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When can 2016 be over yet, gently caress gently caress gently caress. Fisher was a genuinely amazing person and she has died way too young. Thanks for making a new thread. A fresh start for a new year might be for the best anyway. I still didn't get to see star wars yet, nearly went yesterday but the showtimes we wanted were sold out.
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Dec 27, 2016 21:43
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See, another benefit of this being someone else's thread is I can just leave and not read it and not feel like I'm neglecting something I'm responsible for.
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Dec 28, 2016 02:31
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The average British pilot in WW1 lasted about one battle. "Realistic" depends on context and details and the star wars films have generally portrayed only desperate space battles in which an insurgency decides it has to expose itself to the full brunt of a superpower, with the casualties that come with it, because of what was at stake at that particular moment. That said, space battles in a space movie don't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) "realistic," they need to be dramatic and exciting and not break immersion. Probably a "realistic" space battle would take place between combatants entirely out of visual range of one another and mostly involve a lot of trigonometry. Also hi thread, I finally got to see the new star wars movie, so I'm able to come back into the star wars spoiler thread. I liked it. I thought it was a pretty good movie. I suspect there's another half hour or so of movie that got left on the cutting floor, so hopefully there will be a director's cut at some point. I see GW is still bad, that's interesting. Chill la Chill posted:As far as I know there weren't just two expunged first founding legions in 40k, but easily a thousand. And perhaps 100 times that many successor chapters. And while important bits of 40k history were written like legends, they really skimped out on the Betrayal aboard that one ship where the now-chaos marine stabbed the emperor. I've heard at least 30 people talk about how their marines were actually on that ship, and that's just a small sample, so that ship was inconceivably larger than Noah's Ark! My memory was that there were supposed to be (exactly?) 1000 chapters of Space Marines in the Imperium. GW has never even named more than maybe 200 of them, so that leaves enough that no gamer who ever made up their own chapter could ever be straight-up contradicted by the canon. Unfortunately, GW went down a modeling path of gradually eliminating generic space marine models - used to be you mostly could only buy chapter-agnostic little dudes, plus a smattering of special characters etc. from various factions. But then in the 1990s, more and more chapter-specific models started to proliferate, encouraging players to play one of the canonical chapters instead of making up their own. These days I have no idea if it's even possible to buy official GW models of a complete fieldable space marine army containing no chapter-specific models? I could never afford to get into 40k when I was a teenager so I didn't even try, but I still made up chapter names and doodles my own little chapter insignia in my lined notebooks during class instead of paying attention. Nerds love to theorize about their favorite settings, but if the only space you leave them is your already ridiculously over-described major plots and specific planets, then all they can do is insert their terrible fanfic ideas into those stories.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:11
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So when is his murder trial? I mean he's basically admitted he's a murderer.
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Jan 9, 2017 19:55
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Reportage! http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-4107598/Fantasy-games-miniatures-maker-Games-Workshop-sudden-sales-surge.html I'm sure the company will unfreeze its employees salaries, hire some competent sculptors, ease up the abusive restrictions it places on independent stockists, expand its stores to include playing space, hire competent rules writers, begin playtesting its rules before release, lower prices on its most ridiculously expensive products, and restore the beloved setting that so many of its new license customers that bought Warhammer: Total War have just been introduced to. Right?
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Jan 11, 2017 19:31
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Moola posted:you know personally I don't think theyre going to do any of those things Leperflesh but https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3802686&userid=101756&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post468171180
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Jan 11, 2017 22:24
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Mantic's studio paint jobs are about at the level that I paint. Which is fine for tabletop use but totally unacceptably bad for use as photography models for product sales. Seriously it's embarrassing.
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Jan 12, 2017 23:53
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Yeah, they're a company with their hearts in the right place, that is open to adapting to change, and engaging with the community, and a bunch of other things that are good to be. But they're also sort of sadly incompetent in several areas, showing some slow but promising improvement, and I think they have a bright future. But today, they're in this weird space where their competence as a commercial business is way behind compared to the scope of their sales and success.
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Jan 13, 2017 00:37
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I mean, we assume you're aware they literally did that to Fantasy, but I'll mention it just in case it somehow slipped your notice. Like, they not only invalidated all of the existing Fantasy library, they also invalidated the series of four very very expensive "the end times" books they'd just released during the previous six months. e. To be fair, I feel a little bad for 40k players because it's not nice that they would go through what all the Fantasy players went through. At the same time, I kind of want it to happen to them anyway, because if you watched what happened to Fantasy and didn't believe it could happen to 40k and kept investing in this terrible game from this terrible company, it's hard to be all that sympathetic.
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Jan 20, 2017 19:28
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OK so actually if it has any carapace weapons it can still shoot you with those while you're in the trench. But yes this is still also extremely dumb and a very funny way to nerf some extraordinarily expensive models.
