TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich

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

https://twitter.com/nekoewen/status/948265344195379200

Dunno about you guys, but I'm going to be buying some stickers for the next time I run a big game. Also possibly getting some sticker sheets custom made.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 22:32

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:40

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

Plutonis posted:

Hey Ewen, you were the one who made this game, right? I'm thinking of attending this table since mine isn't happening this week.

Waaaaay back in the day I made an RPG called Thrash for fighting game style martial arts, and although it wasn't very good design-wise (this was in 1997), enough people really wanted to play an RPG along the lines of Street Fighter and King of Fighters that it was decently popular, including in Latin America (someone even made a Saint Seiya thing for it). A Brazilian guy named Thiago Rosa Shinken took the Karyu Densetsu campaign setting I had barely sketched out and went totally crazy with it, running a huge, epic campaign with his friends, and eventually using that as the basis of an original RPG that's going to come out pretty soon (in Brazilian Portuguese). It was clearly so much his thing now that when he asked me about rights I just asked him to send me a copy of the finished game.

I don't know any Portuguese so even though he showed me the fastplay PDF they're going to release in a few days I know nothing about the actual game, though I liked how Asura Karyu (who was a PC in my original campaign way back when) makes an appearance, plus one of the other sample characters has a connection to a rocketball player named Ewen.

Thiago is also the translator for an upcoming Brazilian version of Magical Fury, and he's doing a stretch goal class for the Dragon World kickstarter.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2018 16:59

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

Alien Rope Burn posted:

A lot of folks have positioned him for years as some secret master that deliberately tanked 4e (despite it being his livelihood) instead of, y'know, just being bad at design.

All I'm saying is that you don't have to make poo poo up about somebody when their actions are bad enough.

This whole thing is kind of amazing because when 4th Edition was in full swing, he was one of the major mouthpieces of it, and generally contributed to intelligent and insightful discussions of it on the official D&D podcast (which makes the whole "warlords shouting wounds closed" thing all the more baffling since he himself gave a good talk on how to handle warlord healing), and there were grognards saying some pretty loving terrible things about him basically because he was one of the main human faces of The Edition That Hurt Us.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 17:34

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

Subjunctive posted:

Is BESM worth reading if I know nothing about anime or manga? It gets mentioned a lot.

I like to say that BESM is a game designed by a man who likes anime a lot more than he likes game design. There's not a lot worth salvaging from it. One glaring example is that since it uses a 2d6 roll-under mechanic, when two characters with high combat stats engage in combat, they end up whiffing over and over until someone rolls particularly well or badly, and the designer stuck with this until the other designer he'd hired (David L. Pulver) sat him down and forced him to play through a combat like that.

If you want a universal RPG with an anime spin you're better off checking out OVA.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 14:46

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

Ron Edwards is working on a seminar thing he calls "Finding D&D," where he basically makes the case for D&D culture being a religion of sorts. I'm still watching and digesting it, but it's really interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmQz7-qe_3s

Also I like how he said that when he first started publishing in 2000, stores would ask him why it wasn't d20. Two years later, they had so much unsold product that they would ask, "It's not d20, is it?"

# ¿ Apr 11, 2018 17:09

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

Thuryl posted:

Nah, Ron Edwards genuinely likes D&D, although he dislikes some of the ways people play it. It's Vampire that he reserves his hatred for.

The videos are critical of some aspects of the culture around D&D, but he's definitely a fan of D&D itself, and was very complimentary to some of its offshoots. It's legitimately interesting that the better D&D derivatives in his estimation are the ones that focused on refining rues to serve actual play rather than imitating the rules as presented in specific texts.

I found it interesting how at least as he experienced it, the publication of D&D was really random and scattershot. The original woodgrain box version only had a print run of 1,000 copies, and people who didn't have it were trying to cobble together what they could from a mixture of Basic, oral tradition, photocopies, Judges Guild products, etc., then the AD&D Monster Manual came out (which showed several important differences from Basic), then the "white box" reprint of OD&D. D&D isn't a game but a collection of around 9 or so games that hit a lot of the same tropes to varying degrees (and that's just the RPGs, which leaves out the D&D board games, video games, wood burning kit, etc.) and the related informal traditions around them. Post-Gygax TSR and then WotC both tried to tap into the culture and position their publications as authoritative, and the d20 license was in part a component of that marketing push.

