|
I really like Rose Bailey's games/design sense and I'm invested enough in the nWoD system to like the fact that she was involved in them but at the same time I'm excited to see what she develops on her own (even if Cavaliers of Mars looks a little rules-light for me.)
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2018 01:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 02:56 |
|
|
That Old Tree posted:I'm sympathetic to worrying that a game line is "dead", because it absolutely does become harder to push for games and find players for a game that isn't actively supported. You're not wrong, but also I'm pretty sure for most of the people posting here the difficulty in getting people to play smaller games is just business as usual.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2018 19:02
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Well that sounds fiddly as hell and a bookkeeping nightmare. Not really, no? Like I know boo hiss Pathfinder but it's literally just "you get 3 points, this action costs 2, this action costs 1." You could put a little number next to the spell and you're good to go.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2018 21:00
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:It's very easy to take 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e, or whatever other D&D chassis you want and fix the LFQW problem: give fighters and rogues increasing amounts of per-day abilities that are comparable in power to spells of the same level. You don't have to touch existing casters at all - just make everyone quadratic. thank you i swear to god everyone seems to think the way to fix 3.5 is to remove all the powerful and fun parts. nobody wants to play that game. 4E isn't that game. d20 Modern is that game and it loving sucks.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2018 21:00
|
|
|
Arguing forcefully from your own aesthetic preferences is perfectly fine (and I'd be a hypocrite if I said otherwise) but it isn't objective. The bigger problem is that, frequently, 3.5 doesn't actually do what it's designers or its fans say they want it to do or like that it does.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 00:45
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I don't. My personal experience is that in general games that try to present asymmetric choices to players in the vein of "this option is real simple, while this one is more complex!" invariably gently caress it up somehow. I feel that games ought to establish a targeted baseline level of complexity/interactivity for all choices and design things around that level, and if someone thinks the game is too simplistic or too complex then they can play a different game, of which there are many to choose from. I don't think it actually benefits a game to try and cater to both, to go for the stereotypical example, someone who's really invested in the game and consequently knows how to exploit the hell out of all the tools at their disposal and the guy who shows up just to drink beer and occasionally hit stuff with an axe when he remembers it's his turn. Well, it benefits those games in terms of expanding their audience, but "expanded audience or better at delivering a specific experience" is a problem that video games have been stumbling over for over a decade, so it's no surprise it crops up here as well.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 02:32
|
|
|
Being good at things is fun, and building characters in a system like D&D is something that you can be good at. This is not to say that D&D does an especially good job on the finer details of being this kind of system -- for example, system mastery is much more interesting when there are a greater variety of viable builds, so that you can have creativity and optimization at the same time -- but it still does it better than a system that tries to excise complex character-building and system mastery altogether.Alien Rope Burn posted:Which is why people probably get upset when you suggest upturning that apple cart. Just like the fighting game fans who lost their poo poo when I suggest that, say, a sequel to a popular fighting franchise might want to try discarding demanding mechanics like stances or 360 degree inputs. The community becomes so invested in things like buffering 360 degree inputs that they don't care that the 360 degree input was only put in because it mirrored the original move appearance-wise, and not because it was a particularly deliberate attempt to devise a functional mechanic for the ages. This isn't wrong, but I would like to add that what it was meant to do is far less important than the effect it actually had -- inputs may have been "arbitrary" in a design sense, but things like a 360 degree motion are in fact important to the balance of the game for a variety of reasons. (For example, the more individual inputs there are in a motion, the higher the minimum number of frames it takes to complete that motion, which has implications for what other moves can be input faster and thus come out earlier.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:01
|
|
|
Banana Man posted:What is lfqw? Also what is shadow of the demon lord and 13th age like compared to say dnd 5e? Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards. It refers to the tendency for spellcasting classes to start out a little weaker than martial classes and then at some point rocket past them in power (and scope) at an accelerating rate.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:06
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I think that's a retroactive justification when you're talking about the origins of the mechanic. It has become a thing designers take into account as the genre developed, but I'm pretty positive they weren't thinking about things like frame advantage when they were originally creating Street Fighter II. It's like last hits in MoBA games, a mechanic born of the limitation of the Warcraft III scripting engine that people cargo culted into some of the world's biggest games not because it's a great mechanic, but that's just because they were recreating Defense of the Ancients and wanted to attract its burgeoning community. Well yes, but what I'm saying is it doesn't matter that it's retroactive. It is completely secondary to the effect it has on play. You should keep 360s, much like last-hitting, because they are in fact good for the game. e: Like forget 360s for a second, combos in fighting games were a fortuitous accident that were adopted after the fact. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Mar 11, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:26