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Jan 21, 2017 19:54
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Have they actually bothered to do this? How many of the new names have they trademarked, anyway? I dunno about in the UK. In the US, we have a convenient online search tool for finding trademarks, both current and expired! http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=4804:1kod9t.1.1 For example, there are two entries registered in the US for "WARHAMMER AGE OF SIGMAR" broadly covering computer games and other digital content, printed matter, and (non-computer) games. I'm not sure why they needed two, which appear to be identical, but I'm not an expert on the vagaries of registering trademarks. Notably, "SIGMAR" by itself is already trademarked for use in children's books and jigsaw puzzles by some Argentinian company. I searched for "STORMCAST ETERNAL" and got no relevant results. "STORMCAST" on its own produces a handful of dead trademarks for weather forecasting products. I also get no results for "BLOODBOUND," "AELF," or "ORRUK" so at that point I gave up. I don't believe GW has bothered to trademark most of their nonsense words, at least in the US. Nor should they, since registering a trademark is expensive, and you have to maintain that registration with annual fees. Since they're not registered trademarks, anyone can name their products STORMCAST AELF ETERNAL BLOODSECUTORS in the US. However, there are still some fair trade protections: if you tried to sell products with the intent of making them confusingly similar to GW's products, you would very quickly get successfully sued. In general it's illegal to try to gain the benefit of a competitor's product design, packaging, naming, etc. - even aside from trademarks. As a caveat to that, however, to the extent to which some design detail or name is in the public domain - that is, has been used before, or is derived from prior art/use, anyone gets to use it. So for example, GW successfully sued Chapterhouse on the basis that their models have big pouldrons and big pouldrons are part of the design aesthetic unique to their product lines. On the other hand, they explicitly lost a lawsuit claim to the idea and name of "space marines" because power-armored space troopers called "space marines" were around before GW ever used them, have been used by many different authors in written fiction, and are just part of the general genre of space fantasy. GW's takeaway from the Chapterhouse suit and other lawsuits has been that by using brand new names for their dudes, there's no "prior art" and therefore no way for a competitor to claim that their Orruks, Aelfs, and Bloodsecutors are just based on that prior art rather than blatant ripoffs of GW's poo poo. Sooo.... yeah. GW does gain some IP protection by using unique names for everything. That protection is thin, though. They are on much better ground when they have original ideas rather than original names, because... why the gently caress would a competitor want to call their elves Aelves? They can still make and sell the poo poo out of a bunch of space elves, space orcs, space marines, etc. for you to use in your warhammer games and there's dick all GW can do about it. GW's entire IP is derivative of prior art. There are precious few actually original concepts. Their visual aesthetics are in a few cases somewhat distinctive - those big loving pouldrons on every goddamn thing, maybe the eldar aesthetic, maybe the logos for some of their chapters and chaos factions? If you tried to sell a product setting of the far future with an immortal but basically dead god-emperor, four chaos gods of decay, carnage, sex, and trickery, a realm of chaos that impinges on the mortal world from psychic activity, etc. etc. you'd be too strongly similar to warhammer 40k and be easily sued. Taken in totality, GW's IP is protectable. But in its constituent parts, it mostly isn't, and putting unique names on things doesn't change that. The names are also idiotic. That's really the biggest issue. "Orruks" and "ogors" and so on, it's loving embarrassing. If they gave them more evocative names that a normal, socially well-adjusted person could say out loud without blushing, that would be a big improvement.
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Jan 24, 2017 20:42
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Gundams are anime so they are inherently bad, hope that helps.
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Jan 27, 2017 02:26
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I don't have the energy to type up a new "exchange rates aren't purchasing power comparisons" post, I just don't. Suffice it to say that you can't really rely on money exchange rates to compare exactly how expensive something is in two different currencies. Also it costs money to ship things places. And finally, GW definitely hates australians, irrespective of the previous points, because even after accounting for all factors it's obviously far cheaper for australians to buy GW products from UK or US realtors, pay the exhange rates and the shipping themselves, and have their stuff shipped to them. So GW is taking the piss, for sure.
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Jan 31, 2017 20:12
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Moola posted:I dont even know you any more LON:GAW peaked recently. On January 18th, the stock closed at 868.5p, which is above its previous 5-year peak of 810p set back in July 2013. If you bought GW stock exactly 1 year ago, you have enjoyed a 76.61% return, which is phenomenal. The company has continued to pay its regular dividends, and although the stock is currently at 826 after sliding over the last week, there's no particular sign of weakness and it is actually just tracking a general market pullback across european markets. Age of Sigmar appears to have been helpful to GW's bottom line.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:05
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GW is a parody of itself; goons marvel.
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Feb 3, 2017 17:47
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Irate Tree posted:I... wasn't aware Australia ever got earthquakes? o_O Everywhere on earth occasionally gets earthquakes. The entire planet is seismically active. Also eveywhere has the potential for very large quakes. They're more infrequent in some places than others, and in some areas they're so infrequent that the likelihood of experiencing one during one human lifetime is remote. But the odds are non-zero, everywhere.
