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Welcome to the Traditional Games chat thread! This is a place for:
Everyone is welcome to the chat thread, even non-TG regulars. You can find the 2020 thread here.
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Jan 2, 2021 18:48
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Tulip posted:It's fairly trivial whether or not games are art, but that means we have to figure out a good critical vocabulary for discussing them that isn't pure extension of existing literary/movie/music criticism. It's particularly acute with tabletop games since the game is in a lot of ways a toolbox for creating further art, but I'd say its art on its own regardless of its other merits. Tuxedo Catfish posted:extremely true I agree that we need a critical vocabulary that isn't just a pure extension of criticism of other entertainment and arts media, but we can certainly borrow from them and learn from them, and I feel like for the most part we aren't even clearing that hurdle. I'm arts-criticism-adjacent in my real life, in that I'm married to an artist with a masters degree and we've been together for... uhhh... 23 years+ now. She's primarily a ceramic artist, works as an arts administrator, and has a long history of engagement with gallery and presentational work (as opposed to pure-utilitarian ware, which she also has a history with but isn't as relevant here). As her tag-along and wingman, I've sponged up a fair bit myself, enough to have long discussions with her and to develop my own Opinions About Art. One of the things she occasionally points out to me is that there can be a divergence between what an artist apparently intended to convey with their work, and the fineness of control and execution evidenced by their technique. The former is usually easier for an audience - in particular, an audience unversed in that particular art - to notice and evaluate than the latter, although not always; and that can extend even to "experts" such as the person jurying an exhibition. Consequently, we sometimes see artwork that is impressive on its surface, in that it might be striking, or have a moving theme, or intelligently convey an interesting idea: but which has visible flaws in execution which detracts from the work. And the cool thing is that sometimes those flaws are simply imperceptible to what we might call the "lay audience", but sometimes they're only subconsciously perceptible, negatively affecting people's appreciation of the work in ways they can't properly articulate. This could toss us into tangential conversations like "who is art actually for" and "does the audience matter" and "death of the artist" etc. etc. ad nauseum, but I think there's a gem of wisdom here that is highly applicable to especially Tuxedo Catfish's comment. Which is that, even if you were primed to enjoy a particular RPG product (as art or otherwise), and even if you lack the depth of experience or study or understanding to consciously identify them, mechanical flaws are flaws of technique that may (or may not) affect your enjoyment or experience of that game. To wit: A ceramic artist with experience notices that this teapot, which has an interesting form and colors and is cool that way, had a run of excess glaze that touched the foot and was then ground off, and this means while it's totally a functional teapot and would be fine to sell it's not really a good example of execution (but note that sometimes glaze dripping is done intentionally, and it's fine when that's the case...). We see this often in student work: good ideas, poor execution reflective of a novice's skillset. It's not a condemnation of an artist, but if you're looking at stuff "with good ideas, but poor technique" that's valid criticism that is valuable to other people who might not otherwise spot the poor technique right off the bat. And poor technique may or may not affect the function of an object that has both a functional and an artistic aspect, but that doesn't mean it's invalid to mention it. Similarly, I have seen (and own!) beautiful and apparently well-executed teapots that, when actually used, dribble out the spout, because it turns out that getting a teapot spout to not dribble is very technically challenging, and you almost never get an opportunity to try pouring some tea from a given teapot before you buy it, especially if you buy it at an art gallery. So mechanical/execution flaws sometimes are hidden and only emerge during use. The language for expressing this kind of criticism already exists and would work fine for RPGs. It is valid to express appreciation for a work that you found aesthetically pleasing even if it has technical flaws: it is also valid to point out those technical flaws. Technical flaws may or may not rise to the point of disqualifiers for different people. Someone may not mind that their teapot would dribble, because for them, that's either a minor thing to deal with, or maybe they never even use the teapot but bought it and appreciate it purely as an artistic object. And another person might view the dribble as not only making the teapot worthless, but also reflecting badly on the teapot-maker, who really ought to know better and shouldn't be submitting dribble teapots to art shows and slapping big price tags on them, and it's just not plausible that they didn't know their pots dribble given what we know of their artist resume and bona-fides. RPG mechanics are part of their structure; structure is part of aesthetic appeal; excellent function is aesthetically pleasing. Concept, function, and form interact; they can reinforce or conflict. It's OK to appreciate artwork that is more about aesthetic or concept than function; it's also OK to appreciate "pure craft" (if there is such a thing there isn't) with no particular regard for aesthetic, if all you want is a hot pot of tea. It's OK to regard a work within the context of a larger body of work, or the entire artistic genre, or view it as part of the conversation taking place between the artists within that genre. A work can be a meta-commentary, it can be a subversion, it can be an intentional violation of the supposed rules. It can mean something different to you than it does to the maker, it can be a failure of the maker's intent but still be valuable, or vice-versa. Critique isn't about telling the audience what they are or are not allowed to like; rather, it's about giving the audience (and the artist) additional tools and context to better understand a work.
