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Alien Rope Burn posted:The Genius: Rules of the Game. That show was great. When I said to people who know me "oh, I've been watching a good reality show lately," they looked at me like "Who are you and what did you do with Jim?" When I explained it was Korean and about games and starring a professional Starcraft player, they realised that I was still my old hopelessly nerdy self.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:48
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Night10194 posted:In fairness, it sounds like the white guys got some pretty cool hooks to work with there. No pun intended. I don't think it was ever meant to be some sort of in-your-face HEY CHECK IT OUT IT'S LIKE IF RACISM WAS REVERSED thing, Stolze makes a point of noting that there's no real history of ethnicity-based slavery or genocide going on in the setting, simply that every culture views themselves as the apex of civilization and every other culture as filthy barbarian savages.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:51
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Kai Tave posted:I don't think it was ever meant to be some sort of in-your-face HEY CHECK IT OUT IT'S LIKE IF RACISM WAS REVERSED thing, Stolze makes a point of noting that there's no real history of ethnicity-based slavery or genocide going on in the setting, simply that every culture views themselves as the apex of civilization and every other culture as filthy barbarian savages. Oh, yeah, I was more just saying a culture that reminds me of Longshoreman X is instantly interesting to me.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:54
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Night10194 posted:Oh, yeah, I was more just saying a culture that reminds me of Longshoreman X is instantly interesting to me. The Ob-Lobs (said seafarers) get a pretty extensive writeup in one of the supplements that Stolze effectively crowdfunded before Kickstarter using the "ransom" model. He goes into a lot of detail on their language which is written in spirals and where the importance of a concept is reflected in how many syllables it gets as a word, which means that the name "Ob-Lobs" which everyone refers to them by since their peoples' actual name is like a dozen syllables long is pretty much an insult by their standards (two syllables, c'mon, you give at least five to someone you don't really know that well) but they tolerate it because hey, these guys are all dumb assholes anyway and at least their money spends good. They have a couple of fighting styles to call their own, one using cargo-loading hooks (or weaponized versions thereof) and one that's basically like a shipboard form of capoeira.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:06
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Night10194 posted:Oh, yeah, I was more just saying a culture that reminds me of Longshoreman X is instantly interesting to me. Now I'm going to have to watch that again. Damnit. This is what I get for spending way too much time on LP a few years back - a huge repository of references no one will get.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:11
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Night10194 posted:In fairness, it sounds like the white guys got some pretty cool hooks to work with there. No pun intended. As a cannibal barbarian werewolf I agree.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:32
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Anyone ever get burnt out about discussing RPGs instead of playing them but they just can't get a group together? I feel like I'm at that point right now.Kai Tave posted:I will always remember the RPGPundit for coining the term "venisonocracy." I feel like cervidocracy would be better. The choice of leadership is made by a living deer after all, not a stew. Kai Tave posted:I don't think it was ever meant to be some sort of in-your-face HEY CHECK IT OUT IT'S LIKE IF RACISM WAS REVERSED thing, Stolze makes a point of noting that there's no real history of ethnicity-based slavery or genocide going on in the setting, simply that every culture views themselves as the apex of civilization and every other culture as filthy barbarian savages. Thank god for that because Farnham's Freehold poo poo is just the worst.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:10
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Lightning Lord posted:Anyone ever get burnt out about discussing RPGs instead of playing them but they just can't get a group together? I feel like I'm at that point right now. I PbP a lot largely because my work schedule prevents me from committing to a regular weekly game meetup. It's been a couple-few years since my last tabletop RPG group and I'm interested in finding the time to do so again, but like you said there's getting a group together and I was lucky since the last one was sort of an outgrowth of me moving to a larger city and also knowing some of the people there beforehand, having to cultivate a new group again from scratch is one of those things that kind of makes me a little tired just thinking about it.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:30
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I've been PbPing a bit, which isn't usually my thing, but every group I know IRL is currently playing D&D. That used to be my thing, but a combination of stuffs seems to have brought out the dull side of these groups and I just can't get excited about slogging through endless same-ish combats to retrieve forgettable macguffins for forgotten realms NPCs I don't care about. On the upside, my recent experience showed me that Dungeon World and Apocalypse World (and I'm guessing PbtA stuff in general) play a lot smoother in PbP than D&D or oWoD which are the only things I've tried online before, so I might start getting involved in more online RPGing which would be nice.