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Feb 10, 2017 19:15
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Played the new Conan board game tonight. My second play, but my two buddies who came over were trying it for the first time. It's surprisingly good! The only complaints I have come from a couple instances of vague rules-writing, probably down to the fact the English rules are a translation from rules originally written in French. But I emailed the company with a rules question from my first playthrough and they already replied with a clarification so that's pretty cool. Conan got killed by a giant snake, and Belit tried to save the day by hurling Zogar Sag's head through a hole in the wall of his hut so that Hadrathas could pick it up like a football and try and get it off the map. Alas, the Pictish reinforcements locked down Shevatas, who could not escape in time. Belit avenged Conan's death, at least.
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Feb 13, 2017 08:36
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You don't need any of the DLC to get a ton of playtime out of the base factions the game comes with. That said: did anyone else find the main Empire campaign to be super difficult? At some point the waves of chaos dudes showing up are just overwhelming. Probably I need to try again from scratch. Maybe I'm just bad at games.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:32
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NTRabbit posted:Metal is not easier to work with, it's stupid, too heavy, doesn't glue properly, and paint comes off of it way too easily just by touching it while trying to move it to varnish it, especially on geometric edges. It's far and away the worst mini material. Styrene plastic is absolutely the king of minis and model kit making. Just to be clear, Styrene plastic is king, but metal is far better than restic. If you have never had to work with restic, count yourself lucky. Avenging Dentist posted:Pinning is pretty easy. You're almost certainly doing it wrong. Tons of older pinning guides just advised people to buy a pin vise, and then go to town with a normal 1/16" drill bit or whatever. My pinning prowess was upgraded massively when I bought a much better pin vise, and steel wire gauge exactly matched to my tiny tiny drill bits. That said, your success with pinning metal is partially dependent on the design of the thing you're pinning. It is for example very challenging to drive a drill bit into a part that is only 10% thicker than your drill bit. Creating a thin-walled tube out of some dude's wrist or ankle usually isn't going to work out well. There are some cases where you simply cannot pin, there's not enough thickness. And this is all ignoring the fact that a lightweight styrene miniature doesn't need pinning because the cement (you are using polystyrene cement, right? Not CA?[/i]) literally melts the pieces together. This hobby has enough challenges and obstacles. High quality plastic can hold very very good detail these days, enough so - after painting and without touching it - you can't possibly tell if the end result is metal or plastic. Metal miniatures are for small volume runs where injection molded plastic is not cost effective, but a company selling reasonable volumes of a mini should make them in plastic.
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Feb 15, 2017 23:17
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Yeah that's gobs of thickness, no issue there. We were discussing the ankle of Ten'ur Go, which was cast so thin that it bent under its own weight: I could maaaybe manage to pin that, using my smallest gauge wire: #61 (0.039") but most people are working with paper clips or something. Also note that's an image from Mantic's blog, not necessarily a production model. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 23:44
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Avenging Dentist posted:We might be talking about different bits because that ankle looks easy to pin (I did a very similar pin job on my Dark Age Kaachika). I'm talking about running a pin through the highlighted bits in this image: Ah I see. I assume you snipped off the studs on the head pieces and pinned into the thicker parts of them, but that's still pretty fine work. I think this is approximately the level most miniature dudes are working at: http://axesandarrows.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-to-pin-miniatures.html  Hold the model in your hand and drill right into it with a 1mm drill bit and you are not going to have a great fun time.
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Feb 16, 2017 00:06
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Earn experience for losing (in real life we often learn more from mistakes than success) but earn money or fame or resources for winning (you claim territory or loot or are rewarded by your king). Players who lose a lot see their limited forces become more elite and capable, while players who win a lot get access to more/more variety of green troops and can sustain longer baggage trains. On top of that, design scenerios that change in nature depending on power balance. Early matches are fairly even pitched battles; later, winners face assymetric scenerios where they have numbers advantage but the losers are getting defensive bonuses and favorable terrain (fighting defensively to proteect their core territories). In other words, far more attention to game balance and telling a coherent story, less focus on rolling on random tables for random skills to see whether you're randomly screwed, or handed an overpowering advantage. e. another idea: in a league play format, permit losing sides to ally, while those winning a lot are forced to fight alone (nobody wants to help the winning faction defeat everyone). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 18:28
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For some people, AOS is the only fantasy minis game in town, literally. For others, they have friends they want to play with. I can relate to the folks who just cave in and play what people want them to play. Also, re: chat on previous pages, AOS does sorta kinda have alternating activations. In the melee combat phase, your opponent gets to fight with his units alternating with you fighting with your units. It's limited to melee only, though, so they can't like move or shoot or whatever, but I figured in fairness it's worth mentioning. The game is still poo poo, of course.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:38
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Not a viking posted:How so? It's even better, because unlike AoS, you don't pay a penalty for choosing to bring in allied units. In AoS you are rewarded for faction fidelity with bonuses, whereas with Kings of War, you need to meet certain force structure requirements to add allies, but you're not actually giving up a bonus to do it.
