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There was at least a little naked opportunism on Paizo's part, kind of like White Wolf's weird marketing campaign where they offered the Exalted 2e core if you turned in your 3.5 PHB to be destroyed around the same time.
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Nov 13, 2021 02:29
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Splicer posted:While alignment itself is still in, otherwise this seems to be what they've done. Drow are just folk but most Faerun Drow live in cities under the sway of an evil cult. So, better late than never. I'd have to dig something up to check on it but I could absolutely swear this was how the drow were originally presented way back in like Vault of the Drow or something - most are just people, usually some flavor of Neutral, but stuck in a society where power is concentrated in the hands of a giant pack of bastards all bastarding at each other. I'd be disappointed if it turned out my memories on this were wrong, but not too surprised.
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Dec 15, 2021 18:06
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The current lore poo poo about the divided Imperium could even be a good starting point to making a better, less overtly fashy setting out of things. The Imperium was already so big that it was having problems holding together, so just, y'know... let Guilliman's crusade to reunite the Imperium across the Great Rift fail. Let the Imperium atomize as the fascists turn on each other as they are wont, and new powers forming from small clusters of worlds banding together. Let some get picked off by Chaos or 'Nids or whatever because grimdark, but others hold together because most sectors and subsectors had to be fairly self-sufficient anyway (insofar as clusters of inhabited worlds can be called "self-sufficient"). Either make a new faction out of it called, I don't know, the Scattered Realms, or lean harder on people developing a distinct identity for their IG armies or whatever. Most importantly, let it stand that the Imperium has been dealt a genuine blow and drastically diminished, and that they're not going to fix it back up thanks to some Great Man. The Marines? I donno, a lot of chapters are powers unto themselves anyway. Let that play out in weird and different ways for the various chapters as unity breaks down and doctrine starts failing (even more than it already has). Just don't make them the sole driving force behind every new state of consequence out in the shattered former Imperium.
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Dec 17, 2021 01:26
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paradoxGentleman posted:So, I wanted to ask something, even if it will make me look like an idiot. It's about the Kickstarter thing. Okay, someone please correct me if and where I'm wrong. I don't have the deepest understanding but I have enough to realize I don't want to touch crypto. So... The short version is that it's a live, decentralized record of activity in the blockchain's network. And everyone keeps a copy, to keep it decentralized, as it regularly checks against other copies of the blockchain to verify that its information is legit and not being edited. This means every transaction in the chain - like say I send you a Bitcoin - gets recorded and then propagates to everyone else so the whole network knows that Bitcoin #314159 is now owned by you and not me. This bloats the blockchain massively very quickly. The current size of the Bitcoin blockchain is 380 GB, according to a quick Google search. It grew 20 GB since early October. It's going to keep getting bigger with every transaction. And bear in mind that Bitcoin's number of transactions are still a small fraction of what you'd see in regular financial transactions for almost any bank or other institution - actual wide adoption of a crypto coin would end up with blockchains so big that only a handful of players could even host it, progressively recentralizing everything.
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Dec 17, 2021 20:35
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Hot take - Dark Souls rpg should be a Quiet Year type game about gathering misbegotten fools around the Last Fire, huddled together as the world falls apart. Throw in some light quest rolls where you wander off, kill a boss and maybe go insane. loving sold on this idea.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:03
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Nessus posted:While wizards and to a slightly lesser extent clerics always got the ridiculous goodies, I believe that if you sit down and play through some AD&D 1E and 2E, the gap is a lot smaller there, especially since many of the material components for big magic are a. explicitly stated and b. would, at least, cost money to get hold of. Yeah, this is absolutely what happened. For all that people decried 4e as "video gaming" D&D, 3e actually reflected a LOT of little bits and changes in video game adaptations of 2e that, in the aggregate, made wizarding a lot easier and more powerful. But, as you said, very common house rules as well. But if you played hard and fast with the rules, back in 2e wizards had a lot of stuff meant to encourage them to husband their casting resources rather than unload and get it all back after the next night's sleep. For example, spell prep time. 10 minutes of prep time per spell level per spell, on top of the need for 8 hours of sleep. A low-level wizard could refresh their whole stock of spell slots relatively quickly. A mid-to-high level wizard was tacking hours on to resting time, hours which could provoke more wandering monster checks which would screw with their ability to finish restocking. So the wizard was supposed to only fully recharge in a safe situation, because trying to memorize everything was a huge risk in the field or in a dungeon. If you're only getting like 6 spell levels' worth of spells back after you rest because you can only really afford an extra hour's prep time, even if you're Wizard Lord Fauntleroy the Magnificent, you better make your spells count. And then a bunch of people and video games went, not unreasonably, "Hot drat that's unfun to keep track of," about that and a lot of other fiddly bookkeeping, and eventually D&D followed suit.
