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srhall79 posted:Along the eastern edge, there's Galt, which I assume is filled with individualists. Galt is the French Revolution country, where they just kept guillotining each other for 50 years. Very silly worldbuilding. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 20:56
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Terrible Opinions posted:This may have changed in 2nd edition but it always left a bad taste in my mouth that hellknights were given a soft touch with the constant reminders that they aren't all evil, but Galt is just this impossible funny land where they love murdering eachother for made up crimes. I feel like a lot of bad Pathfinder writing (especially in 1e) is a side-effect of the alignment system. It makes genuine moral ambiguity impossible, so there's this urge to add galaxy-brained fake moral ambiguity. In combination with the conscious attempts to be "edgier" than D&D in early 1e, this led to a tendency to treat "real-world" evil as Neutral, reserving the Evil label for cartoonish baby-eaters. This is one reason why I'm glad that the Remaster is getting rid of alignment. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 23:59
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Terrible Opinions posted:If they're gonna have the "not all hellknights are evil" disclaimer every time they're brought up it's only fair to do the same for gray gardeners. The Gray Gardener archetype is "suitable for heroes to take after the events of Night of the Gray Death," for what it's worth.
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Jul 12, 2023 00:04
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Yeah, Golarion has improved remarkably from 1e. It's a pity the Pathfinder lore wiki is full of outdated 1e lore.
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Jul 12, 2023 13:57
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MonsterEnvy posted:I think Treerazer is an original demon James Jacobs made when he was young. He’s in the bestiary and I think he’s overall the current strongest official monster in the game. He's tied with the Tarrasque and Dimari-Diji. I'm a little curious what will happen to the Tarrasque in the Remaster. The D&D concept of the Tarrasque as a super-strong monster than keeps regenerating has little to do with the Tarasque in the story of St. Martha in the Golden Legend, which actually died rather easily.
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Jul 12, 2023 22:33
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Didn't somebody write up a conversion of the Eberron setting to Pathfinder 2e?
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Jul 21, 2023 22:07
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PF2 actually does have rules for running a kingdom...but only in the Kingmaker Adventure Path. The PF2 downtime rules are generally considered a bit of a weak point. The crafting system is a pain (especially the core version), and there's not much else to do in the core rules besides earning income and retraining. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 14:48
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Fish Heads posted:I think that's part of why WotC mostly shelved those settings after they took over (among a host of other reasons) What were the other reasons? I'm assuming it's a combination of Dark Sun being too grimdark, Dark Sun being too psionic, Planescape being surprisingly hard to write adventures for, and the WotC writers being boring enough people to actually enjoy Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms.
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Aug 1, 2023 00:51
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Tulul posted:It's actually a Wraith book about the Holocaust. I think feedmegin is joking about the typo of Chanel for Charnel.
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Aug 2, 2023 20:39
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I remember seeing an article somewhere that talks about this, arguing that the Jewish tradition in general is uncomfortable with the idea of supernatural beings that aren't closely connected to God.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:32
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SkeletonHero posted:To be fair, we really don't know what was in the Bible to begin with. Maybe there was a war against giant termite creatures but some dork monk named something like Brundson the Funt just find-and-replaced them all with "Romans" because King Jimothy XII was born missing the part of his brain that responds rationally to termites and they didn't want him suddenly dying of the vapor shakes during Tuesday Mass. That's not really how it works. Textual criticism has catalogued variations/corruptions across various manuscripts pretty extensively, and there definitely weren't universally propagated drastic changes like that in the Middle Ages!
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Aug 3, 2023 17:43
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That Old Tree posted:Every time they do this (Ars Magica as oWoD history, Exalted as oWoD prehistory, nWoD as post-apocalypse sequel to oWoD) it dies quickly or even before publication, but not before all the initial hints creep in so the suggestion lingers. Plus plenty of writers like sneaking in references for all the reasons a writer does such things, so sometimes it keeps getting hinted at even after it's "officially" untrue. I always liked the idea that Exalted was actually an alternate timeline of the World of Darkness; the Unconquered Sun is Lucifer if his rebellion was successful and Yahweh/Malfeas and his followers became the demons instead. I remember someone mentioning this theory on the Onyx Path forums, and Holden (IIRC) rejecting the idea as dumb and wrong. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 03:11
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Libertad! posted:I’m getting really weary of seeing characters in tabletop products knowingly and willfully participate in (or attempt to) genocide people and/or destroy of most or all of civilization and be something other than evil-aligned. Alignment should be done away with entirely, frankly. That said, I have noticed a weird intuition a lot of people seem to have (at least regarding fiction) that trying to kill all (or at least most) humans is more excusable than trying to kill a subset of humans. Probably this is because trying to kill all humans is a thing only fictional villains do, while genocide is very much real. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Aug 6, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 02:44
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wiegieman posted:The technocracy really changes depending on whether the writer wants them to be dragging humanity into the future or wants them to be brutal oppressors, huh. I sometimes see discussion about oWoD saying or implying that this sort of thing is intentional; all the lore comes from ~unreliable narrators~, or something like that. (Which does fit with the way Guide to the Technocracy, at least, is presented.) I'm not sure how that's supposed to fit with all the metaplotty stuff, though. Possibly some elements that were originally supposed to be ambiguous gradually became merely inconsistent. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 01:55
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Loomer posted:new authors reading things wrong and taking certain things either literally or metaphorically What were some examples of this? I can see how it might be a problem. I remember some fantasy/sci-fi author saying that you have to be careful with metaphorical language in fantasy, because for all the reader knows the setting might be weird enough that metaphor might be literally true. Certain kinds of surreal works can exploit this ambiguity for deliberate unsettling effects. The IF game For a Change does a great job of this, for example; the setting is alien enough that language like "a tower proudly plants itself" could be literally true, but the player character is alien enough that they might consider language that seemingly ascribes emotion and agency to inanimate objects to be an unremarkable way of describing things. To bring this back to the subject of the thread, I believe a lot of Jenna Moran's work is built around this. In general, though, metaphorical-vs.-literal ambiguity is probably something you want to avoid in tabletop RPGs, which depend of the players having a reasonably shared idea of what's going on.