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Feb 21, 2017 19:21
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FrostyPox posted:Case in point: Leperflesh's cool new red text. I don't know what he said but knowing how he posts, I imagine it wasn't something entirely unreasonable but it managed to upset someone anyway quote:Not that this is a can of worms I have any desire whatsoever to dive into.
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Feb 21, 2017 20:50
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Moola posted:either you play casual, so loving take whatever you want it doesnt matter Yeah, why would anyone want to discuss the strategies around the choices you make in a game
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Feb 21, 2017 23:39
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In a thread about that game
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Feb 21, 2017 23:44
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In a subforum about games what idiots
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Feb 21, 2017 23:44
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Ugleb posted:I think we are going to see a lot of this come Age of the Emperor as GW navigate the minefield of obsoleting old units/entire factions without losing big chunks of their GW have a very long track record in this respect, my friend. They do not so much "navigate" that minefield as carelessly drive straight through it, losing various arms and legs in the process, but uncaringly plowing onward oblivious to the damage. Which is to say, they have happily flushed chunks of their fan base down the toilet for any reason or no reason with regularity for decades, why worry about it now?
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Mar 7, 2017 19:18
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Well to be fair if your only job is to guard the imperial palace on Terra, and consequently you haven't had to actually fight for thousands of years, it makes sense you'd swap out bulky power armor for more comfortable uniforms eventually. The oiled bodies thing never made sense to me though. 
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Mar 14, 2017 19:18
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mcjomar posted:Which is a discussion on semantics and definitions - the type of discussion I tend to dislike. This is an oversimplification but I find it a useful model anyway: All disagreements boil down to one of three key factors:
However, it's possible to have a coherent discussion with someone even if you disagree on matters of fact or philosophy. If one person believes that all life is "sacred" and another doesn't, they may have different positions about the value of preserving species from extinction; but they can still have a coherent debate about it. If two people disagree about whether or not global climate change is real, they will have a hard time seeing eye to eye... but they can still discuss points of policy regarding CO2 regulations. But when people are using different definitions for the same words, they are failing to communicate. Their arguments will go nowhere because they do not understand each others' statements. Unidentified semantic disagreements destroy debate. People are "talking past each other." So while I appreciate that many people find semantics discussions to be tedious, those people are shooting themselves in the foot, because establishing a common definition for key terms is a prerequisite to having a coherent and functioning discussion. And that's why mcjomar posted:But for the sake of was an important thing for you to say, because tournaments are a tangent. There are plenty of competitive games that are unsuitable for tournament play. You and Atlas probably are not able to effectively debate the value of good rules in games not because you have a fundamental philosophical difference, but because he uses the word "competitive" to mean something slightly different from you. (Perhaps other words too.) The most relevant definition to this discussion is Merriam Webster's second definition for the word Competition: quote:a contest between rivals In other words, all games in which two or more players are pitted against one another are nominally "competitive" games. Used as an adjective, you could rank some games as more competitive than others, perhaps along lines of the degree to which players can affect one anothers' chances of victory through their own choices; I have played supposedly-"competitive" games in which individual players essentially race for victory without being able to hinder the other players (Candyland, chutes(snakes) and ladders, etc.) Those are typically childrens' games. But the competitiveness of a game may also be sabotaged by randomness. A game which gives each player the illusion that their decisions affect the outcome, but which undercut those decisions with piles of dice and lookup tables that frequently and randomly invalidate or counteract their decisions, are decreasingly "competitive" the more swingy they become. For example, Dreadfleet. Sadly. A game which I was very excited to own, and which has gorgeous components. You appear to be able to direct your ships and have a tactical battle with your opponent, but actually those are illusory choices; the outcome of the game is determined by the luck of dice and card draws, with tactically sound decisions constantly undermined by lolrandom monkeycheese determined entirely by chance. Dreadfleet may be said to be "not competitive" because of those factors. So, tl:dr; no, "competitive" has nothing to do with whether or not the game is or may be played in tournaments, and everything to do with whether or not a game pits players against one another and gives them meaningful choices that affect the outcome. Atlas was speaking to I think a different thing: that in a casual setting, a game can be less competitive and still be worthwhile, because the players are not valuing their agency towards the outcome as much as they are valuing the experience and flavor of the game. I doubt he and his friends will be breaking out Candyland any time soon, but they can enjoy a bad game - a game which he specifically acknowledges is bad - for reasons unrelated to the "competitiveness" of it. It's true that a game with better rules is generally more enjoyable for people who want to engage with those rules and generate an outcome that they felt they were nominally in control over; but you can also enjoy a game in which the most important factor is the lolrandom monkeycheese itself. It can be fun because