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Dec 28, 2021 17:45
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There was a point made by, if I recall, Slacktivist during his reviews of the Left Behind books that for all we can suspend disbelief about the supernatural in a story, we still expect people to act like people. And, unfortunately, our framework for what people are like is a species that has historically been quite tribalist and xenophobic, and still is very much so. Assuming it's a natural state isn't exactly wrong. I prefer to work around it and put other dividing lines up to generate conflict in a setting, but it's really not inexplicable why so many plug fantasy racism into their settings so readily. Now, narratively declaring it True and Good in your setting is another thing entirely, that too many fall into the trap of doing as well.
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Dec 31, 2021 20:36
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homullus posted:There is some evidence that xenophobia is not, in fact, our natural state, and some evidence that it is a feature of the cultures that went around the globe pointing guns at everyone, demanding that they adopt the same culture. War and conquest are hardly unique to (early-)modern Western states. And xenophobia isn't just all-out race war, it includes cultural posturing and self-aggrandizement that are not exactly unknown in the historical record. People have found excuses to divide into groups over whatever basis and come into lesser and greater levels of conflict over it for literally all of recorded history.
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Jan 1, 2022 00:10
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If you came to me and said, "Make a Power Rangers game," well first I'd question why you thought I was a good idea for it, but I'd start poking around at different systems. If you told me I had to base it off of 5e, I'd laugh until you waved some ramen-buying money in my face. And even then, I'd be exploring the genre for a while, documenting general combat types across the series to build classes off of, and probably use Backgrounds for ranger colors because Backgrounds are actually relatively broad compared to your other character-creation choices in 5e. Anything that takes the place of 5e's races would probably just be extra bonuses rolled into Backgrounds for people to pick, or maybe offer a second, more normal-person-history set of Backgrounds to also pick from. Maybe strip down classes a lot too, to make them more of a handful of customizable skeletons to hang stuff off of, but I've been thinking about ways I'd do that since 3e.
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Jan 30, 2022 20:03
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It's important also to have it on the books that yes the IRS can go at you for unreported criminal income because of the important little case precedent of Al Capone. Like this is something people have loved to bring up for years, but apparently never thought through the implications of how that actually functions beyond that?
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Feb 20, 2022 19:46
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There was some movement toward more video-gamey bits, just from expectations picked up from, well, video-gaming AD&D and 3.0 stuff. Like spell memorization was supposed to be a lot of extra time on top of the 8 hours of rest so wizards and clerics had to balance how much they were memorizing versus the risk of more wandering monster checks when out on adventure. Video games just condensed that down into being part of the 8 hours, and 3rd edition and later largely followed suit. Or Identify shifting from something that took hours to cast and only told you the most basic powers of magic items, something intended for use primarily between adventures when you had downtime, to a one-hour spell (long, but still much faster) that told you everything an item did, letting you take far fewer risks on mystery gear - all in line with more video-gamey expectations of what an identify spell would involve. I'm not sure what 4e was like but 5e got even more casual about identification. The influences are there, but they're far more about QoL features and rules that people largely ignored or house-ruled out already anyway. It's fine if a change isn't to someone's liking, but yeah edition warring is just having cranky fits.
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Mar 23, 2022 20:15
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Yeah, that's the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, AKA, the "book of weeaboo fightin' magic" being talked about. It wasn't even stuff directly given to fighters (without spending feats to get very limited access), it was a set of three new classes that were various flavors of stab-magic guys.
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Mar 24, 2022 00:26
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CitizenKeen posted:FFG announced the leaked Spider-Ham pack for their Marvel Champions game, and I'm wondering if we're going to see a pivot to using April 1 to announce real things that are funny/goofy/weird that people actually do want. It seems like a decent way to test the waters. Purportedly, the idea of Yakuza: Like a Dragon becoming a turn-based JRPG style of game came from an April Fools joke that got a really good response, so they decided to go for it.
