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Also extremely few people watch streamers play RPGs out of any interest in the rules. They watch it to enjoy the actors and characters and drama and jokes and storylines and etc, etc, etc. You know, the reason most people watch anything. That they also kinda pick up how the game works is basically a nice side effect.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:12
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Mors Rattus posted:There has been a tremendous effort to show respect and deference to the original cultures that worshipped or currently worship these gods. IIRC this has resulted in the Hindu gods being one of the bigger holdups, to make sure they were done just right. My knowledge of Hinduism is entirely lacking, but with what little I do know, I could see trying to decide not just which gods to use, but which take on which gods to use, being a potential nightmare.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:57
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The first disk is the best part of the game and the whole game would've been better if it all took place in Midgar, anyways. But yes, it's cyberpunk. Select parts of FF6 would be far closer to dieselpunk.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:54
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I legit don't understand why you continue to defend Paizo as much as you do, especially considering how hard they've walked back on their whole "we're the good progressive company!" thing.
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Mar 9, 2018 23:28
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Ither posted:Wait, what? There was a time where Paizo's PR was pushing them as the good, progressive TTG company that cared about people. It got especially notable in 5e's lead up, what with Mearls openly aligning himself with some of the most toxic parts of the industry. Oh, they still had lots of issues, especially whenever the nasty racist parts of their whole pulp fantasy boner got brought up, put they (ssssssssorrrrta) had the promise that They Are Trying To Do better. Since that time, Paizo has...stopped doing that. And while no specifics have been aired, former Paizo employees have mentioned enough to pick up on there (broadly) being a more progressive faction in the company, and a far more regressive and conservative faction - with the latter being made of mostly the men on staff, who are also the ones who are the ones largely in control of the company, so it's increasingly pretty clear that whatever minor culture war happened in the company, there's been a winner. To put it another way, there was a time where Paizo was the company that introduced one of their iconics as a trans woman. The current Paizo intentionally excluded her from their 2018 International Women's Day thing. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I've never played pathfinder because it looks like a slog to me but "it takes a move action to open a door!!!" is exactly the sort of flippant non-criticism that everyone here complained about re: 4e. No RPG system lives and dies by how quickly a character can open a door relative to how quickly they can attack. Sure, but it's also potentially telling about OTHER system problems. Like, yes, "it takes a move action to open a door!!!" is a kinda nonsense problem that probably doesn't actually come up that often, if ever. But at the same time, someone sat down on this engine and decided that it takes a move action to open a door - and it was never fixed. It's a minor thing that doesn't come up much, but there's also a fuckton of minor things, and eventually SOME of them are gonna start to come up. "It takes a move action to open a door!" isn't silly because of what it implies about the settings or universes, it's silly because of what it means for trying to actually have in-game combat, and how an unlocked door is literally more time consuming and difficult to deal with then a wall of fire. Or how it takes longer to reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet then it takes for a wizard to reach into their spell pouch and pull out powdered rhubarb leaf, an adder’s stomach, and a dart, but definitely NOT the ground up mica or gold dust worth exactly 25 gold, which I can tell apart by feel alone, apparently, or the live spider I plan on eating. Or how it takes me longer to pull out a dart (that I'm going to throw) then to pull out a dart (that I'm going to sprinkle powdered rhubarb leaf onto). It's a silly rule that people ignore, of course, because it's d20, and d20 games inevitably turn towards freeform; put it with all the other rules we ignore. But the fact that you ignore the rule doesn't make it a good one.