|
|
|
Having high ceilings means you need to balance on the assumption that players will push the game to its ceiling. Otherwise, pushing the game to the ceiling will break the game, and while having a worse experience because you're bad at a game is unfortunate, having a worse experience because you're better at a game is a disaster. (In fact, I would go a step further and say that this is the only sensible definition of balance, but that's another topic and one that matters less here than it does in competitive gaming.) A training wheels class is a bad idea regardless of whether it's an "archetype" or not because almost inevitably there will be something unique or notable about the simple class that isn't present in its more advanced version, and as soon as you've done that you've created a situation where playing the thing you like badly hurts your ability to play well; the whole point of balance is to avoid this as much as possible. A better approach would probably be to have canned builds that the player can then deviate from when they feel up to it, along with robust tutorials and explicitly drawing players' attention to principles and decisions that will affect the power and feel of their character. e: also, a RAW process for respecs, please, even if it's just "character creation is fast and PC mortality is high" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Mar 11, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:35
|
|
|
Countblanc posted:This is like saying rocket jumping in FPS games should just be a button you press. In a competitive game proving you're better at the game than the other guy is the whole point, plus you can learn to git gud at rocket jumping at almost any point you choose. This breaks down somewhat when you're playing a game that's co-op vs. environment, and you're committing to your choices for months at a time.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:39
|
|
|
Isn't the entire selling point of 13th Age is that it's D&D without a grid? That's not "the best D&D" that's "a perfectly nice game that lacks one of the few both defining and positive traits of every version of D&D."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 03:46
|
|
|
BECMI is the game that encouraged you to designate one player as the official party mapper and to have a defined marching order
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 04:04
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Having one player as mapper and another as quartermaster is absolutely a good idea and helps make the game move far smoother. Oh, I'm not being critical, BECMI's my second-favorite version of D&D. I'm just a little confused by the implication that it doesn't make space and positioning pretty important. Maybe I misunderstood what Paolo was getting at.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 04:09
|
|
|
NinjaDebugger posted:I think this is the dumbest, most ahistorical thing I have ever seen anybody say about D&D. Why, because people ignored the rules in order to play without a grid?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 04:42
|
|
|
NinjaDebugger posted:Because D&D and AD&D, especially, only ever mentioned grids in relation to wilderness travel, where they recommended using hex grids. Hell, AD&D used inches as its primary unit for using gridless wargame terrain, with inches being defined differently for indoors and outdoors. 2e didn't get actual gridded combat rules, as far as I know, until the Player's Option: Combat & Tactics book, which a lot of people didn't use, and is precisely why there was a huge loving revolt over 3e's mandate of an actual grid for combat. Wizards at the time were particularly incensed, because it meant they couldn't depend on the DM being nice about targeting anymore. If you're distinguishing between grid-based and numerical distance-based tactical combat, then yeah, sorry, my bad. I'm used to using "gridded" as synonymous with tactical combat since I'm usually distinguishing between D&D and PBTA or something. That said, if I understand correctly, 13th Age uses theater of the mind combat, which is neither of those things, and more removed from either of them than they are from each other.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2018 05:10
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:I mean, he hated the Peter Jackson movies because they were "action flicks for fifteen year olds." I mean, I'm kind of sympathetic. I like the Lord of the Rings movies well enough, but it's sort of a case where my fondness for them is mostly due to liking Peter Jackson's gonzo sense of humor and the grotesque on the one hand and liking high fantasy on the other, and while the LotR trilogy is both of those things, a lot of the time it's less than the sum of its parts. And then this problem gets a million times worse in the Hobbit movies.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2018 03:38
|
|
|
Cards suck. Shuffling is an even more dubious method of generating randomness than rolling dice and even if you're not using cards for that specific purpose, they're a bunch of little pieces that are fragile and get lost. I guess the upside is if you're playing a game where characters are built out of modular pieces that change during play they're a handy way to pull information that may not all apply at once together without writing/erasing or constantly referring to things in a book, but you gotta weigh that against the above. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Mar 28, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2018 21:55
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:The Gloomhaven modifier deck is a thing of beauty, though. Constantly improving your deck is a fantastic way of tracking advancement, and imo beats the hell out of die modifiers. Yeah I get it for Gloomhaven and Gamma World 7E, I just wouldn't want to see it become a universal standard.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2018 22:06
|
|
|
I mean the core mechanic of Gloomhaven as described never sounded fun to me either, but I haven't actually played it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2018 06:41
|
|
|
Literally all Arthurian literature is fan-fiction written to suit the culture and tastes of the people writing it. Inserting modern political sensibilities into Arthurian legend is more Arthurian than attempting historical accuracy. 