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Jan 6, 2021 19:46
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mellonbread posted:I don't think you can get people to agree to a consistent terminology. To everyone else, it's always going to look like the guy presenting the definition is trying to auto-resolve the argument in his favor. Critics do this naturally, as we do with all language: a jargon is developed, it is abused, there's a consensus usage and unconventional usages, and if you get into the deep end sufficiently you find yourself reading academic papers packed with tortured language indecipherable to those not already hopelessly steeped in academia. Which is to say, aldantefax posted:there doesn't need to be a rigorous vocabulary to talk about why people do / don't like a game or its components, at least, but I get this impression from the thread that for others, that point is more important than the criticism or opinion being delivered, which seems to stifle discussion. Myopia and pedantry-for-the-sake-of-it can stifle discussions, definitely, and lots of people get irritated or bored by lengthy arguments over the meaning of some term - "you're arguing semantics" is an accusation of foul play, rather than a supportive statement. But we also already use specialized language in this hobby, and it can be leveraged comprehensibly for critique, and I see that specialized language built upon all the time. For example: we can discuss a game's "mechanics" critically, and do; and gamers generally understand what we mean by that, even if occasionally someone uses the term in a weird way that muddies the waters. Tuxedo Catfish's call for mechanics to be considered as "objects of aesthetic appeal" is using the language of art criticism, including the call to action. Are folks confused by those terms? If they are, a discussion of them needn't be awful. It's important when you're trying to communicate, to be understood, that you use words and phrases that others will interpret as you meant them. Perfect communication is probably an unachievable goal until we develop mind melding technology, that's a fundamental aspect of language, but clarity of communication is on a spectrum and given that criticism is intended to inform and be part of a conversation, it's reasonable to ask that it use language that is as clear as possible. This may mean adopting or developing terms and we shouldn't shy away from that need when it arises. We've got a bunch already. "Rules-lite," "PbtA game," "GM-less," "Indie game," etc. are terms that an outsider to the genre might not understand but most everyone in this thread does. If I say "this system claims to be rules-lite, but there's significant combat crunch weighing it down" that's a criticism using Trad Games terms of art. But we can learn from terms-of-criticism from other arenas, too, like art critique. Theme. Tone. Intent. Response. Form. Function. Flow. What do these mechanics evoke? Do they reference previous works - not by citation, but via cues - a nod to a prior work that is recognizable to those familiar with that prior work? Does character generation in this game subvert genre expectations? Are there additional periods of recognizable and describable architectural movements, beyond just the OSR - or perhaps, within the OSR? And games contain visual art, too. Is the imagery in this product consistent? Provocative? Whimsical? Over-wrought? Simple, or simplified, or simplistic? (Pet peeve: these are not synonyms.) This goes beyond RPGs, too. Is this worker placement game just a bastardization of previous, better works; or is it a coy nod to a genre favorite, with a twist that is simultaenously inspirational and maudlin? aldantefax posted:A few questions: Yes. Both, and more. I can discuss a horror film through comparison of the whole film to other horror films: and, I can also take an aside to discuss the lighting and camera work in a particular scene of that film, making an argument for why they were or weren't effective or appropriate or something, or perhaps to use as an example for how a scene in a different film might have been shot in a way that would improve it. Any of these approaches have potential interest to an audience interested in: movies in general, horror movies in particular, and cinematography in detail. quote:- Does assuming the enjoyment of others (other than yourself) factor into a game's worth either via its commercial success or its aesthetic design? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but: popularity is one available metric for a work, sometimes; and you can perform surveys or use other approaches to determine broad appeal. Rotten tomatoes rankings seem to help folks. But, in my opinion these aren't really "criticism", they're just statistics. One of the functions of criticism is to enhance an audience's ability to understand a work, which can add to, or subtract from, their enjoyment. Another function is to assist those who are making artworks, providing avenues to discover and implement improvements or at least offer alternatives that might not have otherwise occurred to them. So apologies for the roundabout approach, but I wind up with quote:- Does someone need to necessarily use an agreed upon language for some to criticize something and learn that vocabulary as a prerequisite for delivering an opinion? No, not necessarily. But development of a shared vocabulary is useful, because vocabulary is a tool, and good tools tailored to a particular task make the task easier and improves results.