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Mar 10, 2018 04:31
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As far as perspectives on balance go, three things come up I've talked about in other threads in the past. 1) Balance isn't just about ceilings - it's about floors, too. Wizard has basically NO ceiling to their power in 3.x; if you want to do it, and you know how, you can find a way to do it, regardless of what "it" is. But they also have an extremely low floor, maybe the lowest in the game; a wizard who DOESN'T know the "how" is going to be substantially weaker, potentially even neigh useless. What makes the wizard powerful in 3.x really isn't intuitive in the slightest; most people who play it wanna just chuck fireballs, and why not? That's how D&D wizards work in all media about them! But of course, that ends up being one of the worst ways to play one. It's hard to believe wizards are OP when everyone you know who's played one has sucked at it. 2) Balance expectations aren't always flat. There's a lot of people who will go "what? Wizards aren't overpowered at all" not because they aren't, but because their expectations FOR the wizard include them being just plain better and more powerful then others. This is where you see a lot of "the wizard isn't overpowered, all they can do is cast their spells!" A lot of this is in made up class "niches." It's also where you get 5e's "We have three pillars of gameplay, and fighters only ever interact with one, but that's ok, they're Real Good at it!" So in a good part of this, you have to fight the fact that, for a lot of people, wizards are supposed to be a little OP. Their spells are supposed to be super powerful. Their daily limits toooooottally balance them, look - the book even says! 3) Wizard vs Fighter is an absolutely terrible comparison. Yes, on the narrative scale, wizards and fighters ARE truly on opposite ends of the spectrum - but very, very few people actually pay attention to how the game works and acts narratively. Instead, you want to approach it from the perspective of class niches. Remember number 2! People expect the wizard to to stand behind the fighter and throw spells to end the fight; telling them that will only help cement in that This Is Right. Instead, you wanna compare fighter to druid / cleric and ROGUE to wizard. It's easier to claim that the wizard ending the fight in one spell is no big deal, because "that's what wizards do," but it's harder to claim that it's totally fair that a cleric should be a cleric and a fighter. It's likewise a lot harder to argue when the wizard actually does just poo poo all over the rogue and what the rogue is supposed to be good at.
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Mar 10, 2018 22:28
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Pathfinder will only ever make the most basic steps towards becoming a better game without any major breakthroughs so long as it continues to be lashed to "simulationist" design. That is the core of so many of Pathfinder's problems - the refusal to look at game mechanics as a means to express the fluff. So long as Paizo attempts to use mechanics to illustrate the fluff, rather then express it, you're going to continue to get poo poo like the monk.
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Mar 10, 2018 23:46
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"This class is really easy to learn, but also deceptively functionally useless! At higher levels, it's so un-fun, that players will get more experienced and will naturally gravitate to the other classes!" is the least new player friendly idea I can conceive. It's like it's made specifically to give new players bad experiences so they never return.
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Mar 11, 2018 01:40
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13th Age is the only d20 game to have make feats work.Tuxedo Catfish posted:BECMI is the game that encouraged you to designate one player as the official party mapper and to have a defined marching order Having one player as mapper and another as quartermaster is absolutely a good idea and helps make the game move far smoother.
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Mar 11, 2018 04:08
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AD&D combat was not assumed to use a grid. It assumed you used minis and a ruler, but even then, it wasn't that important. That's because pre-3e D&D was a dungeon crawler through and through (though this also gets more true the farther back you go; by 2e, it was trying to shed that a lot). Combat was to at least some degree a failure state. Combat didn't use a grid because combat was meant to be short. HP was way lower almost completely across the board, and saves worked in reverse - they started weak and ended strong, whereas now they do the opposite. That's because your wizards weren't using save spells at higher levels, they were glorified artillery - if they even used spells in combat. Saying "AD&D doesn't have tactical combat" is almost a nonsense statement because AD&D to some degree didn't have combat as we think of it, like, period. Combat was part of the dungeon crawling - it's divided into turns because you had to keep time. The longer you spent fighting, the more likely reinforcements would show up. Combat, again, was almost sort of a failure state - all risk, no reward. In other words, combat actually WAS just a small glorified minigame to the actual D&D experience of looting the gently caress out of this goddamn death dungeon. The dungeon had a grid, because the dungeon was what ACTUALLY mattered - and where most of the rules were focused. And that's not even touching on companions and the like. It really is hard to state just how much 3e changed poo poo while pretending otherwise. It absolutely was not "AD&D 3e." It was absolutely it's own new game. unseenlibrarian posted:The best tactical combat RPG is still Spellbound Kingdoms where the tactical options have nothing to do with moving on a map. Absolutely correct. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 05:46
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Quote's not edit
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Mar 11, 2018 06:18
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Darwinism posted:So 2E AD&D had the player's options books that were very polarizing and morphed into 3E and 3E had Bo9S (and Star Wars: Saga to be fair) that was similarly polarizing and morphed into 4E and 4E had Essentials which was, again, polarizing and turned into 5E we must now put bets on what 5E release will be turned into 6E. The TRUE sinister reason for their glacial update schedule - if they never release any books, none of them can become 6e!
