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Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
At this point on tumblr, it is impossible to distinguish between lazy clicktivists who think trying to shame other liberals is "activism", people parodying those clicktivists, and alt-righters who think making parody accounts is "psyops".

The only honest tumblrs are the ones about pornography.

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Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Oh god, and this is just the beginning too, we're going to have five months of sweet sweet grog tears just in the hype leading up to the playtest. Maybe we need a babysitter for this thread, to make sure no one ODs.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

TheChirurgeon posted:

It suffered more from being a kids show on a kids network than the original did

I think it suffered more from the succession of antagonists whose plots revolved around "gently caress over the avatar" and Korra's resultant physical and emotional crippling. Kuvira finally had plot goals beyond telling Korra how much she sucked and how useless the avatar was, but that was the tail end of the show.

Even Aang wouldn't have been as confident and proactive if the first 3 books had been a procession of villains teabagging him.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
While being on a kid's network probably didn't help, but I don't think there's anything inherent there that would stop them from having villains whose motivations were in conflict with, but not directly centered on, the avatar.

Like, I appreciate they didn't want to just have another evil overlord trying to take over the world and just rehash the original series plot. Conceptually I think the Amon plot was alright, and its intersection with the avatar made sense and fit in well with her whole internal plot of insecurity over being in Aang's shadow and whatnot (execution of the plot, maybe not so much).

But then you get Unalaq whose central point is also that the avatar sucks and needs to go for the world to improve, and then we get Zaheer and co. who yet again feel that loving up the avatar is key to breaking the world out of its rut. And Korra just seems to internalize all this poo poo heaped on her, which isn't helped by the fact that even when she wins she ends up losing her past life connections and is physically crippled, on top of being an emotional wreck. When they finally do the evil overlord plot, most of the season is about Korra essentially in therapy to deal with being dumped on for three years.

To be clear, I actually liked Korra for its characters and world building. There was a lot of potential there. But I wasn't watching a show called "avatar"' because I was hoping for three seasons of animated Jessica Jones.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
I've pondered on occasion whether something like Spellbound Kingdom's combat style matrix/flowchart thingie could be a good adaptation for a martial arts game. The idea of players watching the flow of their opponents moves to guess where they'll go next, or learning how different styles work so they can overcome them mechanically, seems like it'd be a good fit. Seems like it wouldn't take much more to do it for an avatar like game, it already has some magic-based fighting styles IIRC.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Terrible Opinions posted:

The problem is non-white dudes getting hired by the larger RPG making companies and getting access to distribution tools for releasing the games they have made independently. This is a fairly overt problem caused by systemic racism/sexism. Obviously once a work is made a distributed all you really have to care about is the quality therein, it's just getting to that point as somehow who isn't a white dude.

So, encouraging diversity in larger RPG companies is a straightforward (though not easy) approach. Same with something like the newsletter, in essentially helping with visibility of more independent games. But how do you facilitate "access to distribution tools", in this context? That seems like for our weird little nerd hobby to be pretty critical, given the importance of the kickstarter/POD/pdf approach to sales these days, but I'm not sure what would be helpful in this frame.

I suppose at least one approach would be to do something like the indie music label/publishing house routes of yore, and try to set up a collective oriented specifically towards publishing and promoting more diverse materials. Getting the company name up as one of the "big ones" on drivethru might help. At least, assuming the whole thing doesn't implode; my experience with some of those indie groups back in the 90s (for punk music and rabble lit anyway) was that they were notoriously volatile.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Ah, good to hear its going on. I was loosely aware of Indie Press Revolution, but had thought it was more just a general indie game house. Hadn't heard about the other, but I'll check them out too.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Has anyone put out any estimates of the relative risk/reward of freelancing in this industry versus spending the same amount of time trying to self-publish and kickstart your own work? I mean yeah, there'd be a lot of assumptions so it'd be mostly back of the napkin, but I wonder if that sort of thought exercise might be illustrative. It was less than 2 decades ago that almost everything had to go through a publishing house and self-publishing was impossible or likely to cost you your life savings. A lot of freelancers today were at least involved as hobbyists in those days, and I wonder how much of the willingness of people to put up with the exploitative poo poo is inherited assumptions that freelancing is still the "safe" way to try to work in RPGs.