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Apr 2, 2022 04:43
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Halloween Jack posted:I still don't know all the details about the Blood War, but it sounds like the least interesting thing you could possibly do with Planescape. Ooh, a big war everywhere forever. It's a forever war but it's (mostly) confined to the Lower Planes. It's a hazard that occasionally spills over to neighboring chunks of the Outlands (the True Neutral plane), where the most "normal" people who aren't in Sigil tend to live. Broadly across the game line, its presence deforms everything around it to provide drama and plot hooks, but is not often meant to be engaged with directly because it's just not on the same scale. It's also the excuse for why there can be anywhere that's got "normal" people in that the demons and devils are all busy with each other instead of constantly stomping all over the Neutral realms on their way to sieging the Heavens. A couple of the books elaborate on how there's a conspiracy of celestials arming both major sides of the war to try to get them to extinguish each other, while using the profits to help deal with the collateral damage, and the actual "goodness" of this given it's being done by beings literally made of Good is left hanging as a huge hook.
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Apr 2, 2022 23:03
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Rand Brittain posted:I think the Fated are that kind of libertarian. Free Leaguers have a regular issue with police abuse and try to organize against it so if they were to map to anyone in modern US politics they'd be closer to the various voices that contribute to "defund the police" and promote alternative measures. The Fated are absolutely "gently caress you, got mine" libertarians who got into a position of power, though. Their self-absorbed old guy leader even has a skeevy, manipulative secret relationship with another faction leader who is much younger than him, only like 19 years old. It's blatantly exploitative, especially as part of the background of the Faction War adventure.
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Apr 3, 2022 04:23
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, IIRC, the Orcs in eberron are explicitly heroic, and were basically dying out due to depredations of Demons and being the front line protectors of the Greenwardens for generations. They welcomed humans of like mind who were willing to take up their charge and saw Half-Orcs as a continuation of their culture without the weakness to sunlight that kept them in the swamps and deep forests. Straight-up, yeah. The orcs are a people largely content in their fairly marginal (to others) lands, who've always been off doing their own thing while empires rise and fall. There's a relatively high incidence of orc and half-orc Khyber cultists (worshipping otherworldly gribblies), but that's from proximity to where the daelkyr (said gribblies) were imprisoned - if anyone else moved in, they'd start falling prey, too. Plus as of 5e, the Venetian-Republic-but-with-mining dwarves are digging too deep and starting to get some daelkyr corruption of their own. Notably, one of the fastest-rising powers among the Dragonmarked Houses is House Tharashk, composed of humans, orcs, and half-orcs. Most of the focus is on the humans and half-orcs since they're the ones who carry the mark, but the orcs are absolutely carrying their own weight in the house and, well, are also just beloved family. Most significantly, their "marginal" swampy Shadow Marches have become incredibly valuable because it's a reliable source of dragonshards, the magical material that the economy runs on. They could risk becoming the local equivalent of a petrostate under Tharashk, but orc culture emphasizes the community in a way that's holding the worst of that off for now.
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Apr 13, 2022 17:48
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Siivola posted:"Cults and terrorists" still sounds pretty bad. It's a pulp adventure setting, these are cults and terrorists who are unabashedly evil and mostly killing people for the sake of killing people.
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Apr 14, 2022 16:59
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Bottom Liner posted:Good news, he recently rebranded it as “fantasy horror” and it’s just as lazy and bad as before but a step or two away from Warhammer (and directly toward grifting off Dark Souls instead) It's not even "toward," he's already there. I was getting ads on Facebook a few weeks ago for some recent Zweihander Kickstarter that was promoting the game by explicitly calling it "the Dark Souls of" tabletop games.
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Apr 16, 2022 22:03
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Goodness! The at this point known practice of using April Fools to gauge interest in a product was used to gauge interest in a product! Who could have foreseen this!
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Apr 21, 2022 17:29
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Tsilkani posted:This is slated for an August release, there's no way it wasn't already in development well before April Fools. Potential products also tend to be in progress well before they're announced and not infrequently spiked well into development if the makers decide there's not enough interest to merit following through. This was absolutely an interest check to see if it was worth bothering to actually finish it for release.
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Apr 21, 2022 19:08
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Isn't the peak of the Maslow pyramid stuff that's nice to have in a fulfilling manner but not actually foundational and which you can do without if you must? Putting yourself at the peak means you're the least important part of the person's life if the pursuit of that peak is compromising (or compromised by lack of) the lower tiers.
