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Jimbozig posted:This discussion is helpful for my current work on Strike 2e which will include more AoEs. There are basically 3 categories, right? My take on this is pretty close to Tuxedo Catfish's comment: people intuitively understand what "enemy" and "ally" means in practice. They couldn't explain the logic behind what is and isn't an ally, but they get that their party members are allies and the people they're fighting are enemies and the imperial grunts that are fighting both sides might count as allies on the cleric's turn and enemies on the wizard's turn depending on the specific circumstances. All and Any make sense in the same way, but Opt only makes sense as a term if you have this entire conversation. The point is, we're talking about making RPGs and not logic puzzles. Having a truly watertight definition of enemy and ally is neat, but one of the strengths of the medium is that even in an extremely crunchy tactical system you can go "you can figure out how to take it from here" for weird corner cases in the fiction and it will be mostly fine.
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Jan 25, 2024 01:46
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Halloween Jack posted:Normies don't have opinions about Mike Mearls. Normies who are put into a position where they're talking to Mike Mearls and can ask "so what was designing 5e like" as random water cooler talk do. (So yeah. It's not normal, but it's the kind of weird you'd expect from a random guy who liked D&D back in the day but whose only reference point for the 5e edition change is talking to the people who oversaw it.)
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Feb 10, 2024 20:16
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Sionak posted:This isn't a really helpful response. What kind of lovely stuff? There's a lot of flavors of that in ttRPGs. There's a few things like the discussion a few pages back of one writer at OPP being racist towards a Palestinian writer, but for the most part the lovely things that are revealed about Onyx Path are just... that they're a badly managed company, and that's being reflected in the quality of their work. That their books are written by getting a swarm of underpaid contractors to write each chunk of the book with minimal managerial oversight and their entire business strategy is using the influx of money from one kickstarter to survive until the next one. They're exceedingly normal flaws in this industry, and if their books were still good it probably wouldn't come up in here at all. That's why MonsieurChoc's answer was kind of nothing: because there isn't actually a smoking gun you can point to and say "this company is Bad now". Just a series of reveals that make you go "oh, I see why they've been going downhill lately".
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Mar 16, 2024 02:06
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admanb posted:I mean... no. It's correct to be cynical and gently caress Embracer and all that, but debtors don't just let you refinance all your debt into a corpse because "lol." Their debtors expect the independent Asmodee to be viable enough to make them back that money. I probably wouldn't go that far, but even as a financial layman this isn't a Toys R Us situation. This is Embracer Group eating as many companies as they could and spending the next three years choking on them. Asmodee got the debt because Embracer hosed up royally and they were the biggest coherent company they could split off in this reorganization. What else were they going to do, throw this on one of the video game companies before they have an actual name? The annoying thing about Embracer Group is how it did absolutely nothing positive. Just a constant sense of "the one good thing you could do was pour money into something cool, and you couldn't even do that right".
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Apr 24, 2024 03:27
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My personal take is that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if the discussion of how you can ignore the hard limit on how many assets you can include in a roll if it feels better stayed in the longer rules discussion and not the step by step list of how it works. Talking about how breaking that mechanic's hard limit won't impact the broader mechanics too badly if you want to do something more high-power in the moment is perfectly normal. In fact, I'd actually encourage it. Including it in the step-by-step list just feels like a real lack of confidence in your own mechanics, and that taps into things people are annoyed by in the wider D&D discourse as already mentioned.