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Jun 29, 2015 09:59
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unseenlibrarian posted:Oh god that loving thread. Night10194 posted:Oh, yeah, I was more just saying a culture that reminds me of Longshoreman X is instantly interesting to me. The Truils are like semi-nomadic Native Americans, except white, and also like Picts kind of. Their story hasn't played out like the Indian Wars for a couple reasons, to make a long story short. One is that their lands aren't called the Truil Wastes for nothing, so none of their neighbours can get a political mandate to spend vast resources to thoroughly conquer them. Two, the Truils are real loving scary. REIGN is cool.
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Jun 29, 2015 10:20
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The ob-lobs and truils are also just thinly veiled reimaginings of goblins and trolls. Part of the purpose of the default REIGN setting was to do a fantasy setting where there explicitly aren't different races, just different cultures and to repudiate the semi-racist underpinnings of fantasy races in the first place.
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Jun 29, 2015 10:45
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It's worth noting that the only Reign sourcebook thing that came close to not crowdsourcing itself was the one that -did- have all the standard fantasy races and no humans.
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Jun 29, 2015 10:49
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Lightning Lord posted:I feel like cervidocracy would be better. If i'd have just read this bit I would have assumed it was a Pundit bash on women and SJWs.
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Jun 29, 2015 11:26
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Is there anything interesting to Dindavara other than being black notjapan?
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Jun 29, 2015 11:32
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Lightning Lord posted:Anyone ever get burnt out about discussing RPGs instead of playing them but they just can't get a group together? I feel like I'm at that point right now. I'd rather blow my brains off with a shotgun than spend more time writing enormous paragraphs and reading Kotaku and Polygon articles about videogames than playing them and hell if I'd waste my time doing something for a hobby I care even less.
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Jun 29, 2015 11:51
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Dindarva's not really 'not Japan' unless you zero in on how they mythologize swordmaking to the exclusion of all else. (Fun fact: the -really- mythologize swords and swordmaking: Their name in their own language basically means "Those guys with the swords".) But: One of their big things is "Noblesse oblige' to the point of basically infantilizing the peasantry; the noble class expects nothing of the working class and thinks of them as children that must be protected and cared for. And because the peasants are regarded as children, the nobles are expected to be upright paragons of virtue to show them the way. Their conflict with Uld is mostly ideological; Ulds are "What if the prosperity gospel got established among medieval trade guilds" and thus treat being poor as a moral failing. The Dindarvans meanwhile are all "Sure, the peasants are helpless babies but that's why you have to take care of them." (Also the Uldish blacksmiths have a faction that keep trying to steal Dindarvan smithing secrets.) They take it seriously, too; the Dindarvan school of magic that's not about swordsmithing, the Stoneheart guardians, is exclusively made up of failed nobility; folks who showed the sort of moral weakness expect of peasants. So they cave in their chests with loving boulders to replace their hearts to try and become the sort of paragons they're expected to be.
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Jun 29, 2015 12:03
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Lichtenstein posted:Is there anything interesting to Dindavara other than being black notjapan? I like that the default time period the book is set in is about to be plunged into a massive war between Dindavara and the Empire because the treaty that was signed between them after the last war is worded something like "and there shall be peace between our nations for as long as we live, and our children, our children's children and their children" which the Imperials took to mean "in perpetuity" and the Dindavarans have been literally counting and are making lots of noise that the last old man is about to die and then it's on. Other cool things they have include Dindavaran Death Forging, the magic school of quenching swords into living beings (up to and including full-blown demons) when you make them to get kek magic swords; Stoneheart Guardians who are pretty much religious fanatics whose magic school turns them into a psychopath who cannot fall asleep; the only formal military training program in the entire world; Game of Thrones happening between shockingly well armed houses of nobles. They're sort of aesthetically feudal japan but I'd really liken their culture more to Sparta. Military service is literally everything and the nobility are defined by the art of war and combat. I believe the stated reason for why peasants aren't real people is because they are not allowed to hold swords. Foreigners are obviously evil because some of them use swords and they definitely haven't been given the okay by the Sword-Father.