it's funny, or tragic, or inspires your imagination. You can fully acknowledge that it could have and should have been better, but still enjoy it for what it is, especially if you don't care as much about engaging with a quality, balanced decision-making exercise. I like to watch The Mummy, an objectively bad film, because I like seeing Brandon Frasier hamming it up, watching hordes of scuttling beetles running everywhere like a tidal wave, and the general wacky egyptian-mythology theme of the film. Nobody argues that a game like this is better than a well-balanced game, at least as far as "competitiveness" goes; and Games Workshop has taken the swinginess-factor to an extreme habitually, to the extent that there are only one or two games in their entire history that were actually worthwhile for anyone who wants to play a "good game." Their games' popularity hinge on the visceral experience of the setting, models, and randomly-generated situations and outcomes. They're bad games, but it should not be so surprising that a lot of people play them. What is sad is that there are available, games which are both objectively better from a "competitive" standpoint, and have interesting or engaging aesthetics, settings, and outcomes, but GW still maintains a disproportionately high grip on the attentions and pocketbooks of countless gamers. But that's entirely extraneous to a debate over whether or not Atlas should play 2nd edition Warhammer 40k with his buddies. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Mar 17, 2017 |
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Mar 17, 2017 19:34
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for me "competitive" means "I want to play in a tournament, or otherwise compete with others"
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Irate Tree posted:I'm probably over stating but it's just the constant use of autistic as an insult that gets to me. I mean, i get it, it's this generation's retard. It wasn't valid then and it isn't valid now. A goddamn men. I have been accused of being autism - as an insult - for a variety of reasons mostly relating to attention to detail or adherence to principals. These are not symptoms of autism, and if they were, that would not be cause for insult. But much worse, using "autistic" to describe anyone on the basis that you think they're mentally dysfunctional is insulting and denigrating to people who are actually on the spectrum. Granted low-functioning autistic people likely aren't reading threads on SA, but there are high-functioning people with autism who might be, and there are a lot more of us who have friends or family members with autism. And more broadly yet, the general use of clinical terms that describe various developmental disabilities, mental illnesses, and... well, anything that anyone might get as a diagnosis from a doctor, as terms of ridicule or insult is sickening.
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Mar 20, 2017 07:55
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I've played every edition of D&D from ~1985 through 4th edition (but not 5th). Of all of those, 4th was by far the most balanced, mechanically interesting, and useful rule set. I say "useful" meaning that the rules - such as they were - were designed from the outset to generate and support the expected gameplay experiences. It was also vastly improved for the GM, especially when you took advantage of the digital tools. That said, it is definitely first and foremost a tactical combat game. 4th edition made that combat game much more interesting, fair, and manageable. Breaking up all character classes into four broad categories (controller, leader, striker, and defender) and then ensuring every character class could perform well within that category was a huge step forward for the game. Standardizing all combat actions as powers, and ensuring that powers of a given level were of equivalent... uh, power ... across all classes, races, etc. meant that players were far less likely to be penalized for making a "trap" choice, and conversely, it became very difficult to make a character that categorically outshined another character in the party. But. 4th edition did not really take on the challenge of the game outside of combat. It has a tacked-on-feeling Skill Challenge system that simply falls on its face - skill challenge math was broken and had to be fixed in later books, but even with fixed math, skill challenges always feel either like dumb exercises in players contriving to justify using their good skills and then rolling lots of dice with a near-inevitable outcome. In the end you feel like you'd have been far better off just roleplaying out what happened and ignoring your character sheets, and that's not a great outcome. It also had a "ritual" system that mostly replaced noncombat magic that - in my very limited experience - was mostly ignored by everyone, and that's unfortunate because the mechanic had some potential. But I think it just didn't fit into most players' expectations of what a game of D&D was like? I dunno. Ultimately, though, you are engaging with the game's mechanics when you're having combat encounters, and the rest of the time, you're free to RP all you want and maybe make some skill rolls occasionally and you can totally play a game that way... but if you spent the time and effort to make a D&D character, you were wasting your time if you aren't mostly using it to chop up monsters and take their stuff. In any case 4th edition made it very straightforward to just build a character with the mechanics you wanted, and then re-skin anything you wanted (race, class, powers, feats, whatever) to suit the flavor you were going for. Some groups cottoned on to that and went hog wild, and others apparently felt constrained by the flavor text and then complained that it was all too samey or video-gamey. The other complaints about the game are valid. It is not a good system for any of: fast lightweight gameplay, mechanically-supported noncombat character interactions, storytelling as a mechanic, or settings other than the default D&D "everything and the kitchen sink, with lots of magic" setting. 4th edition could have been better. A number of innovations just didn't go far enough. I had a strong sense that the designers understood they were making a big step forward, but felt constrained by Tradition and Expectation to keep some sacred cows that basically held the whole system back. poo poo like still having ability scores from 3 to 18, rolling a d20, huge lists of basically indespensible magic loot without which your character is hopeless, etc. I had some hope that the next edition of D&D would follow through on what was set up by 4th, but it seems that the backlash by grognardy fans, coupled with the massive cuts in spending and the game being in the control of basically a grognard, regression was the choice that won out. Anymore I have no patience for rules-heavy RPGs. I just don't feel like I have the time to master a system just so I can play lets pretend. I kickstarted the new Conan RPG and I'm liking what I see in the books as they come out, although I haven't gotten to play it yet. It's not what I'd call a true lightweight system (like say PDQ or Fate Accelerated) but it's much lighter than D&D and seems to be designed to encourage "adventure" as the core gameplay rather than "murder things and take their stuff." Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 07:37