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May 1, 2024 15:39
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theironjef posted:I honestly am failing to see what's even actually being fought over here. Like, when I was a kid, I played a poo poo load of 2e D&D. It was what we played in my boy scout troop. And we invariably and without even thinking about it discarded the racial level caps. They were lovely design. I feel like you'd have to search far and wide to find anyone that thinks they weren't lovely design and could make any sort of defensible argument as to why and how they were good actually. We also dropped 2e method 1 rolling (3d6 down the line) for a wide variety of other rolling methods, because the odds of rolling a bard were like .0017% or something. That's lovely design. Why devote page space to something so rare? We laugh when Synnibarr has three pages dedicated to what happens if you roll 5 zeroes on a 5D10 roll and qualify to be a godling or whatever, but that's .01%! It's more likely! So we house ruled that poo poo. And generally speaking, if you played 2e, you probably house ruled the poo poo out of it too. 1e more so, 3e more so, even my favorite 4e had the MM on a Card to make up for the lovely first two MMs and a bunch of other stuff besides (hello free weapon focus math fix feat). Making this specific argument really bugs me personally, because the whole reason this is a bugbear for parts of the RPG community is that for decades the first response when you post something like "racial level caps in D&D are really dumb" would be "just ignore that rule lmao" and that doesn't do anything to change that this mechanic in a book you spent good money on is poo poo. Thus, the general frustration that if the core rules aren't good enough to use, why did I loving buy them? The entire point of my last post is that when you say something like the inciting rules text in a step by step list of how to resolve that mechanic, it feels less like a discussion of what is mechanically necessary to keep the game running smoothly and what can be adjusted for taste/drama and more like the game itself going "just ignore that rule lmao", and by extension if the core rules aren't confident that they're good enough to use, what's the loving point. (This post might be a bit unnecessarily spicy, but it's a sentiment that's generally built on years of reading people with very bad opinions on ENWorld et al. There's built-up feelings there.)
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May 1, 2024 16:30
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theironjef posted:I'm pretty safely not the type to hit you with the "lol ignore that stuff scrub" level discourse, I review roleplaying games for a living. But reading hundreds of the things has made it clear that none of them are perfect, but most of them are good enough to use. I do feel like it's weird, at least for me, to apply that level of perfectionism to anything you actually buy or intake. Like who am I, Anton Ego? Sometimes good enough is good enough. A roleplaying game to me is a stack of ideas, a rule framework or two, and generally some art, and I am perfectly comfortable buying them for parts. I am literally a lapsed System Mastery listener who keeps thinking they should get back into the podcast but never does because doing things is hard. I promise, I know. I wasn't kind of spicy because I thought you were that kind of guy. I was kind of spicy because I was confused that someone who has been in the RPG community longer than I have didn't get that there is a long history of That Guy in RPG discussions and the many years of this kind of opinion are a response to many years of That Guy. To try to make my point a bit clearer, I'm going to talk about a different game for a bit. I've been rereading Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine recently, because Jenna Moran launched a kickstarter recently and it was on my mind. (Side note: the window to buy backer rewards for that campaign via Backerkit is literally closing today, if that's something anyone is interested in.) That game has a lot of weird, wobbly rules, and it actively tells you to only use them at your discretion most of the time. But it doesn't run into the problem that led to this entire discussion, because those discussions are always focused on how the game is weird and wobbly and designed to be molded to your game's fiction and are generally treated as design insights that help you understand the game's intent better. If there was a bulleted list of steps on how to take actions and each one ended with "(or don't, as appropriate for the fiction)", it would be... well, not as immediately negative as this, because Ironsworn is a much more traditional RPG and thus closer to the games That Guy has been making stupid "just ignore the bad parts and do a better job as GM, forehead" posts about for years, but it would still feel like a weird lack of confidence in the part of the rules text that should feel the most confident in telling you what to do. Again, to be perfectly clear: I am literally making a tone argument about RPG rules text. So to Narsham's point... listen, it's literally what Rand Brittain said earlier. Sometimes a game can say this kind of thing and it feels like a game admitting that certain elements should be adjusted for taste, and sometimes it feels like the designers weren't sure that this mechanic was a good idea in the first place. It's all about how they write it and how it fits into the text as a whole.
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May 1, 2024 17:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:you can still be an rear end in a top hat about a game with bad rules, but i don't think there has ever in the history of TTRPGs been a case of "an explicit admonishment not to power game" that wasn't just cover for bad rules I wouldn't call the famous Wild Talents "you can turn off the sun with a six dice power, everyone is trying to have a good time so please do not build stupid game-ruining poo poo" that. Acknowledging bad rules, sure, but it's a very frank admission that they're there because they wanted to leave as much control in players' hands as possible and this is a side effect that players need to avoid for their own good.