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2018 19:47
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:It's about 70% waifu collecting and 30% "Nasu is good at writing weird complicated systems of magic/metaphysics that are internally consistent," which is something a not-insignificant portion of people who like elfgames enjoy. the hell are you talking about, everyone knows the only reason you read or watch Nasu stuff is so you can better appreciate Carnival Phantasm and Today's Menu for the Emiya Family
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2018 18:20
|
|
|
Serf posted:I'm still laughing at the idea that being an insane reactionary has no bearing on whether you're a good person. I usually see this sentiment coming in the opposite direction -- that is, "before it was just a difference of political opinion, but now it's a moral issue" -- but it's still just as absurd.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 16:18
|
|
|
None of this justifies the unquestionably sexist backlash that followed, but the Guild Wars 2 narrative team sucks at their job. It's like Blizzard-level bad. I'd probably talk down to them too if I still played or cared about the game. The bigger picture here is that a man who reacted poorly to fan complaints on a personal twitter account might not have been taken to task the same way, and that even had the firing been justified (which is a very different question from the above) it should have been handled in a way that didn't embolden the kind of assholes who would immediately turn around and try to weaponize it. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jul 7, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2018 20:27
|
|
|
Of course it's boring to watch other people engage with crunch, especially if you put the camera on the people participating in the game and don't have some way of clearly showing what's going on on the board, Poker / Hearthstone-style.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2018 14:33
|
|
|
moths posted:I'd love for this to be part of the interview process. I agree these guys are assholes but the last thing we need is to give interviewers more bullshit, demeaning tactics to hold over potential hires.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2018 15:49
|
|
|
sexpig by night posted:how is 'the gently caress wizard who made rockets and pioneered its fuel source' left in the shadows of a nazi? kind of supplied your own answer there
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2018 17:05
|
|
|
I'll embrace non-violent TRPGs the day someone makes a TRPG where non-violence is as mechanically interesting as violence is in my high-crunch game of choice. Burning Wheel's probably close, honestly, I need to give that a more serious read-over or find someone to actually run it for me.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2018 02:13
|
|
|
Heroism through skill and strength (or put another way, as the moral duty of the strong and skilled) is not inherently fascistic. To think otherwise is some grade A shooting yourself in the foot in terms of abandoning good and resonant storytelling to assholes. Even the concept of a mythic past isn't necessarily in their domain, although it is inherently conservative.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2018 23:45
|
|
|
Meinberg posted:You're right, I'm being overly simplistic. It's important to know what that strength and skill are being used for. If it's being used to slaughter hordes of orcs or subhumans, that's bad. If it's being used to topple authoritarian power structures, it's good. Cool, we're on the same page I think. I was a lit major in undergrad (and largely a medievalist) and I absolutely loathe giving up e.g. Arthurian legend or whatever to nazis. Which is also not to say that those stories are spotless to modern sensibilities by any means, but it's a different set of problems, particular to their time in history, and one I think it's interesting and productive to grapple with.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2018 23:59
|
|
|
or poo poo, even Tolkien for that matter: taking Tolkien seriously as an influence should include his latter-day realization that he'd hosed up re: Orcs
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 00:04
|
|
|
fog boar posted:Can you point me to a document where he discusses this? I assume it's in one of his letters or something but I'm not sure where to start looking. Orcs, "humanoids," et al. as a veil over racist pulp tropes is a topic I've been yammering about with friends for a while but it'd be helpful to have a primary source that I can show people too. HopperUK posted:I found a quote from Letter 153: Letter 269 also (briefly) discusses whether making Orcs irredeemably evil would be heretical from a Catholic standpoint. It's a little less emphatic than I remembered, but still helpful. "Letter 269 posted:With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable... Also if I remember correctly the "twisted Elves" thing is something Tolkien went back and forth on as he considered the implications; making it a definite plot element in LotR was an innovation of the films. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 1, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 00:55
|
|
|