Basically, I'm just wondering if, as time goes on, the freelance pool may shrink as people figure that if they're going to get paid poo poo in this industry either way, they should at least get poo poo pay and ownership of the property instead of work for hire.

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I wonder how companies setting up these "for pay user content portals" will impact that shakeout as well. I'm sure you couldn't make a living trying to sell your fan supplements on, say, White Wolf's official portal on drivethru. But if your main impetus is to be able to (misleadingly) call yourself a "published RPG author who has worked on supplements for popular games such as Vampire the Masquerade and Dungeons and Dragons", so you have "cred" for your kickstarter, why bother with the freelancer bullshit?

Desiden fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jun 3, 2018

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
I mean, I have no idea on comparative costs for marketing in RPGs (in no small part because most of them likely don't have any marketing budget). But 300 doesn't strike me as that nutty for a one off stunt that nets community goodwill and attention. Zweihander's a cheaper digital book, but even so you're talking maybe 50ish sales to recoup the cost, more or less?

And yeah, its kind of silly and pointless in terms of doing much of anything with the trademark. But Pundit is an unhinged dumbass, so even if its actual legal power to gently caress with him is nil, its fairly likely he'll have some sort of contorted reaction to it that does him no favors in the end. Tarnowski's pretty much incapable of not shooting himself in the foot.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
I mean, do the Ennies have any value? Not asking as a slam on them (well, not just a slam), but pretty much the only context I ever see them referenced in places talking about RPGs its either:

1. Bullshit about the awards trying to scam free stuff, which I guess they stopped but as this thread shows is still often thought of
2. Its a d20 award....a decade after the d20 boom sputtered out. Again, may not be wholly true, but seems to be the stereotype
3. OSR grogs try to weasel in nominations, probably since most of them have been banned from nearly everywhere else they might promote their products into the "RPG mainstream"

So if you're not trying to give away your product, peddle something pathfinder, or try to still get noticed in the industry despite being a shitweasel, is there any point in submitting? Does an Ennie award actually translate into more sales, and/or more sales than sticking any other random bullshit "this won an award" sticker on the front of the book?

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Libertad! posted:

Alexander Macris (owner of Autarch, Milo, Inc, Escapist Magazine, writer of ACKS) allegedly threatened to sue RPGnet over defamation of character, so they added him and his RPG on a list of banned conversation topics.

Well, from this I learned that Milo is apparently so strapped for cash that he can't even afford the handful of employees he had left. So that's brightening my day at least.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
This whole debacle just makes me more confused as to why anyone uses twitter in the first place. Is there anything twitter is actually better at than other platforms to publicly post stuff, other than "let randos butt in whenever they feel like it"?

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
What makes it such a particular trash fire? Is it just a toxic corporate culture or is it something in their business model that makes them such a clusterfuck?

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if nuWW had just blundered into these nazi callsigns. Much like Trump in his democratic years, they seem to be a mix of incompetence, unquestioned assumptions, and only a vague understanding of any ideology at all that they just sort of lurch into shittiness. Fascism through failure at life, as it were.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
If you do the 14 words backwards, does that make it bizarro? White children securing the past for the non-aryan races?

Now I want to play a game about time traveling woke kids fighting the slave trade.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Has anyone made a flowchart yet of who is harassing whom for what bullshit reason in all of this? At this point I'm completely confused as to who is attacking one another and why.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Kai Tave posted:

Yeah, Scroll of Swallowed Darkness was kind of dumb imo, but someone looking at a game called Pimp: the Backhanding and going "yes this is cool and good and we should publish it" was way, way stupider. As I recall, even people writing for White Wolf at the time were like "uh yeah, this is actually pretty bad, I didn't have anything to do with this."