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Jan 7, 2021 02:25
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mellonbread posted:I don't think there's as much agreement on this as there might seem, even just in TG chat. See for example the brief discussion of "dungeon crawling" and whether 4E supports it in last year's thread. For some people dungeon crawling was just "anything that happens in a dungeon" while for others it referred to a specific play style. Sure, and these conversations also take place with regularity within the world of art criticism. Including, tiresomely, the most foundational one: "what is art." Most people familiar with the familiar arguments find them tiresome for good reason, but they also keep coming up, for good reason. IMO it's unavoidable and just comes with the territory. Tulip posted:This is really good Leperflesh. I'm a little distracted so apologies for not having a heavy level of engagement, but I'll definitely back you up about jargon: not only do TTRPGs already have (very arcane!) jargon, attempts to evade jargon are generally self-defeating. Jargon can lead to impenetrable writing, but writing can be perfectly opaque without any specialized language anyway, and trying to describe a piece of art or physics in depth with only plain language is a great way to make some hot nonsense. The term "pop art" is loaded down with connotative meaning around this question, among others. Is Warhol or Haring or I guess Banksy even, less valuable (or more valuable) because of popularity? Popularity itself being a medium these artists play with. By extension: can we ignore Monopoly? Ought we to? Or: isn't the current iteration of D&D at least partly the way it is, because of its popularity, and because of the popular expectation? 100% agree that a big value of criticism is to identify and promote less known art/artists. Many art criticism publications dedicate significant space to highlighting new, up-and-coming artists and their works, and those profiles generally include not only presentation and evaluation of the works, but also bios or interviews. e. Evil Mastermind posted:Honestly I feel the biggest obstacle to good RPG reviewing is getting people to accept that it's okay to criticize an RPG. There's lots of people who think all art criticism is illegitimate too, or inherently motivated by malice or jealousy, or at the very least, crass and reductive and detracting from the purity of the work and your reaction to it, etc. "Criticism of criticism" is its own special realm of criticism. Enough so that the famous H.L. Mencken felt motivated to write Criticism of criticism of criticism, heh. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 03:34
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Tulip posted:but it's also been beaten to death. Yup, and that alone is reason enough to avoid discussing either of them, for me, except for where it seems unavoidable.
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Jan 7, 2021 04:24
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aldantefax posted:I use some era of USA rank designations and go from there based on the troop type or if someone has beef with it ask the expert in the group and tell them to make it up. If they want to go hard to the paint about the historical whatnot then they are 100% welcome to flesh out that bit of the scenario. You've got some innerestin' ideas worth mulling over there, fax. Some kind of "heading off the same dumb arguments that happen all the time" glossary/reference... thing... could be useful both to facilitate effective communication, and to make my job easier. The challenge might be reaching a consensus on those definitions? Or the document itself becoming a locus of sniping? Hmm.
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Jan 7, 2021 07:06
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I'm not ignoring the critique/terms chat, promise; but today I have a different thing to announce. Please welcome Dwarf74 as our newest addition to the Trad Games IK Krew! Dwarf74 will nominally be IK for the kickstarter, gloomhaven, and OSR threads; and, like all TG IKs, can also fill in elsewhere as and when needed and able. Thanks Dwarf74. Sorry, Dwarf74!
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Jan 7, 2021 22:56
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I'm sure Dwarf74 will get around to posting, whenever they've finished surviving the initiation rituals and hazing process.
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Jan 7, 2021 23:27
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For the record, and just going to head off the inevitable accusations now: Dwarf74's appointment as an IK was in no way related to the completely coincidental fact that his cat looks exactly like my cat Billie Jean. Our cat similarities were not taken into consideration. Billie Jean:  In a completely unrelated request, does anyone have a cat that is identical to any of these other of my cats? This is very important. Bean:  Sophia:  Gentleman: 
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Jan 8, 2021 02:19
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Len posted:i have a cat named bean does that count? hmm well it's a different correlation but I'll make a note, thank you.
