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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, this. Personally most games of anything I've run in systems without any sort of genre enforcement mechanics lean towards the silly. Like, despite the tone the materials try to convey, my Vampire games all become Blade: the RPG. Of course I encourage this, so I might not be the best person to chime in here. (but I will anyway!)
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Dec 14, 2014 00:36
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Slimnoid posted:That's the thing, though. It was neat to read but not useful to play in. It was background poo poo that very rarely, if ever, saw any sort of play; there was no reason to go to the elemental plane of salt because it'd just loving kill you. Same with a lot of the planes actually. They weren't very fun. No, I agree with MartianAgitator. Background poo poo is fine. Not everything needs to be 100% played in all the time. Sometimes just being part of the weirdness of a setting is fine. Also, the Plane of Salt is a bad example of poo poo that needed to be cut. We aren't talking about something like a giant block of history that scholars of the setting used as weapons against people who just wanted to slay orcs, or that useless "weapons lose their pluses" rule, or even Ravenloft's giant very specific list of which spells you are punished for casting in the Demiplane of Dread when it's totally fine everywhere else. We're talking about a place where salt elementals came from. And the fact that it killed your rear end dead by basically pickling characters is cool - not only does that have the potential to be a really memorable way for a PC to die, because the Inner Planes are so alien they were rarely if ever used like "haha you teleport there now ur ded lol" (at least in my experience, maybe someone else has a tale of how the evil DM hid a portal to the Plane of Dust in the pub's door or something) but it's a challenge. As in, "This place kills you dead but are you bad enough to figure out how to go there and live because that's where the bad guys have their cool fort made out of a giant salt crystal?" It's not useless because anything that fires the imagination isn't ever useless. I'm not against not having it (Mystara, D&D's greatest setting, just has the four classical elements as Inner Planes) but its kind of silly to point at it and say that this is why 1e/2e was bad when there are a thousand other, better reasons, when I could come up with an awesome Plane of Salt adventure. Hell I'd throw the Plane of Salt into the Elemental Chaos if I ever use the 4e cosmology again. But I'd probably make it the Plain of Salt. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 19:23
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Kai Tave posted:It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. "There is a magical dimension where salt monsters come from that will generally kill people if they go there" is not a sprawling pseudo-Tolkienesque detail at all, though. I guess it all boils down to whether or not you feel every detail of a published setting has to be immediately 100% gameable out of the box without any touching from the GM or players. I mean it's the loving Plane of Salt, it's not that big of a deal, and I get that it represents Gygaxian naturalism to you because it springs from the interactions between energy and all that, but it really feels like railing against old design for the sake of railing against old design. Who has ever been hosed over by the elemental planes? I don't mean looked at the section of Manual of the Planes or Planescape that detailed it and yawned, I mean who has had their gaming totally upended by it in the same manner as Forgotten Realms canon? I'm not even against not using it, or versions of D&D cosmology that don't have it. I'm just finding it odd that people are acting like it's this inexcusable design flaw, and that people are so salty about it.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:48
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Covok posted:Thank you for saying that. As someone who has a family member with autism, I really get tired of people using the term for a form of autism as a pejorative. I will also thank you, Libertad, for the same reason. While a mercantile campaign that arose from one long string of "DM May I?" because the players have to cajole play out of the DM sounds like the worst, I don't think All About the GPs, Baby is the worst D&D campaign ever. Instead of bean counting, run a big campaign about owning a caravan or being local mobsters who corner the market on grain, while threatening local farmers for protection all "Would be a shame if anything happened to your wheat... think of the poor kids who'd go to bed starving without their bread!" Oh, and I think a table would be useful for random events if you're running a caravan campaign. A caravan seems like a really good candidate for having random poo poo to happen to the PCs and not having it be ultra dull. Like maybe your wagon wheel breaks which leads lizard men disguised as bushes to ambush. You come across a talking pig who offers his accounting services. Things like that. I don't see it as particularly simulationist.
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Dec 16, 2014 12:03
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FMguru posted:"Nerds with no business sense, sometimes shading towards scam artistry" is a sadly recurring theme in RPG history. Like James Shipman of Outlaw Press, that dude who outright steals Tunnels and Trolls books, puts his name on them and sells them.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:39
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Covok posted:That is straight up criminal and illegal. Why hasn't T&T put a C&D on his P&S? They've tried, he just laughs. He seems to be proud of being a thief. Ken St. Andre says that it's not worth the money to pursue in court. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/09/23/scamwatch-followup-tunnels-and-trolls-publisher-speaks-about-outlaw-press/ EDIT: When Shipman was confronted with stealing art for another book, his response was A Scumbag posted:I really don’t care. Your item(s) will remain there forever. Copies are selling very good. Over 50 copies sold to date. I’ll probably soon be adding Hobb Sized Adventures and Angry Flowers to my web site as soon as I get the layout finished.
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Dec 23, 2014 03:12
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moths posted:Athas used to be inaccessible from any other realm, which I took as meaning it existed in the future, way at the end of the D&D multiverse. Everything else had already died and burnt out, all that remained anywhere was a chunk of sand and rock whose inhabitants are fighting over the scraps. That makes sense since it's kind of sort of D&D's answer to Vance's Dying Earth.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:38
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Quarex posted:Well, he has certainly heard of at least one modern game; when I was talking to him about gaming at the Wasteland 2 release party Well he is a writer on Torment: Tides of Numenara, so it's impossible for him to be unfamiliar with the game. I don't know if I'd consider myself a fan of Numenara (although it's possbile I'll get more interested in the setting since I am a huge fan of Torment and Avellone in general) I certainly don't feel excited about the system. However I do like how it's acting as sort of a gateway to the wider RPG world for many people who only have had D&D on their radar. Sort of an "Oh yeah, there are other RPGs aren't there?" thanks to it being a creation of Cook. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but that's the reaction I've seen.
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Dec 24, 2014 18:30
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he mentioned how much he loves the frequent games of Numenera he gets to play (I assume with other people at Obsidian Entertainment, not just for his own amusement). I am sure I can imagine the reaction in this subforum to that, though.