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Jun 10, 2022 02:48
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Dawgstar posted:Oddly the second direct to video (or maybe SyFy) movie felt more authentic. Which made it better as a movie, but only because of a very low bar. It was bad, but it was frequently fun bad, which the first one failed at. My college gaming club had a club mixer when it was out so we spent most of it watching the movie and laughing at it - and it really felt like it wanted to be laughed at. It even had poo poo happen that was just blatantly "dickhead GM moves" as plot events, like the wizard's teleport mishap.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:Is there really a "lesser Beholder" monster called a Spectator? Oh there were a bunch of Beholder variants, and yeah there was a weaker and friendlier variety called a Spectator. AD&D 2e had rules about how they could be magically conjured and bound as guardians to watch over a treasure for about a century. Beholders split off weird subspecies almost as often as elves, apparently.
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Jul 24, 2022 04:15
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Terrible Opinions posted:but John CArter was not helped by having an earth person in it I'm trying to figure whether you're saying this in general about such stories or actually specifically about John Carter because uh Carter is a Confederate veteran who has some kind of bizarre astral projection to Mars in the very original story. Carter being an outsider bringing Earthling ideas to Mars is an axis around which the series spins.
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Jul 25, 2022 23:37
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Dawgstar posted:That was a weird scene. I'm not sure how he decided that Mike was financially invested in CDPR and was thus beyond broke, especially for a game that despite a rough start sold really well. RED is also the longest-running best-selling title on DTRPG. The immediate "No, it's MY ART" was really a thing. On the one hand, I'm glad that guy's bullshit was nipped in the bud on there, just on general principles. On the other, I'm a tiny bit disappointed we didn't get to see some insane ramble through scenic Crazed Justifications and its suburbs. (I know he said he was "done" with the thread there shortly before he got banned but like gently caress he'd have actually stayed away.)
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Jul 31, 2022 00:36
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Ultiville posted:I was working at a big LGS when 4E came out. It sold very well for several years until WOTC became very obviously uninterested in it. It sold a lot more than 3E did at the end of its run. Eh, you can see the same pattern in Youtube game playlists or the availability of early entries in some comic and book series - people drop off as a thing goes on and jump on when new thing starts. 4e would have to have aggressively poo poo itself to not sell better at its start than 3e did at its end.
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Aug 14, 2022 22:51
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ItohRespectArmy posted:ok, now go quote where people said it was stupid and you were "subhuman" for liking it lol Denigrating a thing someone likes while claiming it's not about the person is, really, a pretty common way to denigrate the person while claiming you Totally Aren't, Honest, It's Just Too Bad They Have Such Objectively Bad Taste. Arivia's taking it a little too personally but it's also extremely understandable especially given how thinly-veiled it sometimes feels on these forums. Even if you don't actually mean it that way, it comes pretty drat close in on the same language of dismissing people through the stuff they enjoy.
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Aug 15, 2022 18:41
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FMguru posted:- Game is designed for one-shots and short campaigns, so no expectation of a long, shitfarmer-to-demigod campaign This is an entirely probable reason for why Halloween Jack posted:I've read that it's very popular in Japan? To wit, the understanding I've been given is that for a laundry list of reasons, a lot of popular RPGs in and from Japan are those that expect more episodic play rather than long campaigns. The idea is that, kind of like why teens are the ones having all the adventures in so much Japanese media, students are the ones who are going to have the time for them. And even they have to face heavier and heavier demands on their time as they get older and their academic demands get more burdensome. So something with a focus on episodic play is going to work better for a group with messy schedules who want to get together, have an adventure, and then be okay with a character just not appearing in an episode rather than derailing a campaign plot by their absence.
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Aug 22, 2022 18:50
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Darwinism posted:Okay but... why did the sapient hadozees apparently gently caress into extinction the non-sapient hadozees? If they are a Planet of the Apes reference as mentioned, that's a plot point from one of the old movies - some of the intelligent apes get thrust back in time to the then-present day and while at first they're public darlings and a media sensation, government figures learn about the future of Earth and the intelligent apes and plot to sterilize or kill them to prevent them from loving intelligence into the general ape population.
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Sep 1, 2022 23:14
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Darwinism posted:There's a point where devotion to making a reference really fuckin' backfires, and I think that point should really obviously be before sexually assaulting the still-animalistic versions of your people so much so that they die out Oh it's loving weird and dumb all around. It was a bizarre plot point in the movie too.