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Jan 8, 2021 02:23
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dwarf74 posted:My cat Octavius is identical to Leperflesh's other than being much larger, which means they are fifth-dimensionally linked but mine is closer. CLOSER  The grey star signifies how you are now officially simultaneously A Thread Cop and therefore Bad, but also an oppressed junior-level peon forced by The Management to do all their poo poo work for free with no privileges, exactly like the proletariat. The worst of both worlds!
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Jan 8, 2021 02:42
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:This is Smol Bean: Our bean has a chronic cough, so we call her Coughy Bean sometimes. She also loves to be in a bag, at which times she is Bean Bag. Similarly, string...
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Jan 8, 2021 03:17
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aldantefax posted:I think you might want to exercise some authorial license and just go for it. I well might. I am juggling multiple projects/responsibilities/inclination and attention span things right now, so I may back-burner this for a wee bit, but it makes good sense to have Mod Support for this sort of project. I'm preserving several of these posts in a doc so I can come back to them, so I'll just acknowledge these posts that I'll come back to: Absurd Alhazred posted:Leperflesh, if you're soliciting sources for a terminology stickie, I think this would be a good addition: the what I like glossary, which should be relevant to all traditional games. aldantefax posted:... hyphz posted:It is, and could use some new year love. https://forsoothgoons.com/tg/index.php?title=Help:Glossary The wiki needs some love. It hurts me to look at the main page and not see anything to tell me what's on the site or how to find it. As far as I can tell, the only way to discover pages is through the Random Page link, or just having someone give you a link to a useful page. I had no idea there was a glossary, and searching "glossary" doesn't even return it (because the page is titled Help:Glossary and is not in the content pages!) I would like to help and make it much more usable, but... doing so very highly resembles the poo poo I do at work, so I've carefully avoided volunteering for years. I can see hyphz has been active, I'd be interesting in hearing who owns it (fuego fish and hypnobeard?), who else is active, and to what degree a random mod can come and stomp around making big changes without pissing everyone off. hyphz posted:The problem with all the terms is that they're based on the experience delivered by the game, and so none of them can be applied until there's a way to unpick the game's responsibility from the GM's responsibility. A GM who is determined to send you to the piss forest can ruin almost any game system, but that doesn't make the systems less valuable. yeah and, I wanna respond to megathread chat, a recurring subject I've put some thought into already: Absurd Alhazred posted:I think moving away from megathreads would be nice. Your specialized Megadungeon thread is a good example of something focused that allows for more productive discussion, in my opinion. A more focused subject matter makes moderation easier, too, I would think. (Fax commented on megathreads too.) Yeah. There's been a thread in the mod forum and suggestions in QCS about potential upgrades to the forums, and one of the things that's been brought up - and that I've weighed in on with the admins/mods - is how we handle megathreads from a technical (rather than policy) standpoint. For example, I'd love to have some kind of filter or tab or view that would allow browsers to see or not see the megas, and also indexing/search options that are specific to thread titles (or even better, robust metadata including topical tagging). I've seen mods from other subs with a lot of megathreads ask for other stuff too. Some forums like Ask/Tell and Games are similarly flooded with megas (but that's not a bad thing), whereas GBS has moved from mostly-megas, to violently anti-mega, and swinging back to well-maybe-megas-are-cool, and I dunno what they think of them in C-SPAM but etc. etc. there's clearly sitewide interest in improvements to the UI that accounts for the different modes of long-term and short-term discussions and how they can conflict. However, all of that stuff is way down on the priority list; the site has significant technical debt to cope with, and while we've seen some cool little features bubble out anyway because they were easy and fast to implement, something more significant like what I'd like to see will not happen soon. So, we need to instead find coping mechanisms and strategies for whatever problems we may have with megathreads in Trad Games, in advance of any possible technical site update, and that's also presuming that we all agree on what exactly the "problems" might be with megathreads (and we absolutely do not all agree, that much has been very solidly shown all over SA and also sometimes in TG for a long time). For TG, I've already introduced informally one solution to the attention and navigation obstacle, which is to announce/highlight/talk about new threads here, when they're posted. I think graduating that to a sticky is something I'd like to do, if I can establish that