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Warthur posted:That's pretty much the question I've been asking - what is it with Nightfall still trying to make SLA a thing? If there's a hidden SLA community eagerly beavering away at this stuff over here in the UK they've succeeded at entirely hiding away from me. There are probably enough people nostalgic for SLA that they could do good business on a quality rerelease with some good supplements, but it seems like Nightfall never has their act together. Pope Guilty posted:The System Mastery review of A State made it sound like unplayable garbage TBH. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 17:15
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Sometimes it feels weird to me that I literally grew up with that forum, still post about RPGs all day, but don't bother posting there. I remember the bad old days, but surely there was a way to get rid of the "I don't hate gay people, I'm just saying it's a fact they'll burn in hell for all eternity" freaks without the obnoxious moderation they have now.
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Jan 10, 2019 15:28
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They want creators to post there without fear of criticism. Kevin's never going to post there and he has a bad reputation in the industry, so there you go.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:23
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It's almost as if there was a years-long, industry-wide glut of companies basing their game on D&D rules and finding it to be a complete loving mess. (Unless they hacked it so much it was no longer compatible with anything else.)
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Jan 25, 2019 18:42
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People were so angry at 4e they came up with entire new theories of game design, that no one ever actually believed, just to have some smart-sounding reason to denounce it.
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Jan 25, 2019 21:02
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Some of them were just pure distilled brainworms. Like Frank Trollman arguing that the wording of "enemy" means you are your enemy, so in 4e you can only stab yourself to death and the game is unplayable. I remember another guy saying that when you jump, you have to jump the maximum possible distance determined by your check. I've never seen people do this with any other game. 4e broke men's souls. It was great.
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Jan 25, 2019 23:48
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Comrade Koba posted:Out of curiosity, are there even any that do? It's not so uncommon for indie games now.
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Jan 27, 2019 02:24
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Dear Lord help me, I'm back on my bullshit. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Honestly I think there actually is something to the idea of "dissociated mechanics" and y'all are too quick to dismiss it just because it's being used by an idiot who uses it as a negative term. xiw posted:The other problem with it for me is that the base D&D combat system is massively 'disassociated' - the choices you make in combat in an attack-roll-based / hp system are a mile away from the decisions you'd make in a real fight. Nobody decides 'now i will hit the ogre for 1d8 damage, i know there is absolutely no way i can kill it with this swing but i need to whittle its 4 hit dice down' since hit points are such an abstraction. As an example, Hollowpoint makes the actual criticism you're talking about, much better and more succinctly. Hollowpoint posted:There’s a bank robbery scene in Michael Mann’s movie Heat (1995): the crew has robbed a bank and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt others, but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money. Comrade Gorbash posted:The reason it's a crap analogy is that you can immediately point to several concepts in football that do naturally fit limited uses of various kinds. The whole concept of defending and marking, has been criticized because "soldiers don't try to get hit!" These people don't understand the most basic stuff about ancient infantry tactics.
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Jan 27, 2019 03:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:GNS is half-right, they just backed S instead of the objectively correct choice of G Andrast posted:D&D is a strongly focused game
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Jan 27, 2019 05:59
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Why would you want a huge section of the book dedicated to stuff that only a fraction of the classes get to touch? It's terrible design.
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Jan 27, 2019 16:20
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Wasn't FASA the #2 next to TSR for a significant period? And some people must have been introduced through Palladium given that they were advertising in all the Marvel comics I read growing up.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:13
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Right, but remember that a design goal for every edition post-AD&D1e was Don't Make Baby Cry. In order to get a game that is just good design without caring if Baby cries, you have to go to a game that doesn't say Dungeons & Dragons on the cover--whether that's a non-D&D TSR game, or an indie game.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:57
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Even Japanese RPGs in the conventional mold seem to have fewer hangups about realism and seriousness than American ones. By which I mean want to balance the classes and let you play what you want to play.
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Jan 29, 2019 16:36
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To be honest, I think Kevin probably has a point. Teenagers tend to be really uptight about rejecting Kid Stuff while embracing things that are equally silly but have a veneer of being Serious and Mature. That said, Palladium became an insular culture over time largely by design.
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Jan 30, 2019 05:16
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What was the Numenera mechanic that was like "You have this power theme, and sometimes something stupid randomly happens?"