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Aug 8, 2023 02:38
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Halloween Jack posted:And I haven't even shown you the terrible JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fanfic. Were White Wolf writers reading JoJo in the 90s? Despite its popularity in Japan and in some European countries, it was pretty niche in America before the TV anime came out, IIRC. Though the OVA had its fans; I could see a White Wolf writer creating a new type of vampire with time-stopping powers.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:56
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Pakxos posted:Wait, is this also where the time-controlling vampires come from? I really know very little of JoJo. Wait, oWoD really did have time-controlling vampires? The main villain of Part 3 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a vampire with time-stopping powers. To be clear, his time-stopping powers are completely separate from his being a vampire. He was also the main villain of Part 1, but didn't have time-stopping powers back then; he was just a vampire. In Part 7, we meet his less-evil alternate universe counterpart, who is not a vampire but can turn into a velociraptor, as well as the alternate universe counterpart of his alternate universe counterpart, who can stop time but is not a vampire.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:58
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How many people actually played (as opposed to read) these kinds of railroad metaplot adventures?
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Aug 12, 2023 02:25
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joylessdivision posted:White Wolf? Including racial slurs in their books? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? That's crazy. That’s a word I would expect to see in a book dealing with the history of New Orleans, though.
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Aug 23, 2023 19:26
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Bouquet posted:Does anyone know of any games with PvP as an expected possibility that have fail forward mechanics? Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts?
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Aug 30, 2023 22:35
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IIRC, the early EU (possibly WEG specifically) also sometimes did the opposite, saying that 5693 came from a society of luddites who never use blaster pistols and left his society because of his love of blaster pistol repair.
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Sep 8, 2023 16:01
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I feel like in D&D-style fantasy, the "evil people who do evil things" approach often amounts to killing people because of their religion instead of their race.  More seriously, though, I think part of what leads to both the "evil races" approach and to a lot of the inanities of D&D-style alignment sometimes is a desire for the enemies to be more OK to kill than evil people who do evil things would be. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 15:21
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Don't vampires and intelligent dragons count as "evil races" just as much as orcs do?
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Oct 31, 2023 16:13
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Nessus posted:The classic dragon is a huge hostile flying lizard. If you’re lucky it’s a marauding beast. If you’re unlucky it’s Smaug. I feel like D&D's division between chromatic and metallic dragons is at least a little evocative of real life ethnic conflict, even if not to the same degree.
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Oct 31, 2023 16:29
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Capfalcon posted:Also, the funniest reason that Were-beasts stopped being a big deal is because of the edition change, because originally, being a werewolf or werebear actually overwrote your original personality. I remember reading somewhere that werebears used to be inherently lawful good; they turned into a bear and ran off to do lawful good things (people joke that this probably involved fighting forest fires) every full moon, or something like that. Is that correct?
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Oct 31, 2023 23:59
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Weren’t the weapon vs. armor charts mis-converted from Chainmail, and Gygax admitted that he never used them himself?
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Nov 16, 2023 16:53
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MadDogMike posted:I kind of like Pathfinder's elves for actually specifically adapting to the terrain they're in to get all the various wood/cavern/artic/etc. type elves, they even have a feat to let an elf effectively be so good at it they can shift their heritage between those types (without it taking years like most elves). Lamarck was right in this case! A pet theory of mine regarding the Remaster drow retcon is that the idea of the Dark Fate was an in-universe misunderstanding of the Wandering Heart phenomenon.