I'm willing to habitually update that sticky on a good quick schedule. The idea here is that if people don't have to click through three to five pages of megathreads scanning for something that turns out to be a new thread that might be of interest, then maybe those new threads will attract more eyeballs and posters, and that in turn will tend to keep them closer to the front page, which is a positive feedback loop. Secondarily, encouraging everyone in TG to step out of their bookmarks and see what's new is a goal; and encouraging more new threads is an "if you build it, they will come" approach, because more content = more attraction. However, none of this is stuff any of us can force, and we have to also accept that total traffic on SA, and also traffic in TG, is way way down from its peak many years ago. Until SA is attracting hundreds of new accounts monthly we are not likely to see a major change in how the goons use TG, and that may simply mean that most new threads don't attract much attention and will tend to die out in a matter of a few days or if the OP is persistent, perhaps a few weeks. Which is ok. It might not be the outcome everyone hopes for, but it is totally OK to have short-lived threads that wound up being two or five people chatting with each other, too. So, to return to the point: the "megathread problem" is, in my view, more of a project than a crisis, and something we can experiment with to see if we can get some positive results, but not something we should ever feel like we've "failed" regardless of what does or doesn't work. I have additional reasons for not moving quickly on this that I won't discuss yet. But I did want you guys to know that I really appreciate your ideas, I'm making note of them, and you're not wasting your time making them.
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Jan 8, 2021 07:51
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aldantefax posted:game bookshelf I have a bookshelf in my office which contains all of the RPG stuff that I intend to keep (I've got a bin in the garage with some stuff I intend to get rid of but haven't gotten around to... for years...)  My organizing principles are, in order:
I don't care, at all, about alphabetizing, because there's not enough books for me to ever have to spend a long time trying to figure out where a given book is. I also don't care, at all, about whether my organization would make sense or be usable for anyone else, because I'm the only one who ever uses this bookshelf. The lowest shelf there has my white dwarfs, because I want them near my RPGs, even though I have a different place where I keep other magazines, and that highlights that for me, grouping by subject matters more than grouping by medium. That shelf also bleeds into my non-RPG/Game books: it's the right amount of space to fit all of my books on home improvement, followed by almost all my books on making things (blacksmithing, woodworking, and reference material for both) - but I recently picked up some more woodworking books, which do not fit, so I will soon need to probably move the home improvement books somewhere else so that I can get the new woodworking books in here. I think my organization priorities make sense as prioritizing both space usage and utility. When I'm thinking about minis and RPG stuff, I don't just only want to find the exact book I had in mind... I also want to see the books I have that are related, because they remind me of their existence and may inspire me to recall some related thing I want to look at or read about. I could well re-organize the middle shelf to put all the sci-fi stuff on one end and the fantasy stuff on the other, and that'd be just as sensible as putting star wars in between paranoia and champions; just depends on which axes of association you decide are paramount for you. I will say that this shelf, as a physical object, sucks. It's a cheapo particle board shelving unit that I will eventually replace with good shelving. But utility trumps quality: I have this shelf, I don't have its replacement, and I want my books on a shelf today, not "eventually when I get around to it." When I put off utility for reasons like "it makes no sense to put in effort now because I'm going to be doing X sometime soon and I'll have to re-do this", "sometime soon" has a terrible habit of turning into years later or maybe never, and that's how I wind up discovering a cardboard box with stuff that's been in it since I moved 11 years ago and never made accessible. This is a weakness in my own personality that I have to fight, your mileage may vary a lot, so I'd abstract it for general use to "honestly assess your own tendencies and do what is actually going to give you the best utility and value for your time, money, and space." Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 20:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:drat, the bowing on them shelves. Yeah that's what particle board does under load. I have the tools and ability to make slide-in replacements in probably half an hour, but my woodworking ethos would force me to also properly sand and finish them, and then at that point I'd be halfway to just... rebuilding the shelves... which I would not do using the same construction method... so I should just make custom shelves.... uhhhhh that's project #eleventy-six on my list... ...so in the meantime, they will serve.
