Xae posted:

A ton of balance in games designed by idiots is dependent on the GM.

Xae posted:

I didn't know that "encounter design impacts game balance" was a controversial statement.

Xae posted:

That is part of what I mean by encounter design. There are some pretty big balance problems in 5e, but they aren't some insurmountable problem. If players are just using hypnotic pattern, or whatever the flavor of the month is, having some charm immune creatures shakes things up.

To me that isn't going off the rails, that is part of GMing.

Subjunctive posted:

Isn’t that WHFRP 3E?

Bedlamdan posted:

Who else is loving hype for the Lord of the Rings prequel series only on Amazon Prime

TheChirurgeon posted:

I love the poo poo out of the Rankin Bass Hobbit and remembered being legit upset the first time I rented the Bakshi Fellowship of the Ring and saw the new art style. 12 year-old me was like "What the gently caress is this garbage?"

moths posted:

Leonard Nimoy would have been amazing as Tom Bambodil.

slap me and kiss me posted:

Every rpg should be a deck of cards.

occamsnailfile posted:

You can do blind writing samples but a lot more of the person's identity comes through in those, even from subtle things. There was a joke thread that made the news recently about male writers describing female characters which highlighted a lot of the ways one's gender or sexuality are hard to disguise in the gaze employed in writing. Word choice can often tell you someone's national origin even if they're trying to set a scene in the US. Things like that.

Then of course you get to serious differences of opinion in what constitutes "good" writing. Some people like Faulkner, some like Hemingway, and this is a case where both sides can be right at the same time, but the hiring committee are the ones who get to enforce a preference.

occamsnailfile posted:

Why would you interpret those as good reasons? It means that when you say "blind" they...aren't actually. And reviewers tend to pick writing that adheres to their unconscious (or conscious) biases.

Precambrian posted:

The problem is, if the judges are all reading white male authors, their basis of what constitutes "good writing," particularly in what makes an "accurate" depiction of women, minorities, etc., is going to be based on a history of white men's depictions. The blind contest then favors whoever can "write white" best, which is most likely going to get you another white man. This is further compounded by cultural biases that anything that sounds black, for instance, is unintelligent, or how white readers expect stereotypes as realism (see Leonard Chang), which the white writer will happily provide and the other won't think to.

Blind judging is, in general, a good thing, but it's not a magic bullet. People need to consciously choose to look outside their networks and seek out creators who aren't like them. Not just for the hiring process, but in terms of the media they consume every day.

Kurieg posted:

Jiren was a complete garbage pile of a character.

spectralent posted:

I can also see how the environment of RPG writing doesn't make than an obvious thought even if you're in it as an industry.

spectralent posted:

I don't think an awful lot of people consider effort spent on RPGs to be work done in an industry. I mean hell, look how many people put expansions or entire games online for free, and are happy they get comments back. The only time I put an RPG up I was ecstatic someone played it. I would love that those people get paid, but I can also see how if you do that you might not think "Oh, I should pay these people who've done other work for me".

ravenkult posted:

''Migrate the text'' meaning...copy-pasting it into a Word document? Very cyberpunk.

Rand Brittain posted:

And if you do, it's still appropriate to keep your mouth shut about the first thing because they're not of the same order of magnitude.

Cassa posted:

Is there much of a streaming side for magic games?

I was talking to friends about their BattleCon stuff and the concept of watching high level play in that game would also be super fascinating. Even watching some of the 40k Conquest LCG was a great time.

Trustworthy posted:

Say that I want to get into games writing. Is creating a cool, well-crafted, self-contained adventure/module, then showing it to a RPG publisher and saying, "Lookie what I can do; I'd love to write for you if you ever have any scrub tier work available," a terrible way to do that?

Is there a better (or more typical) way for new games writers to get a foot in the door? I'm willing to sink some solid effort into a games-related portfolio piece, but only if there's a chance of it actually being useful.

Subjunctive posted:

It seems like pricing on the basis of word count penalizes the amount of thought and effort that needs to go into making something simple and powerful.

Caedar posted:

It's a matter of incentives, though. Speaking as a game editor, I've seen looooots of really bloated text, and I'm sure the per-word rate that many pubs use contributes to that behavior. Under that payment structure, it's simpler for the writer to just shovel in a bunch of extra words than to create something clean and use the extra words for examples.

Subjunctive posted:

Do solo practitioners really work from a word budget? I figured that was well downstream of writing whatever needed to be written, so I’m surprised that a designer would say “I carved 500 words out of the encumbrance rules, so I can finally add that example I wanted”. Have you heard a solo designer say “I wanted to add a better example and knew what it would be, but I didn’t have words to spare”? Especially given the prevalence of PDF delivery, it would be a sad surprise to me.

Warthur posted:

The absurd thing is that D6 is such a simple system and is already at least intended for vaguely similar gunfights-and-martial-arts action stuff to Far West (whether it delivers on that is another question but it's not like GMS is going to extensively playtest this poo poo), and has its own OGL and everything. It really shouldn't require that much work to get the system chapter done and out there at this stage.

That Old Tree posted:

I look forward to judges being allowed to vote on books after reading the back cover and the introduction and, you know, anything else in the book if they find the time nbd.

Serf posted:

tipper gore sounds like a monster in lotfp

AlphaDog posted:

Xenophobia is the main theme[/] of Lovecraft's mythos. It's not disguised, it's front and center to the extent that even calling it subtext seems disingenuous.

Are there [i]really people who read (eg) The Shadow Over Innsmouth and somehow didn't manage to pick up that the fear of miscegnation makes up the entire point of the story?

Der Waffle Mous posted:

I hate that the thumbnail is small enough my brain immediately went to "someone edited it to be sonic mpreg didn't they?"

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

sexpig by night posted:

reading the rules is the coward's path

Serf posted:

yay, i can level up and become a landlord

Biomute posted:

If D&D draws inspiration from LOTR I guess it makes sense for fighters to be kind of poo poo.

Warthur posted:

Which is why I'm speculating about a system which is built around the idea of synergy from the ground up.

4E was one way of doing it but relied on every player at the table engaging with the tactical skirmish aspect of the game to a similar extent (or being willing to be effectively told what to do during their term by more tactically-minded participants). I'm thinking of stuff like "If there's an X level wizard in your party your fighter gets Y", so you automatically get some synergy effects regardless of whether the wizard player's actually on the ball this evening or not.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Counterpoint: the fact that no one knows how to say GEAS properly makes it the perfect name for the game you’re describing.

grassy gnoll posted:

As a counterpoint, since this is the ungodly year 2018: I had a dude in high school get really, really angry at me for suggesting he play a wizard in 2E AD&D because it had a spell called "gay-rear end."

hyphz posted:

If nobody turned up to a play then the author would be blamed for writing a bad play
If nobody reads a book then the author would be blamed for writing a bad book

Argas posted:

Make a tinder app that lets you find campaigns/characters. Bam, done.