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Jan 30, 2019 16:31
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He's literally saying "It's permission to screw over the PCs at random! And sure you can do that anyway, but since it's written into the book they can't complain!" A bunch of games in the 90s did this under the guise of making the GM a Master Storyteller.
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Jan 30, 2019 16:56
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Oh, right, the Connections play into the Intrusions. And it's all dumb as hell.
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Jan 30, 2019 17:55
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I will admit, the idea that magic stuff all contains Weirdness and you can't go around carrying too much Weirdness or it causes problems, is not a bad way to have an in-universe limit on hauling magic items around. The way he goes about it and describes it is very on-the-nose and uninspiring, which I find to be a fair description of everything in his body of work that I'm familiar with. It's also contrary to the Clarke's Law vibe of Dying Earth fiction, because it means every magic item ultimately works according to the same underlying mechanism. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 17:03
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Numenera Numenera Hey, hey, hey Don't buy
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Jan 31, 2019 18:07
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Why does his av picture look like one of Tobias Funke's "leading man" headshots?
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Jan 31, 2019 23:00
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Y'all putting more creativity into this argument than went into Numa Numa Nera.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:17
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Numenera is not interesting, but it is somehow more interesting than this.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:10
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My understanding is that it uses a heavily modified system which (necessarily) omits all the attempts at narrative mechanics. So, possibly. I've heard that Pillars of Eternity is not perfect but is a pretty good game for people who miss Neverwinter and D&D based vidjamagamez.
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Feb 1, 2019 00:18
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Joe Slowboat posted:If Monte Cook claims Wolfe as an inspiration I won't be surprised, but I will be in agony. The Book of the New Sun is fantastic and deserves a weird-rear end narrative game in its future society that's all about weird narration tricks and picaresque character relationships.
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Feb 1, 2019 05:39
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Biomute posted:Darth Vader. Too many games with a political conflict either don't give you choices besides HELP SIDE A vs. HELP SIDE B, or give you GOOD GUY vs. BAD GUY that are orthogonal to both sides yet don't actually allow you to take a nuanced position. And too many don't let you progress beyond going from Low Level Flunky to Really Valuable Flunky. Skyrim, for example. Every faction quest in the game allows you to become the new leader, but in the Civil War you're just playing assassin for one side or another.
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Feb 1, 2019 15:06
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Kurieg posted:It did sort of deliver on the oWoD's oft renegged promise of "FULL CROSSOVER NOW", the problem is that it did this by turning all the splats into classes and then making two of the classes suck out loud due to hilariously bad upkeep requirements.
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Feb 1, 2019 15:42
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Rules-as-physics always results in at least a couple problems, one of them major. First, total thematic letdown: you can't make a superhero game where Batman and Superman are on the same footing, for example, if you're allergic to narrative or at least highly abstracted mechanics. Second, you are going to wind up with those weird holes where a normal person can throw a baseball 10 miles or whatever.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:21
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Jimbozig posted:Nah, TVTropes and D&D both give you brain damage. We've seen it first hand. The whole Heisenberg infinite bear space bullshit was obviously the product of a mind infected by D&D. As for the "infinite bear" stuff, last time I checked on Trollman's forum it's literally impossible to read. They've gone completely down the rabbit hole of creating new Capitalized Jargon, based on other jargon, based on jargon Trollman made up, so as to be completely inaccessible to anybody who isn't already part of their weird cult.
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Feb 1, 2019 20:59
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As I recall, he didn't equate it to childhood sexual abuse, but he definitely compared it being an amputee and likened many narrative games (including his own Sorcerer) as "prosthetics" designed to help people raised on a certain D&D playstyle to function as they should. Here we go: Vincent Baker posted:I was searching through the past of the Forge and I came across this that I wrote back in May of last year: Ron Edwards posted:My response, which is actually a diagnosis of the existing activity: I get the point that he's trying to make, but yikes. And the general uproar led him to dig himself deeper and deeper and insist that what he said was not offensive and if you see an attack on vulnerable people here those are your dirty thoughts and shame on you you are disgusting. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 22:02
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Nuns with Guns posted:And yeah the root of the "brain damage" take was the way the Storyteller games misrepresent themselves as narrative games, not the impact of D&D on one's psyche. Ron Edwards posted:Now that I've compared people who don't roleplay right to the disabled, let's compare games I don't like to pedophilia
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Feb 2, 2019 04:44
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Smolensk is really something. In grognards.txt we used to joke about people who are sticklers for what they think is historical realism, "but with dragons and elves and spells," and then he came along, a parody come to life. His contribution to the hobby is an exhaustive list of trade tables, because Dungeons & Dragons doesn't feel immersive unless you can calculate the price of cinnamon in Novgorod in the 14th century.Pope Guilty posted:I want to take the GM advice from Apocalypse World, particularly "Be a fan of the players' characters", and throw it back in time.