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Jan 8, 2021 22:33
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paradoxGentleman posted:The subject of megathreads has passed, but... I kinda like megathreads? It's nice that all discussion of a certain subject gravitates towards the same place, so you can be sure not to miss out on stuff from subjects you care about. Megathreads are definitely not going away, from TG or otherwise. SA is a broad community: subforums are their own segmented sub-communities, which overlap and have flow between because many of us read & post in multiple subforums: megathreads are, effectively, persistent sub-sub communities within subforums. These buckets are essentially arbitrary, created by the choices made over the last 40 years by people designing forums software. Forming communities is an instinctive and natural human behavior. Fighting that tendency is always going to be a losing battle. So to me, the question is never "ought we to have these sub-sub-communities?" because we have no choice, as long as there's more than like 10 people posting on SA they'll happen. Instead, the question is "how can we best serve the competing interests and divvy up the limited resources, reduce artificial constraints, and improve the user experience, taking the fact of persistent microcommunities proliferating always forever, into account. So the "problem" (and I put that in quotes on purpose) isn't that megathreads exist. It's that there is another mode of conversation on the forums that also deserves to exist, and that's shorter-term, more focused, time-contingent, and less popular threads... but due to how the forums are designed, the ability of users to locate and make use of such threads is reduced by the degree to which a given subforum has active megathreads. Or to put it more clearly: the forum shows 30 threads per page. We have around 30 to 50 threads that get at least one post every day; and we have well over 100 persistent megathreads that stay out of archives and last years. Any new thread has to attract at least as much posting as the 30th most popular thread (or 24 really, because six threads on the front page are stickied) just to stay on the front page. Since most do not, the front page is very static: a subset of the same ~50 threads or so are to be found on the front page at any given time or day, for months. Because of that, few users browse TG by visiting its main page. It's far easier to add the threads you care about to your bookmarks, and then use your bookmarks page. But, the fewer users there are browsing the main page, the less likely it is that a new thread attracts enough eyeballs to get enough posting happening to keep it on the front page. That's a classic negative feedback loop. Over time, TG regulars have been conditioned to stick to their bookmarks, and that conditioned behavior actively reduces the utility and success rate of bucking the trend of 100% megathread-posting-forever and actually trying out making new threads! And, there's another factor at play, too. Most megathreads in TG are focused on a particular game or game family or sometimes game company. They typically have effortposts as the OP, containing lots of info about the topic, often heavily edited, informed by years of posts in the thread, etc. TG regulars are accustomed to this arrangement, and so they feel obliged to make a similar effort when making a new thread. There's no rule that says they need to do that, but this is how acculturation works: humans naturally emulate the cultural affectations they're familiar with and see others using, and we feel a psychological aversion to transgressing perceived norms of behavior, especially when we believe many people will be watching and will have immediate and ready opportunity to criticize. So, two "problems" with megathreads, neither of which mean "we shouldn't have megathreads" but both feed into a habituation that I as a moderator (and perhaps you as a user) would very much like to counteract. I think it would be healthier for this forum to have more to offer its users - and new users - than only the same static set of long-term megathreads. I think having a regular cycle of new and shorter-term threads fosters creativity, gets people to meet other users they wouldn't otherwise, and provides an additional attraction (e.g. a different type of content) to bring new users into TG. However, it's tough for me to simply demand that things change. I've seen what happens when a heavy hand is taken to try to affect this kind of change: if you bust up megathreads, you succeed at alienating users far more than you succeed at fostering quality content. Posting new threads cannot be forced, it has to come naturally, people have to have something to say that others find worth chatting about. Absent significant changes to the forums' UI (such as filters or tabs or buttons to hide, show, or only show, megathreads), I've heard and noted and discussed some ideas to foster more short-term posts and get more people to see them. There may be a tipping point of activity that entices enough people to step out of their bookmarks pages that new and short-term threads become sufficiently popular as to self-sustain a regular cycle of them. Or there may not be.  we'll see!
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 09:52
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Poker in the Rear has been re-opened: it can be found as a sub of Sports Argument Stadium, or by clicking this link: https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=139 Traditional Games has been the host of the PitR refugees since 2012, but now at last they can return to their proper home. It is not illegal to post about poker or other card games in TG, but, PitR is the better place for poker specifically, and for gambling/real-money games generally, including sports betting and such. I've moved the Online Poker megathread over to PitR. This was a longish project that I got started a couple or three months ago. The admins and mods were enthusiastic about reopening PitR, but wanted to make sure it was done thoughtfully and right, so there was a lot of discussion and care that went into it, including deciding what could and could not be discussed on the SA forums, who could mod/IK, figuring out gambling addiction support stuff, and so forth. It's taken some of my time and attention, and for a little while I'm volunteering to also help with moderating PitR until new mods & IKs have settled in. I don't anticipate much trouble but we'll see. I figured I'd explain because this is one of the projects I've been alluding to recently. I hope it works out!
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Jan 11, 2021 00:47
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aldantefax posted:Is the mahjong thread moving too there's a mahjong thread?
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Jan 11, 2021 01:26
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Huh. Well I gather mahjong can be played for money, I've only played casually at someone's house, but I'm happy to move the thread if folks in the thread want me to. Definitely not required to move, though.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:Can I or can I not poo poo-post about my sister and I high hustling people in bars for beer money with weird-rear end German card games by pretending to be tourists. IMO you can and should, but I will defer to the PitR mods. I can't imagine it'd be a problem though?
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Jan 11, 2021 05:13
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I get you and honestly I think that sort of story should be welcome in PitR too, but as of right now a couple hours after opening, they don't have like a general chat thread or a community yet so it might feel a little weird to just wander in and post stories? I'm not sure, I'm a pretty big advocate of  though and also I think lots of goons should just go check out the forum and see what it has to offer, even if you have no intention of
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Jan 11, 2021 07:24
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Yeah no I got ya but others are are reading and maybe they've got stories or whatever too. Also please teach us weird german card games, thanks. I'm serious about this part. e. I mean you don't have to, don't feel obliged, but it'd be cool maybe if anyone else is interested.
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Jan 11, 2021 07:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:Watten Thank you, that is fascinating. Also a post that could totally fit in PitR, should you feel like slapping it down over there somewhere. Also those games both sound absurd and fun.
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Jan 12, 2021 02:39
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Yeah any competition where skill both matters, and takes practice to acquire, is open to an expert abusing a newbie. The problem isn't the game, it's the attitude of the expert, one that is not a new thing and is a universal that extends well beyond the realm of table games. I get what Hyphz is saying: Go has a particular structure in which a novice can be in a hopeless position well before the game is over, without realizing it. By contrast: getting owned by a player of much higher skill at pickup one-on-one basketball is obvious to the player who is currently behind 8-0 and can't get a clean shot in. However, that in no way excuses an expert player's disregard for a novice player if they decide to just play out a crushing win without even talking about it. There is no worthy achievement in such a win, it doesn't improve the expert's skill, doesn't impress anyone else, and doesn't serve the novice's learning or enjoyment, nor enhance the social experience.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:19
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Jimbozig posted:Hey, just getting some opinions on a design thing. In Kazzam, there are two magical implements. (Actually there are 3, but the question is about these 2.) I'm gonna step outside the mechanics for a sec. Does one of these (make you vulnerable to melee) feed into an already-existing vulnerability that mostly wizard types already avoid? Does one of these (make your enemy you hit suck) play into the Controller aspect of a wizard, while one (do +1 point of damage) only matter at low levels and probably not at all because 'do more damage' isn't in the Wizard's role anyway, they're more about making enemies suck? These are all (bad) D&D tropes so I'm maybe way off base here, but I think it's more important than how big the piece of wood might be, or even what feels more like wandy vs. staffy. If I'm making a ranged attacker I'm already gonna be vulnerable to melee and doing tons of stuff to avoid being standing next to enemies, so the drawback doesn't matter to me most of the time; if I'm making a controller, I don't care about +1 damage I wanna make the enemies suck or more vulnerable to my allies or maybe shove them into the campfire. Coming back to your actual question, if you must assign one set of bonuses/penalties to a flavor of implement, can you lever off of setting elements that aren't the same old tropes? In other words, in your Kazzam setting (is that a setting?) maybe some wizards cast spells via handheld mummified small animals with gems for eyes, and other wizards focus their powers through magic rocks that they have to juggle, while a third set of wizards zap baddies via fragile origami crafts. Or something. This is personal but I'm sick to death of wizard staffs and even more sick to death of wands. If your game is supposed to be setting-agnostic then it's a toughy because probably most settings that players try to use for this will be using the cliche'd implements too.
