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What the gently caress. Alt-right shitheads making false accusations of sexual misconduct at loving gamers over disputes about games? gently caress. That kind of poo poo is terrifying. Like, some rear end in a top hat could get mad that Strike! is inclusive and pull a stunt that threatens my actual career. It's insane. What is wrong with people?!
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Feb 24, 2018 16:56
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You can fight and climb and seduce perfectly well with a perforated colon and a severe concussion, but you need magic for it to get better - which doesn't actually help you in any way except by making you not die the next time you get hit. This is perfectly sensible.
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Mar 7, 2018 02:32
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slap me and kiss me posted:I'd also kill for an rpg that released new character abilities like a legacy game rather than make me spend $50 on a new hardcover. Tear pages 103 to 156 out of your PHB and stuff them into envelopes. Open them when your DM says you've been a very good gamer. There, I just saved you a lengthy prison term.
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Mar 28, 2018 23:57
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NBA players are playing Fortnite, NFL teams get obsessed with Catan, and baseball has always been for nerds. The old signifiers of nerdiness are now ubiquitous and everyone likes to call themselves a nerd. But there are still nerds... not cool people who like nerdy things, but obsessive lonely geek boys and girls who are looked down on just as they have always been. I don't want to call them "the real nerds" because then it sounds like I'm gatekeeping. But we all know there is a difference between a celebrity who likes Star Trek and the kid who spends his time coding up a computer program to model a video game's combat so he or she can optimize and find the best strats. Maybe we call them both nerds, sure. So what is the word we can use for that difference?
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Mar 29, 2018 13:33
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^^^^^ what a loving douche!! His explanation of the hug incident made perfect sense. It was the only thing there that made perfect sense. Then skipping to the end, it sounds like he admits that he inappropriately hit on and made women uncomfortable. And admits that it was bad and made things unwelcoming. So, you know, that's what we want to see, right? Hopefully this will help other sleazy dudes see the error of their creepy ways. If he doesn't do that stuff anymore, and speaks out against it instead, then good. The long stream of indecipherable bs in the middle about a made up navy and drama about past relationships was a bit over my head, so maybe I missed something.
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May 2, 2018 00:19
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It doesn't even own him, though? Like, I can't trademark something you are saying to stop you from saying it. That's obvious, isn't it?
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Jun 21, 2018 17:40
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I don't really understand what the streamer did wrong that she decided to publicly drag him on Twitter, though? Like, as far as I can tell, she's mad that he replied to a Tweet she made on what she refers to as her "private" Twitter account (which is actually completely public). I can't find where he actually said anything even remotely offensive or impolite, but I may just suck at Twitter (I definitely suck at Twitter) and I may be missing something. What am I missing?
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Jul 7, 2018 20:18
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Yeah, I didn't miss that the manchild brigade was out in full force for the response. I was just wondering if there was a reason she made those tweets in the first place. It seems like she was sick of the shitlord harassers who are always on her case and blew up at an unsuspecting innocent dude.
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Jul 7, 2018 20:37
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MadScientistWorking posted:Dictating to people about how to do things isn't creating a dialogue. Is this you calling her out for repeatedly trying to tell people how to use Twitter or what? I can't tell what you mean from the context.
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Jul 7, 2018 22:01
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Okay, thanks for explaining the situation. I didn't want to ask on Twitter because I didn't want to only hear the shitlords' take on it.
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Jul 7, 2018 22:48
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Subjunctive posted:Houserule? A marker to cross out the "it". Nobody wants 4 dots in celery.
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Jul 9, 2018 13:13
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clockworkjoe posted:What's this all about? Yeah, like when they included beaners!