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Atlas Hugged posted:This seems like a weird response to what I was actually talking about. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in any edition of DnD that really encourages novel solutions to combat situations. Every class has their weapons and abilities in some form or another and those are what are mechanically outlined and what they bring to every encounter. In 4e, since the players could affect their positions in addition to the positions of their enemies in an encounter, the game lent itself to synergy between players in sort of a combo system. This was of course not unbreakable and enemy abilities would counter or limit this or that and they were pulling similar tricks on the PCs. The players couldn't approach every combat the same, they had to figure out what would work on the targets in front of them and the environment they were in. And the DM could accomplish all of this without relying on fiat. Yes. A huge improvement. You were also kind of supposed to (allowed? Encouraged in some places, but people missed it?) to reflavor your powers to support a creative narrative. Just because your power says something like "you bluff your opponent with a feint and then stab him when he's vulnerable!" doesn't mean that's what you have to describe your guy doing when you (mechanically) force an enemy to slide one square and then do a weapon + 1d8 damage attack. But in my experience, in live play people tend not to want to try to reskin every power use on the fly. In PbP it seemed a lot more common, but eventually when you're making the 43rd attack of the adventure you just don't have the heart to keep inventing new creative descriptions for your guy using that same bluff power again. So that only goes so far. The game absolutely does not allow you to just improvise an attack action that isn't one of the powers on your character sheet. You can do some kind of non-damaging thing with a skill roll, usually, but in a combat it's usually strictly better to do damage to an enemy (or cause a status effect or whatever - use an attack power, basically) than doing anything else, so the classic "I want to leap from the balcony, swing on the chandelier, and then crash into the bad guy with a mighty kick!" requires the GM and player to more or less improvise a mechanic on the fly (a bad GM just says "you can't do that" but D&D does not actively support the GM beyond saying "just improvise something" while many other games actually give the GM and player real tools to make this kind of play not just possible, but encouraged).
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Mar 21, 2017 07:47
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Torchlighter posted:Note the the Dungeon Master's Guide for 4e did have a mechanic for improvisation, complete with a damage table: I basically agree with your point, but I'm just gonna nitpick a little and point out that your level 8 rogue should be getting a magic item bonus and possibly other bonuses as well, so unless she's getting the same bonuses on her acrobatics check (probably not), the numbers will be closer. ...This is actually one of my key complaints about D&D, and which 4th edition did improve on but only by a degree, and that's the fact that the actual tactical combat game is centered on piling up and maximizing bonuses which are a pain in the rear end to keep track of. Not just your own character's various bonuses for items and skills and feats etc. but also circumstantial bonuses, buffs from allies, etc. You are rolling a flat D20 with a target to hit and every single +1 you can add gets you another 5% less likely to have your turn - and therefore your main or possibly only contribution to the game for the next ten minutes - be a "you missed. Next up!" So the advice to the GM for how to deal with unexpected or improvised attacks is never going to result in something as good as, much less better than, what the character and his or her allies can stack up using the abilities they've already accumulated. It can't be, because if it did, the players would be incentivized to stop engaging with the game's printed mechanics and just improvise something in every turn of every encounter, and at that point, why bother with all the poo poo you bought into to play D&D? Why buy splatbooks and dredge for the best magic item synergies and carefully memorize the best buffs for the expected damage types of the next day's adventuring, ad nauseum, if you can instead improvise something and get the GM to give you an attack that is just as good or better? So the system disincentivizes combat improv specifically because failing to do so would disincentivize the actual game. This is not a game about improvising in combat. 4th edition made combat sufficiently interesting (and variable and challenging in a solving-a-puzzle sense rather than a try-to-roll-higher sense) that playing it, I didn't feel as though you necessarily had to get bored with sticking to the powers and options on your character sheet. But it could have been a much better game if as much attention and care was put into rules to support and encourage noncombat adventuring.
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Mar 22, 2017 06:48
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GW's improvement is a little bit like how you can feel some hope for an alcoholic who is "seriously cutting back" on the booze. You still don't go out for drinks with the guy and you can't be such a fool as to believe there can't be a relapse, and really it's still obvious there isn't going to be a real change until the guy goes to rehab and gets totally clean. But hey, they've sort of half-assedly accepted there might be a problem.... so, progress!