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Mar 11, 2018 20:52
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Nuns with Guns posted:Austin strikes me as the type that would probably sit there and go on about all the Deep Lore he'd scribbled in a notebook if he had the time, and even in an irl game it's important to know when to inject that and when to kill your darlings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcMjixN2jUY
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Mar 14, 2018 04:42
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Yeah, this policy is straight up monstrous.
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Mar 27, 2018 03:08
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Kai Tave posted:Reminder that this is what Lisa Stevens had to say about harassment at Paizo late last year: Don't forget - not just that they're treated like attacks against the company, but will be "treated accordingly." So better hope they aren't upset about your allegations of harassment, because they might otherwise apparently loving retaliate?
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Mar 27, 2018 03:25
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It's important to not take this in a vacuum. This is absolutely tied to the poo poo that happened at the last PaizoCon, which included barely responding to one of their guests openly harassing a con-goer and physically attacking staff.
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Mar 27, 2018 05:42
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The whole “dungeon crawls in urban areas” thing points to how framing, context, the willingness to make an actual statement instead of constant waffling, and an ounce of basic awareness can make the same basic concept either an interesting, worthy game or a piece of offensive drivel. Serf posted:wouldn't it be more accurate if the dungeon crawl took place in a gated community or private billionaire island or some poo poo? they would actually have things to take, private security and traps and they'd be full of weird, alien monsters A dungeon crawl at heart is an alternate universe take on a heist.
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Apr 28, 2018 19:58
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More notable RE: Pathfinder's trans woman character is that they...absolutely didn't put her in their picture for International Women's Day until called out about it. Also, Paizo is in fact increasingly just white dudes, especially as you get to their upper management, and it's getting worse. There was something of an inner struggle in the company between the parts that wanted their not being a shithead thing to be more then just performative, and those that wanted to still be lovely, but say they weren't for PR purposes, and the latter half absolutely won. EDIT: They're also literally making their orcs more racist by turning them into straight up gorilla-people now so, good job, Paizo. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 17, 2018 |
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May 17, 2018 21:28
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, the core of Nasuverse is having complex world rules and then making them irrelevant with bullshit hacks, so you need a system that models that. Yeah, the problem with most "let's model this anime/comic book" games is that most comic books and shonen-adjacent animes are built on the premise of breaking your own rules constantly. It runs pretty contrary to the general tabletop simulationist idea of modeling the universe and playing in it.
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May 25, 2018 04:13
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This coming from ArenaNet is the part that is the least surprising. That company has always been an absolute trash fire and is kinda known for being aggressively awful to it's employees. This is just another massive sign on how much unionization is needed in games development.
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Jul 8, 2018 19:31
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Literally the best you can say about nuWW is "they're only nazi sympathizers" and like Naw I'm loving good just shrugging and calling them nazis.
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Jul 13, 2018 02:17
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drunkencarp posted:IIRC Ken dodged the question when Robin asked him flat out whether he believed in climate change, and he has asserted more than once that Hillary Clinton is guilty of money laundering foreign bribes through the Clinton Foundation. So no, not the mythical Good Republican. Turns out, it's a myth for a reason!
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Jul 15, 2018 20:17
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think that's one of those ideas that's definitely true if you also get to design the high-level abilities, but can be unworkable if you're stuck with, say, the high-level abilities available to a 3.5e D&D wizard. Ok, but he was one of the guys designing all those high level abilities. Cook is really good at loving up, looking at his gently caress up, going "well that's no good, people shouldn't do that," and then loving up in that exact same way again forever.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:57
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Serf posted:you have to work your way around to it because the post is very badly written and stupid, but lol at "virtue signaling" I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:53
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Mirthless jumping in to provide first hand proof the OSR is full of shitheads and dipshits. EDIT: "The OSR isn't bad, they're good people, like me, who has a mile long rap sheet defending the worst stuff possible, and who use fashy memes in my casual posts!"
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Oct 31, 2018 21:56
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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?
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Nov 1, 2018 03:02
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Physical books are legitimately generally better for real life games where you can physically point to things in the book, but also just period for new games, so players can flip through and actually look through the art and pick up on the game's general aesthetics and whatnot. Games do a pretty terrible job of explaining themselves, but often enough the art does a far better job, and it always increases player buy-in when they can point to something in the book and say "That's sick as hell, I wanna do that" or "look at this total babe, can I be her?" That said, in most other situations, I prefer pdf, because I gotta live within my means, which ain't much, and books take up room that pdfs don't, and cost more money then pdfs do. Anyways buy pdfs, support your artists.