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Aug 11, 2018 23:51
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I feel like if Bugatti released some 350k supercar and called it "the future of automobiles" we would all rightly realize that this is just marketing claptrap about how ~amazingly advanced~ it is without making the leap to "they're saying everyone should be paying 350k for a supercar". If Bugatti released a 1998 Dodge Neon, sold it for $350,000, and called it the future of automobiles, it would certainly scramble some people's circuits.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:27
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:
I can sum it up as a mix of cool ideas, okay ideas, and really stupid ideas, without enough of a common theme to make them really usable in the same game and the small amount of mechanical rules that existed in there were underdeveloped and - without having tried to play it - did not seem hugely playable. But I had a big thing written up where I made fun of the stupidest parts and I thought I may have posted it here.
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Aug 20, 2018 20:15
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There's usually some great concepts there but it all just breaks down or runs poorly. I started out in AD&D and the OSR movement just embraces the worst design elements of the era and generally talks down any criticism about it.
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You guys have done a good job calling out most of the bullshit he had in that thread, but there was one other thing I saw near the top that stuck out to me as pure crap. He says that people just "assumed" that the same marginalized groups of 2018 would be the ones fighting against fascism in his fictional world. But the marginalized groups of 2018 have been oppressed and marginalized for loving centuries! It's not like everyone in the 1800s was totally cool with gay people and people from other ethnic backgrounds. And in the history of political revolutions going all the way back to the Haitian revolution, these are the groups that have been fighting back against authoritarian conservative regimes. In Haiti and in South America the left fought against racist rigid caste systems. France had a whole bunch of revolutions and when you learn about those, you see women leading demonstrations, leftists asking for equality for women and being betrayed by liberals, people fighting for the right to unionize and strike. The same loving battles we have to fight today as the right wants to dismantle labour and oppress women and people of colour. The Bolsheviks legalized abortion when they came to power. It's been over 2 loving centuries of these same fights and this dumb rear end in a top hat can't see where the lines are drawn.
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Sep 23, 2018 14:56
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alg posted:some youtubers got passed over for a sponsorship from Roll20 in favor of a black woman streamer in the name of diversity Man, gently caress these shitheads. When you apply for jobs, sometimes you don't get them. If you can't deal with that without throwing a tantrum like a baby, then you definitely didn't deserve the job. Imagine if Roll20 had given these assholes the nod - how much Roll20 would be regretting it once their bigoted views came out.
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Oct 1, 2018 14:02
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Not surprising to me. When I am in the market for a fiction book, I don't think of an RPG company as the place to go for quality. Their books may have been great or terrible - I didn't try read any, but they sure didn't look like a good gamble. As for board games, I really couldn't say what makes a board game do well. But it seems like an industry where you either get lucky and have a big success, or you end up struggling to break even. And it certainly has far larger costs and risks than printing RPG books.
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Oct 3, 2018 02:44
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There are already competitive minis games and they don't do much as a spectator sport. What makes anyone think that watching a dnd battle arena will be better than watching a Warhammer tournament?
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Oct 19, 2018 05:14
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Lol at this take: the left is attacking me for something I admittedly got wrong, while the right is attacking me for having a girl in my video. Guess both sides are the same, right??
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Oct 20, 2018 14:31
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Reene posted:Before you literally said Burning Wheel I was about to slide in with Burning Wheel. Whaaaaaaaaaaat??? Obviously we have very different tastes in chargen. I could go and spend an hour creating BW characters for fun any day. Compare that to spending an hour looking through lists of feats and gear for a D&D-like game and it's no contest. I'll slog through the latter to play 4e because 4e is fun to play, but it will only ever be a slog for me. Also compare to something like FATE, which has a bit of a problem of being too open and too much of a blank slate for my tastes. If I have a character concept in mind, I can make it in FATE, but usually I just have this vague amorphous thought about something I'd like to explore in the game and Burning Wheel's chargen does a great job at showing me the connections that a character of that type must have with the world, which feeds back into having cool ideas to use to go deeper into the chargen process. I only wish I could have taken more of what makes BW chargen fun for me when I made Strike!, but it clashes with the actual focus of the design. Chargen in Burning Wheel puts you into the setting, while Strike is setting-agnostic. When I make a game with a specific setting, I only hope my chargen will be as good at evoking that setting as BW's is at evoking the late European medieval period.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:14
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Tampons have no value because I don't want to put one up my butt. Discuss. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 7, 2018 21:19
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This is why people tune in to eSports - to watch noobs learn the games against other noobs. My favourite match from this year's EVO was the one where one player figured out how to throw fireballs and the other player kept walking into it until she threw the controller and ragequit, calling Ryu "cheap".
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Nov 11, 2018 17:54
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Flavivirus posted:Sure! Past about 250 copies, your per-unit printing costs are going to be better with a print run than a PoD. The difficulty is warehousing and shipping - you need a good fulfilment partner who knows their stuff, once you've moved on from letting DTRPG handle it. It also helps to be based outside the US, so that you don't have to deal with the lamentable state of UPS. When I did POD, my cut was $15/book from the kickstarter. With no risk to me or the backers if international shipping went crazy (which it did, and I could have potentially been in a position where I would have to decide between sucking it up and losing money or having to ask backers to pay the difference if they wanted their books. Not to mention all the horror stories I've heard about indie board games and books getting made abroad and creators losing all their money because of one problem or another.) So framing this like the only alternative is to keep it the same price and take a tiny margin isn't totally accurate. Of course you will have to charge a few bucks more for POD to keep a decent margin, but the benefits to the customer are significant (reducing the chance of the project failing to deliver down to near-zero, not having to pay full price until the game is complete and ready to ship, reliable delivery). Even if everything went to poo poo with Strike and I lost all the drat money somehow, I could still have put out a product - obviously with less art or whatever, but still a real game - and delivered it to all my backers. What I'm interested in is the returns on having your game be in distribution. That's where it seems like the real benefit to a print run might lie. Can you talk numbers of sales via various channels? How many KS sales, how many pdf and print sales via each channel, etc? You said an order of magnitude more - that sounds amazing! I know I'm asking you to dig up a bunch of numbers you may not have to hand, but it really would be helpful for those of us in this thread who have been doing the POD thing to get a sense of the possible upsides to doing a print run. Edit: Uh, Ettin just asked us to stop with the PDF talk with biomute like a week ago. I ate a few hours of probation because I didn't refresh the page and see the warning. Probably best for us not to engage this time! Just report and move on. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 00:01
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Bedlamdan posted:I mean, I know things look bad now, what with replacing a book from your favorite author, then replacing your favorite author himself, but I think you'll look back on the and laugh the day you'll need to replace your nephew next. What do you get out of being an rear end in a top hat like this? You just need to prance in and drop some sardonic wit minimizing the issue whenever people talk about being upset by creators and companies doing lovely things? Like, maybe a man being a womanizer isn't bad enough for you to stop reading his work. Fair enough - everyone can draw their own line and it's not like we're talking about Cosby here. But you seem to bristle at the idea of these men facing social opprobrium for bad behaviour.
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Dec 4, 2018 03:08
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Why do the Ennies need to have the same judges for all categories? Obviously the people who read lots of game supplements aren't going to have 100% overlap with the people who listen to lots of actual play podcasts. Why not just get a team of podcast lovers to be the judges for the podcast category? As for the question of bad people making good art, I think the key thing is that the bad actions recontextualize the art. Knowing Lovecraft is a racist, what can you see in his art? Tons of loving awful racism. Like, a lot of his stories are little more than barely disguised xenophobia. Knowing Cosby is a serial rapist puts the lie to many if not most of his comedy routines, many of which were premised on his being a good person and a role model. The ones about his childhood are about the only thing I can imagine having any appeal anymore. For me, I can't stomach even those, but I also wouldn't judge someone for wanting to nostalgically re-listen to the "buck buck" story and remember listening to it with their dad at bedtime when they were a kid. Woody Allen vs Morgan Freeman is a good comparison. Allen's behavior recontextualizes his films about romance and neuroticism while I can't say Freeman's similar behavior even shows up in his acting as far as I've noticed.
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Dec 6, 2018 18:43
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So the bad balance rules are actually good because they are genre emulation. What genre are they emulating? The genre of games with bad balance rules.
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Dec 19, 2018 16:21
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Arivia posted:Strike isn't a dungeon crawler Strike has rules specifically for dungeon crawling. It is setting-agnostic (not generic) and so you can do that same dungeon-crawling type of activity in other settings. But it is specifically built for exactly that kind of adventure, which is why it is not a generic system - it's not made to do horror or teen romance or any of dozens of other genres. It's about going on adventures in dangerous places with lots of combat, and has a tactical combat system that makes those combats interesting and fun. Just like Gumshoe is not a generic system. It is a setting-agnostic system for mystery games.
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Dec 23, 2018 03:11
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Arivia posted:flavorless gruel Every complaint comes down to basically this. You don't like the lack of flavor inherent in the setting-agnostic rules, and you don't like the bits of flavor that I did put in - the silly dumb jokes in the kitchen-sink fantasy Origins, the example campaigns that use popular IPs to show how you might customize Strike! to a particular setting. Arivia, the key thing you are missing is that the thing that makes Strike! good for dungeon crawling isn't the optional rules for adversarial play - although those can be helpful for groups like mine where taking on an adversarial role doesn't come naturally to the GM (me). The thing that makes it work well is just the basic rules. Two things in particular: the way skill rolls work and worsening Conditions. Skill rolls in Strike always carry risk and tension - unlike 4e where if you minimax your skills you can autosucceed on many rolls (and autofail plenty of others - a huge frustration for me DMing 4e at high levels was that a typical DC would be impossible for one character to fail and impossible for another to pass). But the real key is the worsening Conditions: it's nearly the exact same system as Torchbearer, since both are based on Mouse Guard's conditions. The difference is that Torchbearer's conditions are spelled out in an explicit and unforgiving order that enforces the grim reality of dungeon crawling, while Strike's are completely up to the GM. So if the GM gives out Conditions in that same unforgiving way (the aforementioned section on adversarial play gives specifics on how to do this without it coming across as being a dick to your players), then the game can be like Torchbearer but with tactical combat instead of Torchbearer's blander yet more versatile Conflict system. Or, with a more forgiving pace, it can be like 4e, where you fight lots of stuff in setpiece battles and get to recover in between. The GM and players can decide together what sort of dungeon crawling they want. And yes, it's more effort than just playing Torchbearer and it's totally fine if you want to just play Torchbearer instead, but I think that there is a place for setting-agnostic games and many people agree. You don't have to agree. Lots of people love FATE. I don't have to love FATE. They still have plenty of fans even if I'm only meh on it. You're right that Strike is not appropriate for every type of game. That is literally what I was saying in my previous post. We have no disagreement there. But dungeon crawling? No, Strike is good for that. I've played it and it is good. Could I have used Torchbearer instead? No, because the dungeon was an alien base in an XCOM themed game (another popular IP that I like to play with, your disdain notwithstanding). The party gained ingress, had a few fights, got some Conditions, then flubbed dealing with a trap and got worse Conditions, narrowly avoided a combat encounter, then encountered a boss enemy and had to make a run for it and evac when they found themselves outmatched. That sounds like dungeon crawling to me! It was a dungeon I designed using those rules for adversarial play - the flavorless gruel. I added the flavor. That is what you are supposed to do with setting-agnostic games. You bring the setting and the flavor. You personally prefer games to bring the flavor and that's a totally valid preference and you should always play what you prefer. I have some projects I'm working on that bring the flavor, but they are also based on popular IPs and so I expect you won't like them either. But other people will and I will, so I'm going to make them. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 06:22
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Flavivirus posted:Also, I’d definitely suggest that the fiction, art, layout etc a rule book includes absolutely serve a role in helping a group play the game as the designer desired, alongside the mechanical text. Yep. And also, having good art and a cool pitch really help sell a game, too. So it's good all around to have both good rules and good art.
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Dec 23, 2018 20:33
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The Trick arrow thing is not a numbers thing. Each of those abilities is balanced for their level. It's that I want you to be able to play a Hawkeye type of character with this class, so you get access to all of the powers but can only use one per encounter. You get all that versatility, but I think it's interesting if you sometimes lose your favourite and have to fall back on your less-used powers. I really don't care if you change the mechanics of how exactly the power is regained as long as you keep the losing and regaining thing. In fact, there is an alternate version of it which might be easier to reskin on the same page! I might do it a little differently now if I were to do a second edition, but I like trick arrow and I'm overall happy with it. I'd probably rewrite the little warning because it gets a bit misunderstood - the "powerful ability" is turning a miss into a hit, not trick arrow itself. The thing I wanted to do when I wrote that warning is to let players know that if they choose that option, they might be without their favourite arrow for a couple of sessions and that their GM wasn't supposed to just give it back right away. Anyway, for a sci-fi example, Samus loses abilities and then gets them back all the time - like in every game.
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Dec 25, 2018 03:41
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You don't lose the power, though. You still have the trick arrow power. You just get to use one of the other options. Like, there is no best one - they are all balanced. You may have a favorite but the whole point of the power is that you have an arrow for every situation. Also, it's not "annoying" to get a little bit of spotlight time doing a side quest during downtime. It's a good thing. It helps the GM, too. I wish I had included stuff like that for every class. But hey, if you have concerns like the ones in this thread, you could use the variant rule on the very same page where when you lose a type of arrow, you are in complete control over when you get it back. Or you can just pick a different power at that level. The other powers are good, too, and very easy to reskin. This is so not an issue. Anyone who wants to play an archer and doesn't like that mechanic has multiple ways to opt out.
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Dec 25, 2018 07:16
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I think the overall point is pretty spot on, though. A lot of sci-fi depicts societies that are either very progressive or are imaginatively different from our own, while fantasy on the whole spent decades depicting regressive societies. There is still more regressive poo poo in fantasy than in sci-fi. Heinlein may be a bad example (I've never actually read any Heinlein beyond a short story or two - I somehow missed out on him in my teens and then always had better stuff to read as an adult), but to illustrate the point, just look at Iain M Banks' work. Even fantasy authors who are themselves very progressive tend to gravitate towards stories about nonconforming people in repressive societies overcoming that repression (e.g. Terry Pratchett, NK Jemisin's Broken Earth), rather than imagine societies that are already better.