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Nov 19, 2023 16:32
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MonsterEnvy posted:Galorion Pathfinders default. Yeah, that’s what I was referring to earlier with my post about the Dark Fate. Drow were actually being portrayed somewhat more sympathetically in the PF2 era, until they ended up having to retcon them out of the setting entirely with the recent OGL-to-ORC change. Though even in PF1, non-drow elves becoming drow was a very unusual event, not something that happened to “any elf who had a bad thought.”
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Nov 20, 2023 00:55
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Cooked Auto posted:Does this mean that elves can have bad thoughts now? See my edited post; there were always elves who had bad thoughts.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:57
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Falconier111 posted:Meanwhile, practically speaking, an expert will spend most of combat resentfully plinking away or cowering in a corner, the warrior will spend 90% of time out of combat sitting around picking their nose, and the psychic will do anything they have the spells for and be a lead weight otherwise. I remember Worlds Without Number saying that this approach is more or less intentional; everyone is supposed to be working against their own character sheet some of the time, basically. The reason Godbound isn't like that is because it's an Exalted-style game where PCs are meant to be more powerful.
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Nov 30, 2023 04:11
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MadDogMike posted:Yeah, I know Pathfinder 2E has the superstition barbarian build as kind of an homage to the original magic despising barbarian, and even with them maintaining the ability to wield magic items and use potions and Pathfinder 2E having decent non-magical healing it’s still a pretty sucky idea to have a magic hating character in your average fantasy RPG group. Yeah, Superstition Barbarian is probably the worst subclass in all of PF2. (I’m curious if we’ll get a less-bad Remastered version of it in Player Core 2.)
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Dec 13, 2023 23:53
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srhall79 posted:Just more examples of D&D only really portraying itself. Gygax may have grown up on stuff like Conan, where magic was dark, twisted, where it had a cost, and so proper and right for the hero to take down every caster they saw. And D&D is none of those things. Besides artifacts and cursed items, magic's safe as houses. It's a tool, it's science, it works right all the time. D&D has occasionally had “risky” spells (the 3.5 version of Contact Other Plane, for example), and sometimes there have been optional subsystems representing riskier kinds of magic. But yeah, the norm is for magic to be reliable. In a discussion on another site about the PF2 Superstition Barbarian, I suggested having them only hate particular kinds of magic (which ones would be chosen at character creation). This would only really make sense in the context of PF2 with its four magical traditions, though.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:29
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Halloween Jack posted:The sad thing is that when people look up the origins of D&D magic, it doesn't usually inspire them to either actually implement Dying Earth magic, nor to make anything better. Instead we get "What if you had to roll on a table every time you cast a spell, and sometimes, something really stupid happens?" Worlds Without Number makes magic feel more Dying Earth-like. That’s probably the exception, though.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:12
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Capfalcon posted:So, I think it's combination of "CoS being a popular, iconic adventure" and "CoS being full of holes that need work from the DM." Most of the other 5e adventures are also full of holes, though. Most notoriously, if you run Dragon Heist as written, the PCs will never do the actual heist. Some 5e adventures, like Descent into Avernus, seem to have been carelessly patched together from the contributions of a zillion different writers who didn't communicate with each other much.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:10
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Yeah, the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms is an exceptionally boring setting. There's an inevitable issue here that's sometimes discussed where popular TTRPG settings need a degree of cliché so players can understand them, but the "default" D&D settings tend to take this too far while simultaneously having a player understanding problem anyway due to the ludicrous over-detailing of certain things.
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Feb 28, 2024 19:34
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It’s actually a bit strange that his delusions would focus on Robert Johnson as early as 1954. Contrary to popular belief, he didn’t really become popular until the early 60s (due to his influence on 60s British blues/rock); he had far less influence on 50s rock and roll than is often assumed. This is a nitpick, of course; as historical inaccuracies in oWoD go it’s quite minor.
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Mar 2, 2024 03:36
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Gatto Grigio posted:Oh no, I just realized that he’s an immortal vampire and that if he’s still around in 2024, he probably now claims that he’s Tupac… Either that or Kurt Cobain.
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Mar 2, 2024 15:24
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I think different splats claiming the same historical figures could be taken as an amusing “unreliable narrator” thing that slyly undermines the idea of supernaturals being the real actors of history. That probably wasn’t the intent, though.
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Mar 19, 2024 19:46
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Discussing the merits of the different editions of Exalted reminds me of something. In the essay where she coins the concept of "submyth," Ursula Le Guin mentions "the blond heroes of sword and sorcery, with their unusual weapons." This made me laugh, because while I'm unaware of any actual examples of the trope she's talking about (Conan didn't have an unusual weapon, IIRC), it reminded me of the notorious bit in Exalted 1e where it suggests giving Lunars different weapons to make them distinct from each other. I wouldn't be surprised if there really were a lot of characters like Le Guin was talking about back in the day, though. ("No, my character is totally distinct from Conan, because he uses a bec de corbin!")
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Apr 30, 2024 23:34
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