He's highly critical of AD&D2e and Vampire for basically the same reason, that they promoted "story" in RPGs in a way where players participate passively rather than as authors.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 02:28

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

ProfessorCirno posted:

There's not much to tell, his constant masturbatory nerd fantasies just never quite seem to involve people of color or any of the things they make - except for two Japanese people who are samurai and comment on how honorable and distinguished the main character is. It's not just "a nerd who can't get over their nerd vision of the 80's," it's that this vision is literally just white dudes and the things they personally made, and nothing else.

There's also the part where the protagonist's online best friend who he thought was a guy turns out to be a black lesbian (presumably so he doesn't even have to think about whether he'd consider getting romantically involved), though in the movie it's painfully obvious that it's a woman pitch-shifting her voice.

Also I liked how the evil corporate badguy blew up a trailer to target the protagonist, killing hundreds of people, and when he shows up in the neighborhood and is confronted with the people there whose family members and friends he murdered, the people don't tear him apart. Never mind that he's the CEO of a massive corporation in a cyberpunk dystopia, let's hope the cops take him in.

A couple of the guys from RiffTrax did a podcast appropriately titled 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back where they read, discuss, and mock RPO and then Cline's newer book Armada, which answers the question, "What if The Last Starfighter was a huge wad of nerd references and really sucked?" Along with all the other stuff, Cline is just kind of bad at putting words together.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 15:32

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

LongDarkNight posted:

I'm sure Carl of Swindon has some hot takes about Drow and alignment but I don't care to hear them.

I don't hate myself enough to go see if he in particular did a video about it, but there was an academic paper titled Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, and despite it being just over a year old, a bunch of the kind of people who make YouTube videos where they rail against "SJWs" got a hold of it recently, hence if you google the title one the results on the first page is a YT video that's an hour and 41 minutes long. A lot of people sure are mad that this paper even exists.

# ¿ May 7, 2018 01:20

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

FMguru posted:

Here's Wick's existential scream against D20 and Ryan Dancey: https://pastebin.com/R7b1HgyT

I was gonna post this if no one else did. He actually calls himself "The Wick."

quote:

ALL YOU SUCKERS WHO BOUGHT ALL THREE BOOKS PAID FOR EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES OF RULES!!!

# ¿ May 31, 2018 13:57

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

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I'm finally watching Macross and it's giving me all new reasons to be annoyed at Palladium's 1980s treatment of Robotech.

I have a whole rant about how Siembieda saw a show about love and humanity during an interstellar war and made a bland military RPG with giant robots. Like, even with the Palladium system you could at the very least include rules for how pop music messes up Zentraedi but I guess it's too much :effort:

or something.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2018 23:14

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

Nuns with Guns posted:

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1041036924670992385

"That's why it was very important that we put Chaotic Neutral alignments back in the game, on the list of 9 options that every player picks from when making a character."

# ¿ Sep 17, 2018 23:05

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

Guy Goodbody posted:

https://twitter.com/K2_PUBLISHING/status/1042000116704370688

yo anybody read Japanese?

Let's see...

"Votoms Tactics," the Armored Trooper Votoms board game, is coming out on October 25th, and the image in the tweet is the box art.

They also tweeted some images of hex maps for the game, so I'm guessing it's a board wargame kind of thing?
https://twitter.com/K2_PUBLISHING/status/1041980201591169025

# ¿ Sep 18, 2018 18:28

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:40

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

Desiden posted:

Is it hard to find a printer for RPGs that isn't scummy? Honest question, I just figured with the number of printers around domestically that finding and vetting a legit one wouldn't be one of the more common failure points. Trying to set up manufacturing with some weird little factory in China you found online for a board game or whatever seems to lead to a lot of trouble, but I wasn't aware the printer side was also dodgy.

For my part, when we've done print runs for Golden Sky Stories books, we used a traditional printing company in Michigan that doesn't specialize in games or anything, and they've given us reasonable prices and excellent service. I suspect if we got into board games or big hardcover books we might have to look for cheaper options, but between the inherent issues in getting books made in China and shipped over here on a boat and the potential impact of trade tariffs (which are going to play hell with the costs of board game components), I'm really glad I don't have to worry about it for the stuff I'm publishing.

For basically everything else I've published I've just used POD, and while the quality isn't quite as good, it's still really good overall, and has the advantage that when IPR asks for more copies I can do some stuff on a website and have the POD company automatically ship books to them within a few weeks.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2018 17:03

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich