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ah yes, the famous concept of a communist monarchy
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Sep 10, 2019 15:18
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Halloween Jack posted:The Chinese mind has a genetic predisposition to prefer emperors. If you disagree, you don't understand Confucianism. Now, regarding the Russian mind... i'd like to refer you to my measurements of the bumps on the russian skull. very troublesome numbers!
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Sep 10, 2019 16:08
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Night10194 posted:More RPGs need to include creative writing advice in their GMing sections. The more people acknowledge that GMing is a creative writing project in addition to everything else, the better. i was surprised at how many people vehemently deny this and hate the idea of the gm using a homemade setting or coming up with their own adventures. and there's people who go even further than that and think that anything beyond the most basic fantasy trappings is useless and stupid
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Oct 8, 2019 16:46
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Night10194 posted:This is nuts to me, as well. I don't think I've ever heard of people getting mad about people writing their own adventures before, though; I know there are groups that primarily play pre-published stuff but I usually thought that was a matter of 'writing our own stuff takes ages and we have jobs/just want to meet up and play' which is perfectly reasonable. i definitely know there are horror stories about people who sit there and drop 20+ minutes of exposition on you about their lovingly crafted worlds, but there's a happy medium to be struck. i tend to think less is more and anyone who wants to be involved in the worldbuilding should get to pitch in, but you gotta have some sort of world to hang the game off of
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Oct 8, 2019 17:07
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Night10194 posted:I genuinely think that whatever his abilities as a designer, Robert Schwalb is a completely and utterly miserably bad adventure writer. I hear the same complaints about Shadow of the Demon Lord premades as I see in stuff like Forges of Nuln and now this mess. the award for absolute worst sotdl adventure goes to "the stars refuge" by none other than monte cook, for having an extraordinarily lovely ending, or possibly "the last train to darksville" by matt forbeck which takes the idea of fighting a dragon on top of a train and makes it as boring as possible.
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Apr 8, 2020 00:43
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I am normally 100% opposed to starting an RPG with fiction, and while Red Markets opens with like 100 pages of fiction, I loved every bit of it. I was immediately drawn in by the fact that it is written in-character and Gnat makes for an excellent cynical narrator. Taking the time to properly set up the biggest causes of the crash and delve into the economic and political woes of the pre-zombie world really helped me get into the setting, and its all relevant for understanding the particulars of the carrion economy that you'll be engaging in during play. I suppose it helps that I largely agree with the diatribe, but I found it to be excellent worldbuilding. I recently re-read the game while considering running a campaign of it and seeing that intro through the lens of 2020 is very different from before.
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Dec 5, 2020 03:56
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I've got a prosthetic limb and it annoys me how these game designers always get it wrong. Yes, of course, we know that the human soul is evenly distributed throughout the body and the loss of my foot decreased my empathy by about 8%. But, and this is the thing they always miss, I now cry whenever I see pictures or videos of inanimate objects with googly eyes being threatened with physical violence. This needs to be accounted for in any game design.
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Dec 5, 2020 04:14
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SkyeAuroline posted:Okay, real question. The next post is already written to edit and put up tomorrow, so it's not affected, but: this is a pretty unfair reading of the contents of those chapters, but if you dislike them go ahead and skip ahead
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Dec 9, 2020 07:09
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SkyeAuroline posted:I'm responding to you directly because your quote is most relevant but this is kind of touching on everyone's commentary. yeah i think this is an uncharitable reading of the material in question. the reason that palbicke gets 9 pages to himself is that gnat is his former employee and clearly thought a lot of him but it never gets into the hero worship you're talking about here. and there are even parts of this section where she dismissively talks about some of the shadier poo poo they did, like when she disclaims responsibility for exploiting contract workers because they followed the letter of the law. i can think of several sections in the book where gnat expresses admiration for groups like the police and the cia that reveal her true nature. and the second narrator, banhammer, is explicitly a fascist who works with the moths only out of convenience. gnat is not an unbiased observer here, but she is also not particularly left either. the whole setting section is about identifying the material causes of the collapse and then using that as a springboard to talk about why the blight hit as hard as it did, but gnat and the other characters depicted are still active participants in the carrion economy with no particular designs on building something better. the book has an anti-capitalist streak, but the conclusion it comes to is that the forces of capital are strong enough to adapt to the worst disaster in history without really losing too much in the process. its a bleak vision, for sure, but also a realistic one (leaving aside the magic zombies).
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Dec 9, 2020 15:33
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Hostile V posted:Yeah, also the fact is that the Moths are the Good Folks in the situation...but, well, Stokes is a Marxist and he's pretty academically read and up to date on, uh, the reality of good guys in a given situation. They're the good folks, directly compared to the DHQS and what's gone down since the Crash, but they're insurgents and incredibly biased because if they weren't bastards and were thoughts-and-prayers "let's sit at a table and discuss this" opposition, either the Casualties would've killed them all years ago or the DHQS would've. Not to excuse their behavior, just that there's a lot of bias at play because Gnat's explicitly writing this all to be her manifesto and her side of the story because the DHQS has spent years turning her into the next bin Ladin and there's generations of feral kids growing up to know her as the face of the Devil but not how to read or write. yeah, absolutely. the moths are the good guys because gnat is writing the manifesto, but if you read between the lines they're really only good in the sense that they're not active raiders. they maintain the ubiq, but even gnat points out that the only reason for it is that while it does benefit the loss and beyond it is the only thing that keeps the recession from blowing them to bits with a cruise missile. i do think that the comparisons to galt's gulch are on-point, but u-city is like what happens to galt's gulch after the apocalypse.