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Nov 6, 2018 04:20
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While Alexis Kennedy tends to hit kinda the same note a lot, it's a good note, of "there are cosmic beings far more massive then us, and oh, they care so much about you, and their love isn't exactly a good thing."
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Dec 6, 2018 23:41
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Roland Jones posted:One of my favorite bits of cosmic horror is one where said cosmic horror actually represents capitalism; it's not only more relatable (assuming you aren't also a sheltered white dude who is afraid of basically everything, including the existential horror of oblivion, the ocean, people who don't look like you, people who don't look like you having sex with people who do look like you, the possibility that you might be related to people who don't look like you, Nikola Tesla, round architecture, the non-visible electromagnetic spectrum, and air conditioning) and an actual threat to people, but it also actually fits things better, such as the "enormous monster obliterating people without noticing or caring" stuff. Night in the Woods rules and is another great example of actually doing something with the idea of "cosmic horror." Lovecraft is racist, but he's also extremely boring. Nobody is actually scared by Lovecraft anymore. Cthulhu is a mass media marketing meme. That's been my longstanding issue with "Lovecraftian eldritch horror" - it's not horror, and it's usually not really interesting. Nobody's actually doing much with it. Like yes, Lovecraft has inspired D&D, in that there are monsters with tentacles and you take damage to an attribute sometimes when fighting them, and that's it. At the end of the day, all of Lovecraft's lore boils down to "just another monster," because that's all it ever was - just another monster, but look out, the monster is REALLY BIG, and people with melanin are involved too! Nobody gives a poo poo about actual "Lovecraftian lore" in Call of Cthulhu the game series, either, to be frank. They just like being turn of the century detectives with things going bad. Oh but the things going bad have trademarked names, so there you go. Cosmic horror in of itself is a dressing, not a centerpiece. You have to use it to actually do or say something. Otherwise, it's just another monster.
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Dec 7, 2018 19:09
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The Lord of Hats posted:But yeah, this is exactly on point. It's a visually interesting time period with some neat stuff going on, and it has a bunch of cool spooky gribblies to fight, and it's in the public domain, and above all, its familiar . Roland Jones posted:Which Lovecraft would probably hate, if he could somehow learn what's been done to his work and how it's seen and used eighty years after his death. Like, imagine Lovecraft being presented with a Funko Pop Cthulhu and having to come to terms with that being how his work is largely seen by the world. He'd throw a fit, then probably write a story about terrifying, haunted statuettes with bulbous heads and dead eyes, their repulsive forms inducing nausea in all but the most hardy or foolish of men or something. Yeah, it is supremely funny to me that the reason Lovecraft's monsters - meant to drive you insane just by knowing they might exist - are famous is because...they're so widespread and well known.
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Dec 7, 2018 20:21
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NutritiousSnack posted:Actually he's difficult to read, there is a difference between being a being a boring hack and someone who managed to survive being thrashed for a hundred years (for sometimes good reasons: tackling his racism for example) and literally forgotten. You confuse him using literary devices in stories for pulp magazines, known for breezy reading, and being inept or not scary. The dude is motherfucking terrifying, like don't discount the racism, but actually read his work as an exchange of ideas, and not rolling poorly on a SANITY roll. Ignoring your weird claims that Lovecraft was progressive somehow, really, are you actually claiming here that nobody who truly gets Lovecraft could dislike his works? That's genuinely pathetic. And also still not scary. Sorry, but the idea that we all live in an uncaring universe surrounded by antipathetic monsters that could and would snuff us out in a heartbeat without ever knowing we even exist isn't scary. That's day to day life. Like, you just described medical bills.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:57
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Kemper Boyd posted:And this whole global warming thing too. Quite frankly, the Lovecraftian monsters aren't terrifying because they don't even know what they're doing. Real world monsters absolutely know.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:05
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Liquid Communism posted:You know, I sympathize to some extent. CharOp gets real ugly when not everyone's into it, but I think the solution is running a system less prone to it rather than bitching at the players. See that's exactly why I don't sympathize. Pathfinder is intentionally even more mechanically nitpicky then 3.5 is. They're proclaiming they hate people getting into the mechanics, and then making the most mechanical mess possible.
