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First RPG I bought, and attempted (badly) to run was the original Daedalus Press edition of Feng Shui. In retrospect this probably laid the groundwork for many of my elfgaming tastes and opinions going forward.
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Jun 1, 2015 23:03
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gourdcaptain posted:Plus, there was also Skip Williams at WoTC, who hated the idea of sorcerers, sabotaged them to make them worse, and after his erroneous Sage Advice during 3.0e column saying Sorcerers couldn't use Quicken Spell for some really rules-lawyer-y and false reasons (lengthened time of casting, and him misunderstanding the difference between a full-round action and an action lasting a full round) was widely disparaged he then hardcoded his bad ruling into 3.5e if I remember correctly. The bizarre pettiness of some game designers continues to astound me. (Or when they put a class/splat in the hands of someone who utterly loathes the mechanical underpinnings of it.) A lot of what goes on in legacy RPG products where it's more than one guy making his own game but multiple people working on a project, especially if that project goes on to multiple editions, reminds me a lot of the poo poo that goes on in American superhero comics, where one person can spend months or years writing something out only for the next guy in line to go "no this is dumb and sucks, check this out" and immediately proceed to set about dismantling or undermining what came before. e; which isn't to say that putting a new spin on things is always bad, sometimes it's quite good and reasonable, but it's not too hard to figure out which stuff is the result of someone just looking to put their own spin on things and which stuff is the result of petty feuds and grudges.
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Jun 11, 2015 08:12
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Simian_Prime posted:Bummed out that the DCC PbP game died on the vine. I was having fun with my literal 0-level poo poo-farmer based upon Rick Santorum. Was it just usual PbP turnover or is DCC difficult/weird to run over forums for some reason?
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Jun 24, 2015 04:31
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I'm imagining that Bestow Weapon Proficiency was the brainchild of someone who had a player complain once that all the random magic loot they rolled was for stuff they had no proficiency in and so they got to thinking "Hmm, how can I best go about addressing this problem heyyyyyy I know" and the rest is history.
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Jun 24, 2015 07:11
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My Lovely Horse posted:And yet I'm still having fun playing it. I think it's a reptile brain "numbers go up" thing. What's more, I'm starting to think I could actually have fun playing 3.5 again despite all the evidence to the contrary. Probably should give it a rest before I do something stupid. Imagine wading through all the poo poo you just mentioned only with 1000% more tedium and also you have to block off your Saturdays in order to do it.
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Jun 26, 2015 08:34
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Kellsterik posted:Definitely, but I think the imagery of an enchanted collar being put around your neck because you defied the government suggests something different from say, an herbal remedy. I agree, they should go back to the tried and true method of dealing with repeat violent criminals and simply executing them. Plus think of the money you'll save on enchanted collars, so it's not just more wholesome, it's fiscally responsible too. This right here is basically the number one problem with Blue Rose...it's not the magic deer, it's not gay people being gay, it's that every time people used to lovely game writers and their cliche "twists" about how the good guy kingdom is SECRETLY EVIL WOAH get their hands on it they simply can't accept the idea that no, maybe the good guy kingdom is just good and maybe a magical peace collar that's smart enough to allow you to defend yourself but won't let you continue to be a serial killer or lash out at others with your uncontrollable violent temper is probably way better than execution or imprisonment or having your hands chopped off or whatever, but no, obviously the people with these collars are going to be glassy-eyed lobotomized zombie thralls Psychic counseling that helps people? It must be an INSIDIOUS PLOT to engineer an army of sleeper agents! All that stuff they say about Jarzon being a bunch of jerks? Propaganda! What is the magic deer's secret agenda anyway!? You could probably make a drinking game out of it, every time you read something in Blue Rose where it's obvious another RPG writer would have made something good-seeming secretly "too good to be true" or "subverted" things by having it be a secret evil plot or part of some sinister conspiracy, take a shot.
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Jun 26, 2015 19:23
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I guess they could just have quietly ignored it and not mentioned it, but I guarantee that the first thing a bunch of gamers would have asked upon reading about Aldis is "okay but what do they do to criminals? What do they do to thieves or murderers (or rapists because, y'know, elfgames)? Does everybody just get along perfectly because of inherent goodness and the magic deer? This is bullshit!" And the next thing you know you've got threads full of people writing essays on their really cool subversive twist idea of how Aldis shuffles its undesirables off to concentration camps or shoves them all in a giant bottomless pit somewhere, and Jarzon are the secret good guys of the setting fighting against the Aldis Imperium's secret tyranny. I mean not to pick on you specifically here but nowhere in the mention of peace torcs or the description of the spell did it mention glassy eyes and forgetting your own name, but that's the first thing your mind went to when you saw that even though it's entirely unsupported by the text.
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Jun 26, 2015 19:51
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oriongates posted:You know what, I'm happy that I have absolutely no knowledge of Blue Rose, not because it sounds like a bad game but because it means the constant, apparently random, references everyone makes to "magic deer" makes this whole conversation wonderfully surreal. I will always remember the RPGPundit for coining the term "venisonocracy."
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Jun 27, 2015 05:38
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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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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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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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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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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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