Some of them definitely. I remember Justin Achilles doing some pretty embarrassing defenses of it on RPG.net though. The one he used that still sticks in my head after all these years was a picture of a 40k space marine in a pimp hat, which apparently proved that nerds were being hypocritical since they thought that incongruous image was funny, but weren't laughing at a game with an action card involving chucking hot frying oil at a sex worker.

That was kinda in a nutshell what made Pimp: the Backhanding extra dumb. I wouldn't call the memes about pimps at the time progressive by any means, but like a lot of memes they were mostly about nothing. Then WW showed up and clearly did not get the joke, and ended up aping the form with a terribly literal attempt at "humor".

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
While it is a sign of the lovely world we live in that this is a product some people paid money for, I think its good to keep in mind how few people in fact did so. Even at release, with articles in a number of social media sites, steam trackers show the number of people buying and playing it in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. After the first month, its not even that much. You could poo poo out a 99 cent flash game in a day and stand a good chance of doing as well as, if not better, than nuWWs product lines to date.

Of course, I stand ready to be blown away during the AMA when they finally let us know what stage of production their "guaranteed within 5 years" netflix programming is at.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
From the scattered "facts" among all the random bullshit the chuds are tossing around, it seems dubious he even provoked someone into attacking him.

At first he was claiming he couldn't remember the attacker, except he was (of course) wearing a rainbow wifebeater, and then some video of a broken window which he claimed the person he couldn't remember attacked in a rage somewhere in the course of attacking him. But which the bar refused to intervene on, since apparently the great librul conspiracy will comp antifas windows or something. Then the police declined to intervene because I guess they're also sekrit libruls and won't prosecute an assault with "five eyewitnesses". Eyewitnesses who later went on to blame Matt.

Option 1 - all that poo poo happened. Option 2 - chuds be chuds, and maybe butthurt that he couldn't sneak into a MtG event at gencon or something.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Subjunctive posted:

Didn’t Matt admit to it? Your theory confuses me.

If he has, I haven't seen it anywhere. Just the gater brigade whining anywhere they're not banned about how gencon's involved in a cover up and they're totally going to go bankrupt next year unless they ban the SJWs.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Subjunctive posted:

I thought I’d seen it, but I think I was reading too quickly. Sorry about that.

No worries. Per standard for these things, the chuds are throwing every combination of "evidence" they can in the air to make it as confused as possible.

Though I do wonder if they were actually dumb enough to file a police report like they claim.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Are these two chuds part of the same brood? Because it would be hilarious if he holds on to the money and they all start squabbling over it.

EDIT: Oh, and here's part of the evil media reporting on what happened. Yeah, this all sounds like a giant pile of "guy made it all the gently caress up":

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2018/08/03/gen-con-indianapolis-gaming-commentator-conservative-views-punched/896816002/

Desiden fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Aug 4, 2018

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Dawgstar posted:

Ethan Van Sciver is a pro comic artist who went untouchable by Marvel and DC when he went all chud so now has to subsist off the donations of alt-right mouth-breathers. He's basically the professional ComicsGate uses for validation.

So...very likely going to try to pocket as much of the money as he can.

At least that part could be entertaining.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
What's also obnoxious about infernals is there's some conceptually interesting mechanics and setting bits in there with how their charms work thematically around the yozis, and developing demon shintais and such. And Malfeas itself is an interesting and weird place with some potential for alien adventures and stuff. But that's all bracketed by big swaths of demonic gangbangs and teen birthing chambers and other edgelord crap.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Bedlamdan posted:

Apparently Matt Loter has been delisted as part of the faculty for Quinnipiac University. There also was a police report submitted. So uh, clearly more than just nothing happened here, and if Loter really was the victim of a random frame-up then he probably ought to have done more than go radio silent and hope the whole thing blew over.