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Dec 17, 2018 06:20
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The goal of an RPG book is to both a) teach you how to play the game, and b) encourage you to want to play the game. Unfortunately, the vast, vast majority of RPG writers are not people who know how to or are even interested in teaching people how to play a game, they're semi-failed novelists who really want you to be interested in their (typically boring) setting, so they fail miserable at a, and only sometimes kinda succeed at b, and even then b only happens with a lot of pre-existing player buy-in. This isn't even going into how garbage and insular D&D's hiring practices are.
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Dec 23, 2018 22:29
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Who actually gives a poo poo in the game? No, seriously. We saw these complaints nonstop in 4e and it was bullshit then, too. Who is, mid-game, going "Now hold on a second, I have some questions about these abilities of yours?!" loving nobody, because these complaints aren't rooted in actual gameplay. It's purely complaints for their own sake. Absolutely nobody is interrupting their own game to suddenly ponder the meaning of words in their class ability list.
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Dec 24, 2018 20:57
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Andrast posted:You are giving a lot of credit to rpg players here Not really; the giving too much credit assumption is that they actually play the game instead of just reading the book on the shitter and then complaining online, frankly.
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Dec 24, 2018 21:56
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Mearls actually personally hates the warlord so it's not surprising they did whatever they could to kill it.
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Dec 24, 2018 23:18
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Kai Tave posted:Monte Cook being brought on board to great fanfare then unceremoniously chucked off the bus will always be one of the weirdest and funniest moments of Next's desultory development process. As far as I know, what happened is way more gross, because it was Monte Cook being brought on board and then basically chased and harassed out by Mearls. Reminder that Mearls was Cook's protoge and basically got hired into WotC by Cook.
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Dec 25, 2018 04:22
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"That's only a problem if your GM is a dick" is only a valid statement if the game actually does a good job at teaching the GM, and even then runs into issues where so much of the tabletop gaming hobby as a culture is still focused around and desperately trying to appeal to old shitlords who still whinge about the "proper way" to play D&D. Like, sure, there's a lot of stuff that's only a problem if your GM is a dick, but tabletop gaming culture really, really wants your GM to be a dick. Tabletop gaming memes are still full of poo poo like "keep a kill counter of PCs you've taken out!" and "make sure not to give your player too much leeway, because players are evil and want to ruin your game!"
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Dec 25, 2018 07:08
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Reene posted:I mean, mainly I just really dislike queerness being relegated to a sidebar with wishy-washy, noncommittal language and calling that inclusivity. If you want to be inclusive you need to actually weave that into your story and setting and write it with those in mind, not quarantine it into (literally) a tiny ignorable box. It largely boils down to fantasy being an intensely conservative genre in most aspects. Even beyond it's take on sexuality and sex and gender, the most common fantasy story is "a thing is happening - stop it from happening!" Fantasy heroes rarely make the world a better place - they tend instead to simply uphold the status quo. This isn't even touching fantasy's fetishization of a non-existent medieval state complete with "good kings" and "peasantry rabble," and a terrifyingly racist outlook where each "race" has their own kingdom they stay in, basically glorifying a series of goddamn ethno-states. My favorite take on dwarves is what someone posted earlier. All dwarves have beards, and that's how dwarves identify themselves. Various beard stylings are in fact how dwarves make declarative statements about themselves. A beard woven one way means this, a beard styled another way means that. While dwarves tend to be very rigid with very defined genders, there's absolutely more then two, and you are free to change your identity to different genders or sexuality as easy as...well, combing out your beard and restyling it. In turn, for the most horrific of crimes, a dwarf is ritualistically shaven and disallowed to regrow their beard as a part of their exile - effectively exiling them not only physically, but denying them the ability to even be considered a dwarf. Elves aren't nearly as rigid. I've always liked the idea of elves being naturally fluid not just in a sense of sexuality, but in their physical appearance completely. Elves begin to take on physical features of wherever they live in just a generation, and sometimes even shorter; "high elves" of the plains who move to the forest will have "wood elf" children, and may themselves slowly turn into "wood elves" in enough time. In turn, elves can tweak and alter themselves with a bit of focus and time. This means elves don't really have the long list of genders and sexes that dwarves have, because literally every elf can simply shape themselves differently, and elves tend to side-eye other peoples desire to categorize sex and gender - they have no need to categorize things when it's all completely subject to personal desire. Hell, there'd probably be times where elves develop their own subcultures based entirely on how they're designing their own bodies. This also means anything that permanently effects your body would most likely be taken as seriously as possible.
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Dec 29, 2018 22:15
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