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Jun 29, 2015 12:35
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Dindavara is definitely not my favourite of the major nations, but I think the most interesting thing to be found there is the friction between their ideology and their reality. Their philosophy says that they have a manifest destiny to conquer the world in order to save it, because only noble Dindavarans are fit to rule; peasants are like children, and foreigners aren't evil, they're like children who have never had good parents. The Dindavarans who are most likely to drink this Honorable Samurai Kool-Aid are blind fanatics, chickenhawks with something to gain from war, or sheltered nobles who have never had contact with foreigners. So there's a tug of war between those fools and the Dindavarans who are skeptical, worldly, or just pragmatic enough to know that spilling gallons of noble blood into the soil is too high a price to pay for a chunk of the Truil Wastes.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:27
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Jun 29, 2015 19:12
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Jun 29, 2015 19:21
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Sion posted:Interesting. Tell me more~
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Jun 29, 2015 22:11
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REIGN doesn't even make a big deal out of its setting. The women cavalry thing is a sidebar, a curiosity. If I remember it right, it's only halfway through the book that it mentions that oh, by the way, everyone's black, and it's over in a sentence or two. None of the things people make Issues out of are treated as Issues in the book. The book just wants to chill and talk about clothing and food and martial arts and how wizards are creepy people and cool plot hooks based on Terminator 2 demons. REIGN is great.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:44
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Sounds like Reign needs more art.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:48
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Lightning Lord posted:Anyone ever get burnt out about discussing RPGs instead of playing them but they just can't get a group together? I feel like I'm at that point right now. God, don't I know it. Part of why I stopped going to TGD for a while. That said, it's worse for me because I'm a massive perfectionist, and not a terribly hard worker. And then I insist on heavily custom settings or even entirely homebrewed systems, which makes the whole thing even more of a hassle. Even my relatively-normal 13th Age game is stalling because of my massive custom Icons list and setting doc, let alone any of the systems I have planned with great stuff I really wanna run. Cyphoderus posted:REIGN doesn't even make a big deal out of its setting. The women cavalry thing is a sidebar, a curiosity. If I remember it right, it's only halfway through the book that it mentions that oh, by the way, everyone's black, and it's over in a sentence or two. None of the things people make Issues out of are treated as Issues in the book. The book just wants to chill and talk about clothing and food and martial arts and how wizards are creepy people and cool plot hooks based on Terminator 2 demons. I can get behind this. More games need to be like that, I think! Actually, that's something that annoyed me recently, because I was thinking I should figure out what Blue Rose is all about, and then I go to its Kickstarter page and there was basically nothing about its actual setting beyond the inclusiveness posturing. Mind you, that's probably a decent plan for making the right kind of nerds mad, and I assume most of the people donating are already in the know, but it's not something that makes me happy in the general sense. I mean, it's an RPG! That an RPG doesn't poo poo on the queertocracy is a big thing for me, but other than that, I can run my weird sapphic dystopias in just about anything. I want to know more about your setting than how inclusive it is, because my will as a GM will make anything inclusive - give me more. Queen Fiona fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 22:54
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I'd rather blow my brains off with a shotgun than spend more time writing enormous paragraphs and reading Kotaku and Polygon articles about videogames than playing them and hell if I'd waste my time doing something for a hobby I care even less. Reasonable.
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Jun 29, 2015 23:57
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Queen Fiona posted:I can get behind this. More games need to be like that, I think! I don't recall the first edition of Blue Rose really hammering on about the "gays exist" thing, it was there and got like a handful of mentions and that was it. The elevator pitch for Blue Rose was more "what if someone made a d20 game but based more on Mercedes Lackey and Diane Duane than R.E. Howard and Tolkien?"