Matt Loter wasn't delisted from poo poo, chuds are just morons who don't understand that "local businessman who teaches an occasional special topics class" isn't the same as "professor on staff".

Even at large tier 1 universities, its not uncommon to have special topics classes taught by locals, the most common I'm familiar with being for languages, art, or business. They're not usually listed as faculty, either full or part time, they're usually just paid with some small flat fee as a one off thing. Quinnipac university is a smaller private school, and a quick look at their faculty roster is pretty standard for that size, a small core faculty, some part time adjuncts, and a few departments teaching various end degrees.

Right wing media is trying to boost this as some sort of "librul ivy tower elitist" because that sells better. The chuds are flailing for some sort of victory here, because the police report (which hambly originally claimed he filed that night, but which local news quoted the indy PD as being a delayed thing after he started hyping it on social media) didn't go anywhere.

quote:

The way it looks is that Loter was just some dude with poor impulse control and some anger he needed to vent, and Hambly probably exaggerated the impact of it afterwards. It probably wouldn't have been hard to just publicly give an alibi and tell Hambly to gently caress off if he was just targeted at random.

You're assuming this happened at all. Which, given that there were supposedly multiple eyewitnesses and the bar would *need* a police report to file an insurance claim on the broken window, is at best dubious. There's also Hambly claiming he had no idea who Loter was, and then getting outed on twitter getting all pissy about one of Loter's posts a couple weeks before Gencon.

In other words, the more likely answer is Hambly's an idiot who made the whole thing up, and is too stupid to stop digging.

Either way, there's no reason for Loter to engage, and a lot of reason not to. Engaging won't change the minds of any chuds, and gives a reason for Hambly to keep responding. Not engaging Hambly, who remember has already been banned from MtG for being a harassing assclown, while he keeps putting up posts of bullshit about this provides plenty of ammunition for Loter to ask Gencon to ban his rear end moving forward. Which I suspect may be as much the point of that Gencon post as anything.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

paradoxGentleman posted:

This is reminding me of that one show where they try first the very cheap version of something and then the very expensive version, like maybe a slice of pizza from a hole-in-the-wall place and then those abominations with caviar and gold filings. It's not like the latter is significantly better than the former because it's full of luxury foods (and not-foods) that don't even go well together, it's just luxury for the sake of luxury.

Well, and demonstration of status, group affiliation, etc. etc.

Part of the problem in the larger conversation going on here, struggling around "why/how do people spend $500 bucks for something when they could get by with a $50 book?" is that the concept of privilege is a clumsy way to try to frame it. It informs elements of the discussion sure, but this is all centered on the purchasing of non-essentials where both ends of the price point are within the budgetary means of the economic middle class. Of course, the alternative take involves having to read stuff like Lacan or Bourdieu, so I don't fault anyone for not wanting to do that.

To me at least, the interesting question here isn't "is spending $500 bucks on a game excessive?", its more "what are people trying to do when they buy a $500 game?". Are they attempting to "distinguish themselves from the poors", like people buying forgeworld products in wargaming are sometimes accused of doing? Does it make them feel higher in the class ladder than they might otherwise, by acting as an "investor" rather than just a customer? Or are they calculating value in a different way altogether here?

There's a whole lot that can be described there with how value is perceived and tastes formed, how aspirations to climbing the social ladder are tied to consumption in capitalism, and how groups define their boundaries, but you're not going to get there with privilege. Or, at least not in the way the internet has latched on to the concept, and tries to pound round pegs into square holes with it.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Part of what makes it such a shithole now, according to a friend of mine got the gently caress out of CPB a number of years back, is that even if the individual agent isn't a maga chud, they're given next to no discretion in how to deal with things anymore. Especially if their supervisor is one of the jackasses who thinks they're defending the borders of holy terra from the hated xenos. Used to be, the individual agent had a lot more discretion to adjust these things during the interview (not that all of them would, plenty being jackasses, but still). Especially under the current administration though, not so much.