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Mar 29, 2017 16:22
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I fell behind and just caught up all at once. Way too many things I wanted to reply to in great detail and at this point attempting to do so would not work out well so I'll just post some random stream-of-thought responses based on my undoubtedly poor and rapidly fading recollection of all the garbage I just kind of halfassedly read and mostly skimmed through. all hobbies are luxuries gw has made some good decisions lately but their legacy of bad decisions has built up such an enormous backlog of poo poo that it's going to take a lot more than one year of a minor improvement in the ratio of good to bad decisions to shovel through it all age of sigmor is a bad game that has made gw lots of money. making more money doesn't make it good. good for stockholders maybe but nobody should buy gw stock. gw's miniatures are made with a very high production standard. that is one measure of quality. gw's miniatures in the last few years seem to mostly be sculpted by committee, using a lot of digital tools and not much artistic merit. depending on what you want out of them, that might matter a lot to you, or not at all. everyone who uses the phrase "the hobby" to refer to anything specific to GW is probably too far gone to help if you regurgitate the arguments of idiots you're not trolling, you're just supporting idiots. if you want to trick someone by saying something that nobody should believe could come out of your mouth, you'll need to better establish your reputation as not an idiot first the artistic merit of a miniature is important if you're evaluating it as a work of art. the functional purpose of a game piece is to work as a game piece, and that's the way it should be evaluated when you're using nominal works of art as game pieces, you have competing priorities that may not be well aligned gws miniatures are a problem in part because they often put artistic merit above game function, but then still fail as works of art. if you just want to play a game, proxying anything that works as the game piece should be completely fine with everyone. If you want to build a vignette that tells a story by assembling works of art, then thematic and artistic consistency with the works of art may be important to you. if your goal is just to test the purity of your fellow players' devotion to your tribe, insisting on brand loyalty is a convenient filtering mechanism infinity minis are well sculpted but the company has a serious mysogyny problem amusingly though, they're getting better about it recently, which is exactly the argument gw defenders in this thread are pushing to justify continuing to support gw but infiniti is bad because it's too anime, and I think you will find that anime is bad malifaux is too goth warmahordes is too steep of a learning curve to learn all the intricate nonintuitive tricks, you can't play by just attacking with your dudes or whatever they're all three just ridiculously better games than warhammer though, like it's not even close gw is still a bad company, let me count a few of the ways they have a useless chain of stores that cost them too much money to run, and pass those costs on to the consumers through higher product markups like seriously you still can't count on a one-man gw store to be open during reasonable hours, have room to play games in, have products you want in stock, or have a sales person available to help you if a single (1) other customer got there a little before you did they are still routinely increasing prices on ancient kits instead of what literally every other company on earth does, which is discount old product they still abuse independent stockists they renamed a ton of their stuff to really stupid names in a completely misguided attempt to protect IP. this does not actually protect their IP in any way more than it was before, and no, they're not even using them to register as trademarks (of course they aren't, that would be ridiculously expensive) the former horrible ceo is still clinging to the company's executive board, and being paid for it, like a bloated leech, and it shows the company's website is a laughingstock. it functions only as a web store, and fails in many amusing ways at even doing that. it does little or nothing to introduce the company's products in a coherent or accessible way, goes out of its way to present products based not on suitability but price, is not the location of what minimal social engagement the company deigns to do, and constantly decides you're not in the country you are in. the company's policy of never having sales runs contrary to a century of business evolution the company still seems to evaluate its products solely based on sales figures, while ignoring critical factors that affect those sales like: recency of the item's release, utility of the item in their own games, price vs utility, the degree to which customers feel embarassed even picking up the item in a store because of its name, and more the company still has no debt, which sounds fine until you consider the annual impact of missed opportunities to invest up front in something that would pay off long term. there is a reason virtually all public and most private companies borrow, it's literally why corporations exist in the first place (to raise investments while shielding the company owners from the financial risk of being ruined if the company's risks don't pan out). gw is still not taking advantage of the enormous success of the total war: warhammer game to sell physical games and miniatures products to a large set of potential new customers, even though the game came out like a year ago now or something gw's annual conventions are still just massive sales events where nothing is actually on discount and you pay to get in the magazines still suck and are again just ads you pay for that give you nothing you couldn't have gotten in a blog post or by browsing their web store (ok I guess at least the magazine remembers your country preference from one visit to the next, lol) gw as far as I know still has pretty terrible/abusive policies towards its employees. you still have to basically act like you're joining a cult to get hired, you will be paid terribly, and you will either burn out quickly or be fired due to failing to meet wildly unrealistic sales quotas gw is still charging more for its products in australia and new zealand than it costs to buy them in the UK and ship them to australia and new zealand, even after currency conversion inefficiencies, for absolutely no fathomable reason. it clearly doesn't even help them make more money in those countries. And they still go out of their way to prevent anyone from engaging in the obviously huge arbitrage opportunity this presents, by going after any online retailer sending products internationally to those countries oh