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Dec 10, 2020 01:25
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SkyeAuroline posted:A little late but I wanted to get back to you on this (and, again, tangentially to other replies). I'll have tonight's post up when I'm home, really. i do not think gnat is an unreliable narrator. she is accurately reporting the facts of the loss and the recession. she's putting her observations and spin on it, sure, but i see no reason to question her account. i'm not talking about an unreliable narrator. you absolutely should go ahead and assume that the dhqs is full top to bottom with goose-stepping assholes who would sooner murder you than look in your direction because that seems to a pretty accurate assessment of how people in fascist organizations behave. if you disagree with gnat's depiction of things, that's not getting into "homebrew territory" that's just disagreeing with her worldview. also, her talk of "good cops" and her admiration for the utility teams is a complete misconception in the former situation and in the latter she's fawning over mass murderers. its not a good thing or an acknowledgement of competency, its a character flaw on her part SkyeAuroline posted:This is intentional. It's also a terrible approach. I don't need Stokes to yell at me for 160 pages about how the government will ruin everyone's lives if it benefits corporate backers, how capitalism is going to exploit everyone until and past its breaking point, how everyone under pressure is some degree of a terrible person... I either already know these things, or can accept that they're genre elements. If you don't write a "what is an RPG and how do they work" section because you assume someone playing a roleplaying game knows what they are and how they work (and if they don't then they can do their own research), then you also shouldn't need to write a "what is capitalism and why does it suck" section in "a game of economic horror" billed on its cycle of exploitation. given how many people to this day will line up to lick boots for capital, i don't know how true this is. you can dislike the game's preachy tone, sure. but i found it quite cathartic to read a book and a setting that accurately takes aim at the cause of so many of our current-day problems and gives it both barrels. its not just another zombie game that starts off with the world being fine and then boom, zombies ruin everything, it goes into the deep issues that were already there and extrapolates them into the new crisis. to me, it represents a continuation of the social commentary that founded the genre in the living dead movies that so often gets overlooked, ignored, or twisted into right-wing narratives instead. SkyeAuroline posted:Re: hero worship, I'm not talking in character. Stokes falls into great man theory with what he attributes to Palbicke. He's an inherent genius with no regard for any actual circumstance who, again, upon getting access to a computer for the first time in his life promptly hacks his way into enrolling in Yale under a false identity and getting past every step of the way there, then makes a fortune by writing two magic algorithms to solve for the entire economy and inadvertantly predict the future (before we even touch Ubiq!); there's no element of "how the hell can he do any of this" except "because he's inherently great and can do great things with his greatness". There's half of "great man theory" by definition- he's born with the traits that let him rise to success and lead mankind, there's jack poo poo indicating he learned or worked for any of this (and plenty of counterevidence that no, he didn't work for anything, his magic algorithms that only he could have come up with did it for him). insofar as palbicke is some great man (he's not, he disappears from the narrative as soon as the blight hits and if not for gnat i don't think anyone would be talking about him at all) his only exceptional trait is a preternatural gift for information absorption. he bummed around the world picking up information from better thinkers and incorporating it into his work. the book even talks about how spawn and cull are just a half-assed recreation of the south korean tech that he based it on. and unlike south korea, which organized and directed a national project to bring their system to life, america was only saved by one guy who figured out how to recreate it but not for the national good, only for his own enrichment and the realization of his lifelong obsession with making a free internet. if there's any great man theory to be derived from this, its in how often a single man will get credited for the work the work of many that he either took credit for or outright stole (as it is implied palbicke did during his time in south korea). stokes' ability to write fiction is subjective, of course. i'll just offer my own opinion here and say that the intro fiction/setting overview of red markets is my favorite fiction i've read in an rpg, and i generally hate fiction in my rpgs
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Dec 10, 2020 21:41
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I run Lancer and I'm sticking close to 3 combats between full repairs. That translates to one combat per session, of course, given how crunchy everything is.
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Dec 8, 2021 19:45
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Reminds me of Uncharted 2 where at the end the villain does the whole "we're not so different, you and I" thing and Drake is like "no" but you just spent the last 10 hours or so gunning down a truly staggering amount of mooks to get here. It shows the limitations of what videogames can do, but it's also very funny.
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Mar 20, 2023 15:26
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:36 |
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Mr. Maltose posted:Drake's actually right, though, because the villain Lazarevic killed a lot of people doing warcrimes and Nathan just killed a bunch of war criminals. That's fundamentally different. The question wasn't about the moral character of the people he killed though. Generic villain main was just commenting on how bloodthirsty Drake is, and the game reinforces this because you have to kill those people, you're not allowed to progress nonviolently. And Drake isn't some upstanding figure himself, he's a western adventurer, going on romps through "exotic" locales and bringing death and destruction with him. Don't get me wrong, I love those games just like I love Indiana Jones, but they are pretty hosed up if you think about them. PurpleXVI posted:I mean, no, that's not a limitation inherent to videogames, that's a limitation inherent to hack writers. Ultimately it comes down to this. If your game is going to be an action-adventure story with lots of shooting dudes, either make your protagonist someone who is okay with that choice or just don't have someone call attention to the amount of bodies they leave behind them. To bring this back to TTRPGs, I've been trying to run more games where violence is something that is applied with more discretion. Like seriously challenging the players to find a solution that doesn't involve death, at least in situations where perhaps there are material motivations and not just "oh these guys are evil, don't worry about it." Like yeah sometimes there's no choice because they're not willing to talk or whatever, but I've been trying to write more situations where the opportunity for compromise exists, which is one thing I think TTRPGs have the advantage.
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Mar 20, 2023 17:07
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