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Feb 3, 2019 06:27
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SkySteak posted:Could you elaborate on this statement, as I am not quite catching the meaning.
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Feb 3, 2019 22:56
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Warthur posted:The problem with doing satire through a tabletop RPG is that if you go very, very current with the satire, then your core book immediately starts turning stale as soon as it's published. If, however, you frame Alpha Complex such that the fact that the Computer believes that cranky old 1950s civil defence documents constitute fresh hot-off-the-presses information is part of the joke, then you evergreen the setting: the fact that the entire society is fighting this absurdly stale war against an effectively imaginary enemy is, in and of itself, bleakly funny and can tie into all sorts of IRL situations with ease. (Any time anyone in power is trying to turn the clock back is a good opportunity, for instance - see the way Brexiteers jizz themselves giddy over wartime Britain.) Ettin posted:He probably won't get back into the Discord again but Zak getting some kind of acceptance isn't that far-fetched. No matter what you do there'll always be someone willing to go "he's done his time" or "he's nicer than people think!" or whatever. If nothing else the number of people who qualified their my-bad posts with "but some of his targets were bad people!" should tell you that cutting ties with an abuser doesn't make you an instant expert at dealing with them. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Traveller's up to double digits, including two Mongoose and two GURPS editions. Did RuneQuest ever have a D20 edition? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 14:46
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Warthur posted:If you liked that effortpost I'll also take this chance to toot the horn of my similar article on Alas Vegas. It's kind of a companion piece to that one, given that Wallis was basically doing the two Kickstarters in parallel. I've noticed that games built on a mystery--the PCs all have amnesia, or the underlying truths of the setting are concealed from the PCs and maybe the GM--tend to come out either too obtuse to be useful, or just kind of meh. (For example: Alas Vegas, The Demolished Ones, SLA Industries, a:state, Insylum.) Is it just incompatible with the medium? Is it incompatible with printing a rulebook anyone can read? Off the top of my head, the closest anyone has come to getting it right is the Vampire: the Requiem supplements where they make multiple Big Secrets behind factions like VII and Belial's Brood and the GM gets to use, modify, and combine them at their leisure.
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Apr 10, 2019 15:49
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Night10194 posted:I think a lot of that comes from the way game books are writing prompts. Trying to focus on having a hidden Big Answer in the gameline makes it very likely that, due to the nature of the books as a writing prompt for GMs and groups, a group will have hugely diverged away from your intended SLA Industries The Truth clever secret to the point that it won't match up with their use of the game or setting at all anyway. Plus, in trying to keep it mysterious, you usually make it well hidden enough that it becomes irrelevant to the game's original premise. It also tends to invalidate that original premise, and people buy your game because they like and want to play the original premise, so that's another issue. Nuns with Guns posted:The nature of having a big mystery, and in particular one that you've concealed the answer to in a supplement further down the publication line, will also mean that the GM and players most likely already have some theories/answers in mind when they reach that book and those answers are often more personally interesting to them than whatever some other writers came up with.
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Apr 10, 2019 16:26
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It's okay to not like things, even critically acclaimed things, and think that they're overhyped.
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Apr 10, 2019 17:56
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I think the only person with "malicious intent" in regard to Nobilis was Mark MacKinnon. "People who like this game have malicious intent" is a strange way to misconstrue accusations of hype. Hype is only malicious if you're talking about, like, Theranos or Lockheed-Martin.
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Apr 10, 2019 18:11
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Apr 10, 2019 20:28
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Serf posted:the only rpg i've personally read that was written/laid out incomprehensibly was fragged empire Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was the last game I read that made me furiously angry trying to read cover to cover.
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Apr 10, 2019 20:53
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Kestral posted:Burning Wheel with all its bits and bobs fully engaged is complex, and it's impossible to learn the system without actually playing a lot of hours and reading the (thankfully now-restored) BWHQ forums, Liquid Communism posted:He's effectively describing poo poo D&D handled 30 years ago.
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Apr 11, 2019 01:53
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