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Jun 30, 2015 01:22
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Kai Tave posted:I don't recall the first edition of Blue Rose really hammering on about the "gays exist" thing, it was there and got like a handful of mentions and that was it. The elevator pitch for Blue Rose was more "what if someone made a d20 game but based more on Mercedes Lackey and Diane Duane than R.E. Howard and Tolkien?" Yeah, no. I read about it in a previous link in a thread - that it was just a handful of references and a general attitude, and people took it out of proportion. Like people say, it's just something that makes certain kinds of nerds really mad. It's more a direct criticism of the Kickstarter than the game itself, and my frustration at how little people actually seem to talk about it (good or bad).
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Jun 30, 2015 04:34
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Yea it's almost as if the dudes getting butthurt about it had some kinda bigotry or something. Yea, there were a few bits that were just 'yea in this world gays are a thing and the good guys accept them because, ya know, they're the good guys' and those got blown into "WELCOME TO BLUE ROSE HERE'S YOUR MANDATORY BUTTPLUGS AND POPPERS GET WILD
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Jun 30, 2015 05:30
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Tatum Girlparts posted:MANDATORY BUTTPLUGS
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Jun 30, 2015 05:43
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Yea it's almost as if the dudes getting butthurt about it had some kinda bigotry or something. To be fair, if groggy sexual content RPGs are any indication, you're either allowed no sexuality at all (unless you're a female monster or sex worker or something), or sex all the time. This confusing middle ground of accepting people actually having relationships regardless of sex is probably making them think it's the latter?
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Jun 30, 2015 05:46
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I mean really, the biggest impression I took away from Blue Rose is that the True20 system was just really, really, really boring. I know people are looking askance at AGE but honestly, it's not like the first version of the game was much better in terms of not being an extremely derivative fantasy gaming system. I'm all in favor of fantasy settings that feature playable psychic sentient animals (or just talking animals in general) and look to other examples of fantasy literature for inspiration instead of drawing on the same well again and again, but for all the furor surrounding it Blue Rose wasn't really that thrilling.
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Jun 30, 2015 05:53
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Not having sex crap on your tabletop game is the best choice all things considered.
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Jun 30, 2015 05:56
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Queen Fiona posted:Actually, that's something that annoyed me recently, because I was thinking I should figure out what Blue Rose is all about, and then I go to its Kickstarter page and there was basically nothing about its actual setting beyond the inclusiveness posturing. Mind you, that's probably a decent plan for making the right kind of nerds mad, and I assume most of the people donating are already in the know, but it's not something that makes me happy in the general sense. This is a very valid criticism, actually. It gives the impression that Blue Rose has nothing to offer apart from a gay-friendly setting; as much as you should not need GM meddling to get something like that, I would have loved to get a better idea of what is going on in Aldis without having to do research on my own. How many new players will not back it because they have no idea what sort of settima they are getting?
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Jun 30, 2015 07:18
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Not having sex crap on your tabletop game is the best choice all things considered.
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Jun 30, 2015 08:23
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really you shouldn't be letting anything crap on your tabletop games, that's unsanitary
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Jun 30, 2015 08:41
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REIGN had one of the nations of the Empire have a tradition of nudism with no fuss nor sexual undertones whatsoever.
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Jun 30, 2015 08:45
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Tollymain posted:really you shouldn't be letting anything crap on your tabletop games, that's unsanitary
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Jun 30, 2015 08:57
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http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/06/29/tabletop-rpg-award-nominates-copyright-infringing-game-multiple-awards/quote:Today, one of the few awards in tabletop roleplaying games announced its 2015 award nominees. There are some really good games that are in the running for ENnies awards, but as I went over the list a different story emerged. The judges at the ENnies awards managed to not once, not twice but three times nominate Mass Effect: The Fate RPG. It is up for Best Electronic Book, Best Free Product and Product of The Year.
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Jun 30, 2015 13:33
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The ennies are worthless poo poo, film at eleven.
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Jun 30, 2015 13:36
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They really should just have one Ennie Award and present it to Pathfinder every year. It would save a lot of time and I wouldn't have to hear about the Ennies so often.
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Jun 30, 2015 13:44
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