages - of talking RPG to solve the cool puzzle-boss while staying in-character.

Apocalypse World is pretty cool because it makes up its own weird cant of RPG and insists on talking about everything in the game in that weirdspeak.

I should play more and grog less.

Although I can appreciate a fun tactical combat system, right now I'm finding RPGs that step away from complicated combat rules really refreshing. Apocalypse World does a nice job of just getting rid of the distinction between combat and not-combat (by making combat work much more like other stuff), and the game I'm working on right now just plain boils combat down to "make a few rolls, figure out the battle's implications for the story, move on," which I'm really liking.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 03:12

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

Tollymain posted:

is meikyuu kingdom a kingdom builder?

Pretty much. It never stops having dungeon crawls, but the actual purpose of the dungeon crawls is to conquer territory and collect materials to expand your kingdom, which is all handled in about the same level of mechanical detail as fighting, complete with weird random tables to roll on.

Kai Tave posted:

Is Meikyuu Kingdom ever getting a finalized English translation?

You'll have to bug adelantefax about that. :P

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 03:14

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:54

Ewen Cluney: May 8, 2012; Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

My parents got me a copy of Say Bye to the Villains (the card game by Seiji Kanai) because it was on my Amazon wish list, and a friend of mine got me a Noteboard, which'll be really cool whenever I have a use for it. I'll probably get some more tabletop goodies whenever I'm able to hang out with my other tabletop friends. Oh, and I got a boxed set of the first four Choose Your Own Adventure books, since I want to understand the medium better and get into making gamebooks and Twine games a bit, though early CYOA has a lot of weird acid trip stuff.

I had a pretty weird year overall, and I'm all ready for 2015.

So yeah. A belated Merry Christmas guys.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 18:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.