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Dec 29, 2018 20:59
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As people have noted, the definition doesn't really work, at least not how he intended it. So I think it's really him just looking for an explanation for why he didn't like it. And I think I might have a better explanation. There are a few things that are all sort of connected that seem like they have something to do with what he was talking about. 1. Immersive reading experience If you want to learn to play a game, a rulebook that reads like a rulebook is fine. Lists of powers in well-organized statblocks that are functional and clear but boring to read are also fine. If your hobby is playing RPGs, that's all fine. But for lots of people, particularly people who post about RPGs online, reading RPG books is a hobby on its own (in addition to playing them, hopefully - I'm not trying to accuse people of not being real roleplayers). And books laid out like I described above are not really fun to read! The fact that this level 5 power is the same as this level 3 power except with one extra easy-to-miss keyword might mean that it's a much cooler and better power in play. But if you're not playing and you're just trying to get in that imaginative headspace of thinking about cool rogues while reading the rogue chapter of the book, then that sort of book is not really very good for that. 2. Immersive chargen experience After reading Burning Wheel, I made several characters just for fun because character creation in that game is itself a fun and immersive activity that generates the skeleton of a backstory as you do it. Making 4e characters is fun if you're into optimization, and I spent lots of time doing that, too, but it's an analytical activity, not an immersive one. Not everyone has fun doing mental math like I do. 3. Tone of writing In 4e the tone of the writing is technical with blobs of generic-bad-fantasy-author flavor text. It's an inconsistent tone (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Other books keep a more consistent tone throughout. Some books are more conversational. Some books are written with a tone that is almost in-character for the setting (Apocalypse World). People have all kinds of different preferences here that are often hard to pin down.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:34
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Kai Tave posted:At any rate, however you slice it, I'm hard-pressed to see how Justin Alexander is a step up from Cam Banks. Even if you don't give a poo poo about 4E or the edition warriors thereof, I'm not seeing how that's an improvement. What has Alexander actually published or developed? Banks has worked on some really good stuff.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:Justin Alexander also wrote a long blog post trying to rationalize continuing to deadname Jennell Jaquays I can perfectly well understand not wanting to bother editing old blog posts nobody reads anymore because of laziness or being too busy. But I can't imagine putting in the time and effort to write a big long post about how I'm refusing to do it. That's absolutely ridiculous.
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Jan 25, 2019 01:56
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Warthur posted:Cool, I'm the idea that people who have literally never tried the hobby at all are somehow going to be able to pick out which strongly focused game experience they actually want in a confused market with no clear point of entry or lead brand. If I've never played a video game, how would I know what to play? What if I play Mario and hate it and swear off videogames forever even though I would have loved StarCraft? Does that sound like a ridiculous worry to you? It does to me. But even if it is a worry... Suppose I'm your theoretical newbie who has never played an RPG before. If I think D&D is the only game in town and I hate it, I absolutely will give up on RPGs forever. If I think there are dozens of cool games and I hate the first one I play, I'm more likely to try another one before I give up. Your idea is that it's helpful for market growth to have a badly designed game dominating the plays of new entries to the market. This idea is bad and dumb. If people into Fury Road and Fallout got into RPGs by playing Apocalypse World and people into Spirited Away and Pokemon got into RPGs through Golden Sky Stories, I bet a lot fewer of them would bounce off the hobby than they would if they tried D&D5e first.
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Jan 25, 2019 21:19
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Joe Slowboat posted:This assumes a number of things about how a group works which I think are a bit much. For one thing, people can try new things and decide if they like them or not, and people will enjoy games that other players are passionate about. Secondly, you don't have to play the same game every time - if you're really that split on what better options exist than D&D, you can try a few and decide if any of them are worth a longer game for everyone.
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Jan 26, 2019 01:54
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Warthur posted:So the whole "playing X game gives you brain damage thing" was obnoxious and wrong when Ron Edwards said it, and it would be just as obnoxious and wrong to say it about TVTropes 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. Also, I had a dumb sarcastic post typed up about the whole scansion thing but forgot to hit post this morning and now it's too late. So you all can thank whatever powers you worship that providence has spared you that particular shitpost.
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Feb 1, 2019 20:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's really cool how we keep earnestly perpetuating Ron Edwards' hot take about how X RPG leaves you with permanent mental trauma directly equivocal to childhood sexual abuse. I wouldn't call it earnest. It is a classic hot take from the days before the internet was full of nonstop hot takes and the fact that it makes grogs so mad is why it's funny. I also don't remember anything about CSA being involved. If Ron compared it to CSA, that's really hosed up.
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Feb 1, 2019 21:51
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Dawgstar posted:"Critical Role is to Normal D&D as Pornography is to Normal Sex." That's not a hot take. Come on. It's an obvious observation and reasonable comparison. We've got a classic nuclear take on this page comparing RPGs to both brain damage and childhood sexual assault trauma, and you post this luke-warm piss? Go back to the grog mines.
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Feb 2, 2019 04:41
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