Also: apparently Christopher Tolkien writes about comments his father made to him re: Orcs in chapter 5 of Morgoth's Ring, which I unfortunately do not have in front of me at the moment. e: I found a source online. Tolkien says in a fragmented essay that, if Orcs are a corruption of other creatures, then it can only be on the individual level, because creating a race of inherently evil beings is beyond Morgoth's power and Eru, on the other hand, would never allow the creation of a race of sentient beings that are beyond redemption. He then goes on to speculate that maybe Orcs are, instead, shards of Morgoth embodied in the physical world. (I'm simplifying here, because the relationship between angelic/spiritual beings like Valar and Maiar and physicality is complicated and written about at length elsewhere, but tl;dr version -- Morgoth became fully physical over time, which diminished him in power but gave him greater freedom to act in Middle Earth; also, since he had a hand in singing the song of creation, there was literally a part of him in all physical matter -- although not evenly distributed; for example, water, as a rule, had nearly no element of Morgoth in it.) And if that were the case (orcs as shards of Morgoth) then they don't truly possess a will; they're just automata who appear as rebellious, hateful, and so on, because these things are just the inherent character of evil. However, he notes that this is difficult to reconcile with a reference elsewhere to Sauron teaching the orcs a new language. Then, in a later and much more complete essay, he states emphatically the orcs do have independent wills and were kept in thrall to Morgoth through fear, and that under him, every orc lived in constant awareness of the Eye moving over them -- they were mentally dominated to the point where he compares their existence to that of an ant hive. After Morgoth died they were for a time "leaderless and almost witless" and "without control or purpose" but eventually recovered themselves and even set up small kingdoms and "became accustomed to independence"; however, Sauron initially gained their allegiance by manipulating their hatred of elves and men, and later trained them to the point of unthinking obedience. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Nov 1, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 01:06
|
|
|
The gist of it is that orcs have been steeped in hatred and fear for so long that they don't know anything else, but it's always presented either in terms of culture, or occasionally in theological terms. Orcs are not biologically predisposed to evil, just utterly controlled by evil leaders and spiritually (and on an individual level only) warped by eons of close association with basically-Satan.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 01:40
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:I'm working entirely off memory, but didn't he later comment something along the lines of comparing orcs to literally himself and everyone else during WWI? Something like that: Letter 71 posted:Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in 'realistic' fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For 'romance' has grown out of 'allegory', and its wars are still derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels. But it does make some difference who are your captains and whether they are orc-like per se! e: Letter 66 might also be of interest, he talks about the army and the business of war in general as something that "breed[s] new Saurons" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Nov 1, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 03:37
|
|
|
Atlas Hugged posted:Obviously a lot of that was added as it went, but I'm guessing at least the demon juice stuff was present since WC1? Nah, WarCraft 1 and 2 are just "there are orcs and they're evil and melodramatic."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2018 05:45
|
|
|
Bob Quixote posted:I'd take Orks any given day of the week over whatever the hell that word salad of a plot was. I never really played any 40K but I had a friend who was into it and I remember reading a quote from the Ork handbook when I was flipping through it that basically said that in the horrible universe of chaos and constant war the Orks were probably the only people who were really happy and having a good time because they were pretty much doing what they were born to do and loving it. "The Orks are the pinnacle of creation. For them, the great struggle is won. They have evolved a society which knows no stress or angst. Who are we to judge them? We Eldar who have failed, or the Humans, on the road to ruin in their turn? And why? Because we sought answers to questions that an Ork wouldn't even bother to ask! We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2018 19:25
|
|
|
Sage Genesis posted:Is this the modern version of claiming that, like, your greatness and correctness are foretold in the stars or something? Like, "That star over there governs my fate and it is ascending in the house of Mars, so clearly I will be victorious in battle and you're a moron for doubting me." No, it's much simpler than that. He's not suggesting secret knowledge that can be divined by mystical methods; I swear half the time when people try to criticize Peterson they make him sound much more interesting than he actually is. He's saying that social inequality is normal because some physical things are not equal to other physical things. A better writer with the same awful premise would have just said "domination of the weak by the strong is as inevitable as gravity," but that would ruin the plausible deniability. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Nov 12, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2018 20:46
|
|
|
Please don't hate yourself. What's necessary is humility, not self-loathing; if nothing else, the latter is still all about you.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2018 06:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 02:56 |
|
|
Serf posted:our local game store has shelf full of 3e stuff at full price, but marked all the 4e books down to $10 when 5e was announced. i snapped up the ones i didn't own already and my other players have been picking off what's left ever since I was buying used 4E books from my FLGS on and off for a few months, but apparently someone noticed because they upped the price from like $10 each to almost their original market price and I stopped, because at that point I'd rather have a PDF.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2018 18:41
|
|