Last year my firm did a project on cross border trade for the local government, that had some CPB guys advising. I did take a certain degree of petty satisfaction in describing my experiences entering the Soviet Union in 1990 versus re-entering the US in 2016. They were...less than pleased....about which experience was more efficient and had less stupid and pointless questioning.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Kavak posted:

The published fan books are sold through Drive-Thru RPG as is the 5th Edition quickstart, but not the corebook. Why did they even need Modiphus, were they that hard up for printing books?

Well, originally they were talking about how they wanted to "get WoD back in stores" which mostly showed how clueless they were about why the industry had went to the PoD/kickstarter sort of model (and that they thought it was an either/or between that and having books in game shops). Then somewhere along the line they seemed to realize that all this publishing and distribution stuff was hard, so they got modiphus involved, who does both store distribution and online sales. Why/how they decided not to have their core book on dtrpg who knows, but given that Modiphus publishes there, I have to assume it was nuWW's idea not to. It would seem like a logical continuation of their ignorance of how anything actually works in the RPG world today.

Or the short form: nuWW is convinced that the WoD is 2018 is still this super special property, and keep blundering as they find out things don't work like they imagined they did in the 90s.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
So was it confirmed anywhere non-chud that Matt Loter is in fact the second person banned? Because Hambley's whining about it involved an email saying he and someone else (who was not named) were banned from Gencon. People assumed it was Loter, but it could have just been another of the shitlords trolling the gencon twitter feed or something.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

quote:

Driving off customers or potential customers doesn't seem like a winning strategy. For me at least the preferred political stance of where I get my entertainment and interact with other is non-political as politics creeps into evermore facets of every ones life. In addition, the cultural value of free speech is under immense attack from both partisans of the right and the left. That is a sad devolution of society and I for one am more apt to support and patronize businesses, organizations, and people that actually embrace the cultural value of free speech regardless if I agree with most or any of what they say.

Truly RPG.net is doomed, without the economic patronage of the college libertarian party.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Ah, the "my stupidity was all a great ruse" ploy. One of the classics.

Would have probably worked better if he read the whole wiki entry on value theory before trying, though.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
I had a couple friends on vkontakte (Russian facebook, basically) message me today asking if I heard about this and what western gamers thought about it. So I guess its gotten some visibility. My impression from them was it was a social media shitstorm, kind of like here, but they hadn't mentioned the kommersant article or anything, so maybe its gotten more visibility than that.

But yeah, there's definitely a fandom over there.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
I'd consider it entirely plausible for him to be getting death threats, just because this is now a big shitstorm on the internet and therefore inevitably there's going to be dipshits who decide to start lobbing threats.

Whether those threats amount to anything more than someone shouting "yer gonna die fukker" at him on twitter or something is another matter.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
In all the hype lead up I did kind of wonder what Martin and pals were promising Paradox in terms of returns on the ttrpg. The way they were talking it up and how they were going back to "traditional media channels" and "recapturing the zeitgeist" made me think they were envisioning a similar return of market share. Having sat in on more than a few meetings with absurd calculations about accessible market and possibility for share capture, I would not put it past nuWW to have sold their plan on "well, old WW was about 25% of the market, and dnd 5e has made upper eight figures in its lifetime, so we can make $30M with v5!". Which would be batshit, but nuWW seems to have a lot of ideas about how ttrpgs work in 2018 that aren't based on much more than wishful thinking, so...