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Sep 2, 2022 04:11
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piL posted:Hadozee probably exist because of the maritime parlance of 'deck apes' referring to boatswain's mates onboard US naval vessels. "What if deck apes were actually apes," looks simple on its surface but is probably a really dangerous question to ask and I wouldn't recommend asking it. That tracks, really. Fading Suns did the same thing in the mid-90s with the Gannok, who are a species of chimp-like aliens with a knack for technology whose whole thing is being a huge "grease monkey" gag. Primate puns are eternally enticing. I don't really know enough (in either capacity) to say if they're particularly racist or not, but FS had some of that well-meaning but unfortunate 90s racism still go around. (One of the human noble houses, for example, being described as "exotic" and with a touch of the "Oriental" to make them stand out.) Yet to delve deep into the recent new edition of FS to see if that got cleaned up or not, too.
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Sep 2, 2022 22:22
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Darwinism posted:Except the potion explicitly was made with uplifting already born hadozee in mind, why say that 'all newborns' come to have those traits? Like. If they were uplifting other monkeys, why only mention it in the context of babies? I don't think it's weird to assume breeding is the context when it's specifically in the context of children. I mean I'd be content just leaving it there as a background detail until/unless I wanted to use it as a spur for something as a GM. If all we're being told is that "and then eventually every hadozee was born uplifted," then it's vagueness for the sake of wordcount and not to imply something gross. Make an adventure around discovering the lost ritual of an ancient hadozee wizard who figured out how to cloud-seed a potion across the world so it rained brain juice on them for a week straight to make sure every wild hadozee got uplifted. (Then either sell off that incredibly-difficult-to-perform ritual or use it to cure a plague.) Maybe go with flying-squirrel-monkey fuckin' if your group's comfortable with when an old speculative fiction author starts putting their weird kinks into a story. Maybe they were already pretty intelligent and the elixir was more some kind of polymorph juice that made it so now they could also talk, and the changed and unchanged populations just blended over time. It's not like it has to suggest genocide, and it's probably the mildest of problems about them to get hung up on.
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Sep 4, 2022 01:30
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Darwinism posted:I, very firmly, believe that vagueness, even if for the sake of wordcount, can still imply gross things. It can but it's empty enough and exists in a world with plenty of other mechanisms for weird changes like this that it doesn't have to. It's at the point where you have to be bringing something to the table yourself to fill it in for good or ill. And it really wouldn't take less words to put in one of my ideas because of how incredibly few words there were to the statement that now all hadozee are born intelligent. It didn't take me any more "bending over" to throw out some random bit of fantasy bullshit than it did to point out the possible Planet of the Apes reference myself a ways back.
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Sep 4, 2022 01:51
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homullus posted:just what I want to play right now, a setting with extreme ideological polarization I wouldn't be surprised if they continued off of the vague waves toward post-Faction War stuff in the 3.x Manual of the Planes and Planar Handbook. Most of the old faction philosophies have become much more blatantly juvenile in hindsight anyway so I wouldn't miss them that much.
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Sep 5, 2022 17:37
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joylessdivision posted:I am both repelled and intrigued by this idea and I could absolutely see it becoming an indie video game darling with the right aesthetic. Cult of the Lamb is like 90% of the way there already, so yeah.
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Sep 13, 2022 19:36
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If I recall, a bunch of Disney comics took off wildly in Europe in comparison to the US. The stuff that would eventually be adapted for Duck Tales especially, which featured Donald heavily at first and then for which Scrooge was invented.
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Sep 22, 2022 19:43
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I'm sorry, it's my group's fault, we're all happy to GM but keep each other tied up instead of sharing our gifts with the world. (Okay, mostly their gifts, I'm a pretty mediocre GM.)
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Nov 15, 2022 00:59
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moths posted:It follows that D&D players in 2022 are just more resilient to garbage people at whatever company they support. You're kind of assuming that most customers are even remotely as online about this poo poo as we are. Like I can't remember if it was this or another thread but someone shared a story on how a ridiculously huge number of Magic players don't seem to actually engage with what some would consider basic story or competitive elements to care about. People buying WotC games aren't special or specially bad, it's that lots (and lots and lots) of people just don't engage further on more than maybe one or two things - and these games ain't it for them. They watch a show or movie and then go about their business. They buy a game to play it and not to think about the people making it. But they'll each have something else entirely they have powerful Opinions about and would consider others "just more resilient to garbage" because we don't care as passionately about it.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:47
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It purports to be a high-level adventuring and economic simulator but within five pages is just a reprint of FATAL.
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Dec 8, 2022 20:58
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Wizards also tried to do random miniatures boxes with another game around the same time they started these, called Dreamblade. Trying to get in on that Hero Clix market. That one didn't really stick, but I loved a lot of Dreamblade's designs. Some of those were neat minis.
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Dec 18, 2022 21:45
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