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May 1, 2024 17:45
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theironjef posted:Okay that's two mentions in a row of my dumbass show, I'll chill out. It's tonal, I can get behind that. I'm not sure I can think of a game off my head that matches without a doubt the "We don't know if this works but also we already got your money" model of rule zero suggestions (I guess stuff like everything in 5e being optional now? Though that's hardly new, both of the skill systems in 2e were "optional"), but it's a tone thing and I am rarely quiet about those myself, so sure. If it helps, I wasn't bringing it up as an organized own or anything. Just... I wanted to be clear about it and then oh god so many people are posting in this thread right now. Keep up the good work on the podcast. I'm friends with fans of the show, so I trust that there hasn't been a random dip in quality since I drifted away from the show for no good reason. :p
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May 1, 2024 17:57
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Honestly, I've gone from my previously stated opinion to "oh, she was just misframing this whole thing" to "actually a random trans woman ranting about her personal RPG bugbear shouldn't have exploded into something relevant to the Industry thread in the first place". That isn't a major event, that's a normal thread on rpg.net. Or any given Friday in any Discord server I'm in. In conclusion, Vox Valentine posted:Twitter should be destroyed.
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May 1, 2024 22:01
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dwarf74 posted:This is a discussion of part of the rpg industry, including an author and a critic, both with substantial-ish audiences, and (potentially) an important topic. It belongs here just fine. Or would have in the chat thread, too, tbh. Objectively, you're right. Subjectively... my opinions on how modern social media shapes interactions for the worse and encourages bad behavior is way too off-topic.
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May 1, 2024 22:15
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dwarf74 posted:This is a discussion of part of the rpg industry, including an author and a critic, both with substantial-ish audiences, and (potentially) an important topic. It belongs here just fine. Or would have in the chat thread, too, tbh. Belatedly, I think I mostly just went "she has a 'had a tweet go mildly memetic' number of followers" and labeled her a complete rando without thinking about how basically everyone in this industry is a complete rando by social media standards.
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May 1, 2024 22:35
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Bottom Liner posted:Uhhhh what are you implying here Part of the extended rambling about social media being the worst I already decided was off-topic is about how trans women are reliably hit harder by the random bursts of pointless outrage that these sites encourage, partially because biases against them (intentional or unexamined), partially it ends up putting them in a position where seeing themselves and others deal with that all the time makes them abrasive and thus easier to form a weirdly angry bubble against. The point is, again, social media sucks and being a trans woman with an actual presence on social media sucks more and I'm going to force myself to leave it at this before I ramble further about off-topic things. (Also, welcome to the forums. Not implying anything about you specifically with this, just the broader dynamics of people at large and how things escalate into drama and callouts and I am very tired.)
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May 1, 2024 23:35
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theironjef posted:One of my personal favorite games is Sentinels the Roleplaying Game, which does not have an out of combat skill system. To me it doesn't matter, I tend to run with a very storygamey crowd and they know exactly how to act out superhero downtime, and whether or not they find anything in the town records building or whatever is going to come down to how they want the story to go. But I do have one table I've run it for who absolutely ground to a halt on it, could not move forward without a skill system, it was like it just broke their very concept of games (I wonder how they'd deal with a game prior to 3e D&D where skills were either not present or clearly marked as optional), but to appease them I just bolted on the skill system from Strike! because it's super simple to remember, and we played just fine. Also, to continue a diversion that's at least about RPGs, I do have one complaint about how Sentinels handles non-combat: as a game, it has the self-awareness and awareness of its genre to know that there are going to be the occasional plot-important political ball or an issue that's just THE TRIAL OF THE FLASH and they should be modeled using the same resolution system as fights when they come up, but not enough awareness to make sure people have interesting things to do mechanically in those fights. It could honestly be fixed by writing a few pages on how to run social/mental challenges like fights and how to recontextualize powers to make them fit those types of scenes, but it still feels like a hole. (And again, that shows that this isn't necessarily just an old vs new thing, because what I described is basically applying a Fate fractal model to a relatively crunchy system for comic book action instead of a relatively simple generic pulp action system.)
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May 1, 2024 23:45
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