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Back in the 90s, when I was first getting into progressive groups and causes, there were plenty of aging boomer activists who showed up to meetings and were all butthurt that the kids these days didn't find their hippie bullshit relevant to what was going on then. Doesn't seem like I can post on MR*H's little pity party, but I wonder if he realizes the irony that he's basically the irrelevant gen-x equivalent to the flower child sitting in the corner, smugly taking credit for all these advances and not understanding why no one finds his approach meaningful 30 years after the fact.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
And going strong even outside of genre fiction. Conspiracy theories, for example. No matter how absurd they can seem, to some its more comforting to imagine a malevolent group of globalist elites behind every tragedy than to accept that a lot of things are just random, because it at least posits some meaning and organization behind bad things happening. Some people really find the idea of a universe without inherent meaning beyond what we ascribe it to be really scary.

Or they become Buddhists and just go with it.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Part of what also makes Lovecraft's racism stand out for his time was less its volume and more the tenor. The particular strands of biological degeneracy that underpinned it were even by that time sort of antiquated. While there were still some neo-Lamarckians running around trying to experimentally prove soft inheritance in Lovecraft's time, they had a century of failure under the belts by the 1920s. As Western society had shifted from the explicit economy of chattel slavery towards colonialism, you also had a shift towards a sort of mishmashed cultural racism with varying degrees of eugenics flavoring as the "proper" attitude towards racial difference. So even at the time, Lovecraft's writing comes across in 1920s society like someone today ranting about the intrinsic rapacious nature of the Hun. It kind of stands out in a weirdly atavistic sort of way, especially for someone so enamored by the trappings of science.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
Dark Imperium kind of kicks it off. That focuses a decent amount on Rowboat's fall and resurrection. Not sure about the tau stuff. There's a bunch of stuff that happened with the eldar, who managed to basically short circuit their end-times prophecy and (partially) create their god of death, which was supposed to require the death of the entirety of the eldar, but didn't. That's got several books covering the wacky shenanigans.

There's also a bunch of horus heresy stuff, which is a mixed bag. Some has added new lore, some is just very tedious battle porn with a few paragraphs of interesting history scattered throughout.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
While I've got no strong feelings about the 2e version of defiling, I did feel like the incentive in 4e to consider defiling was pretty limited. Its a reroll on a daily arcane power, which is nice, but in turn also damages all your allies within 20 squares. Between a lot of dailies already doing some measure of damage or effect even on a miss, and the various other ways to get rerolls a lot of class/race combos have, it just never seemed to be a significant temptation to use in our campaign. There are some paragon paths defiling unlocks, but there are also preserver paths that play a little better with a group anyway.

I mean, I get from a balancing perspective why you don't want defiling to be too awesome, but as a temptation thing for PCs it was too situational to feel like much of a concern when we play.

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Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

dwarf74 posted:

Yeah, Defiling was poorly-implemented in a lot of ways in 4e. It also directly hurt your allies - like, by a lot. Half a healing surge worth, IIRC - or 1/8th of their max HP - without negatively affecting your enemies. This cut back on the 'destruction of nature is its own penalty' nature, for me.

I ended up letting it substitute for ritual components, too, but even that didn't feel like enough. And recovering a Daily felt like too much. Maybe recovering an Encounter power? Allowing damage re-rolls without damaging your allies in return? I dunno.

It's overall fine, though; it's rarely a good idea for player-facing mechanics, and the rest of the implementation is simply phenomenal.

Yeah, we've enjoyed 4e Dark Sun on the whole a ton, so the defiling mechanic as a PC thing mostly just stands out as awkward compared to all the other good stuff. If I really had to balance it to make it tempting, I'd probably do something like either reroll or recover an encounter power, at the cost of some sort of non-enemy living scenery within range (plant life or neutral NPCs, whatever) or some number of healing surges from allies. For my game, I've generally skipped worrying about the specific battle mechanic and done temptation via rituals. We're already doing fixed enhancements and scarcity of magical items, so access to rituals for magic item creation is one of the more available routes to get additional bennies...but most of the accessible sources for those rituals are from defilers. There's also going to be some upcoming options to try to use creepy ancient defiler magic to solve some of their problems if they want to go that route.

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