yeah you can't advertise a discount on gw's products online, becuase that would compete with their always-full-price webstore. For some reason this approach basically works, because people buy a lot of gw products at full price direct from their webstore even though you can always get them at a discount from an online retailer if you're willing to jump through the hoops necessary to place an order with them gw still doesn't test and revise its games rules with actual players, just in house, and the results are obvious gw's facebook page is a joke gw's got no forums gw's free easy rules aren't free or easy or sometimes even rules gw's rules writers still haven't learned how to write unambiguous rules gw's approach to attracting girls and women to play their games is still hilariously nonexistent, because their sales figures say only boys and men buy their stuff, so obviously that's just how things are gw is lazily cashing in on some of its ancient games' lingering popularity by republishing them without even the most desultory attempt to make them be good games in the modern era, and for some reason it works because of I don't know, either nostalgia, or people just want the models and it's the only option for getting them at less than full gw packaged retail? gw's settings no longer work as satire directed at the thatcher administration or the horrors of the cold war but the company cannot seem to find the ability or will or maybe just desire to make its fiction relevant to modern concerns like maybe terrorism or populism or global warming or something I could keep going but who cares. I'm sure someone will disagree with all of these points and feel free to type three thousand words refuting them but I don't care. Today the really sweet outdoor semiferal cat we occasionally see and feed when we see him limped up to my patio bloody and with a broken jaw and weighing like four pounds, matted in his own piss, and between the $250 the cat rescue people threw in and the $350 I put in, we have enough money just to find out if his jaw can be wired (he'll have a shot at making it with a month or three of intensive care in my bathroom) or not (we can't pony up for reconstructive surgery with a metal plate, that's thousands of dollars, so he's done). In one day we've spent more on a cat someone abandoned than I've spent in the last 20 years on GW products. If he dies tonight it will have been money better spent because at least he's getting painkillers and sedation instead of slowly starving to death under a bush somewhere. If you are thinking of spending a pile of money on the latest horseshit from GW, that is your choice of course, but perhaps I can encourage you to give some money to your local animal rescue and just play with the toys you already have for a while.
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Mar 31, 2017 02:42
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I made some posts about gw's financials a long time ago like three threads back that I think were decent. But I'm not some kind of amazing poster and my willingness to put effort into a post is highly variable. Also lately I've been getting burnt out by the futility. so now you get lovely posts with no initial caps that I didn't go back and edit for clarity or even to fix typos, because this thread, and gw, aren't worth it e. just to immediately contradict that statement: in the previous post, when I say literally, I mean it in the colloquial sense - that is, figuratively, intended to convey an emphasis. I only point that out because normally when I say literally I mean it literally Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 02:47
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Cat expenses just ballooned to $1000. The cat charity rescue place is covering $250, and they're also gonna pay for his neuter, disease tests (FVRCP and combo leukemia + aids), and provide oral antibiotics. But I'm still on the hook for the other $750 for the xrays, IV, surgery, antibiotics, sedation, and whatever the gently caress Torbugesic, Famotidine, and Cefazolin are. Oh and a vitamin B12 IV bag. With a Vitamin C IV additive. and a Dextrose 2.5% IV. Those are all on top of the basic charge for the IV fluid bag and pump usage. Ooh, $45 for intravenous catheterization! He had maggots crawling out of wounds around his butt wounds, too. With a broken jaw he couldn't lick clean his other wounds so the flies got to him.  Also means he was definitely injured for long enough for fly eggs to hatch. But, good news. The jaw is broken in the front, not at the joint, so no exotic reconstruction surgery needed. He's getting it wired up now. But, bad news for me: 7-8 weeks. He's gonna need to be fed liquid food and stay with us for seven to eight weeks before the wires come out. The only place realistically we can put him that isn't with our other cats is in a bathroom. This guy is gonna go loving nuts after two weeks, we know from experience the last time we had to do something similar. I honestly have no drat idea what I am gonna do with a socialized-but-semiferal recently castrated male cat who has recovered his body strength and wants OUT but has his jaw wired and will die without being fed liquid food until the wiring comes out. Coordinator lady says I should run a gofundme and also hit up all my neighbors for money. I know my next door neighbor, but he's just renting and hasn't got spare money. I have spoken to one or two other neighbors but I am not exactly at a point where asking for hundreds of dollars for cat surgery expenses would seem OK and normal. So, welp. He's gonna make someone a nice pet, probably. Hey, anyone in the SF Bay area or hell the whole of northern california feel up to caring for a recovering injured cat? He's a super sweet boy, wants to be pet, and is a long hair stripey grey cat. I will deliver him for free. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 05:27
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Atlas Hugged posted:And any chance of a picture to send her? I can post a somewhat unfortunate pic of him drooling blood through the door of a cat carrier now, or, I can wait till at least tomorrow and post much nicer photos of him post-op and cleaned up. He's out of surgery now but they decided to keep him overnight. Tell her if she decides she's not up to the task of this guy, our rescue group has probably 200+ other cats she can choose from. There's a cream colored boy, very friendly, that might be someone's lost cat but is probably abandoned as well, we just got photos of him on our porch tonight: e. just to be clear, this is not the injured cat. Just a second easier option for your sister. But we'd be very very happy to find a home for the stripey boy, even if it's just for after he's back to decently good health.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:36
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