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Jan 15, 2021 02:26
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Jimbozig I'll just add that, are the adults at wizard school really giving kids swords to use in their wizard sports? Like sharpened ones? If someone had given us swords when I was in 7th grade, a kid would definitely have died within a week. Maybe they're like, kendo practice bamboo swords? Actually hey, maybe they use like boffer LARP versions for the sport. OK we're teaching you Proper Wand Safety in class, under tight supervision, but out in the sports arena, you get like a foam wand that makes a cartoon ZAP that knocks into your enemy kid and they get a giant -8 HP in Comic Sans floating above their head for five seconds? Sorry, you're designing a game and you're way more experienced at that than I am, so I'll shut up with my idiot ideas now. Teen wizard interscholastic sports drama game sounds dope.
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Jan 15, 2021 08:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:Given the genre thing it's riffing off, I imagine 'wait isn't this sport incredibly, incredibly unsafe' is more of a positive than a negative. that's probably why I've never gotten on board the harry potter train, from day one I'm like "why aren't all these adults in jail by now"
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Jan 15, 2021 08:38
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Very much same. is a good mantra. Some stuff will have legs, some won't, but that's the nature of the beast. I don't want to overpopulate the top of the forum with too many stickied threads, but something like "a thread to index and highlight other threads" could be stickied as long as it's well maintained. Perhaps the chat thread could be re-named to be more explicitly inclusive of the idea of "here is also where to ask quick questions and get quick answers?" Trad Games Chat and Q&A: 2021 Anno DMG would fit.
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Jan 20, 2021 20:19
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Xerophyte posted:Well, first it was the background setting for a 3 faction PVP MMO that died in development because the publisher realized competitive MMOs were a dying genre before investing too much. Then the setting got used in a home game, which was turned into a multimedia franchise. Based on watching like two episodes, it also feels very much like it's borrowed heavily from the ~1980s novels CJ Cherryh wrote set in Alliance/Union, specifically Heavy Time and its sequel, Hellburner, which are in the earliest time period of that setting and use as background the tension between the belt miners, independent Mars, Earth, and the increasingly independent (but shouldn't be) navy. aldantefax posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3956452  Are you gonna like, do the shitwork of maintaining an index in there, or am I signing up for that?
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Jan 22, 2021 01:35
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The Traveling CCircus thread has come to Trad Games! This is a thread for sharing your creative output with other goons from across the wide forums. Do browse it to see some of the cool poo poo people have made and done, and then please also feel free to post a sample of your (TG or non-TG related) creative stuff there! I would definitely like to see stuff related to: RPGs, minis & painting, character artwork, and so on.
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Jan 22, 2021 03:01
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aldantefax posted:I am happy to maintain some stuff on a weekly or monthly basis since I'm one of the sick freaks that actually looks at threads aside from my bookmarks list from time to time. Sweet. I mean I can do it because I have the POWER to EDIT OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTS but that is kinda rude and the Radium System does not actually preserve previous versions so it's impossible to recover what was overwritten etc. etc. so yeah if you feel up to it you can periodically maintain the first post, and if you run out of steam I can take over, or we can replace it, or whatever. I'll go ahead and sticky that now.
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Jan 22, 2021 03:13
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Xiahou Dun posted:Much closer to mongooses and the like, but we're quibbling at this point. the funny part is it took you two days to notice 
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Jan 25, 2021 07:07
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One of the very early Palladium properties was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. The After the Bomb supplement provided an avenue into, basically, animal-people-with-laser-guns and that was clearly incorporated straight into RIFTS from the get-go.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:07
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I lived in England for 3 years and have been back twice since. The food there is fine. There are plenty of excellent, traditional British dishes. The reputation for tasteless boiled meats and mash is weird and undeserved. They are especially solid on their pie game. Pie crust makes everything better. They have good seafood, some excellent beef dishes (beef wellington, for example), very good sausages, a wide array of amazing desserts, and of course, they invented pub food. Do they have junk food? Of course they do, everyone does. But I defy you to point to a better tasting junk food than a piping hot battered fried fish sided with fat fluffy crispy chips, drizzled with malt vinegar and lightly dusted with salt, served in a wad of (uninked, please) newspaper and wolfed down steaming in the cool night air along with your fifth pint of beer.
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Jan 27, 2021 20:23
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Yawgmoth posted:Poutine. On par IMO but not "better." I've had about four or five Poutines via my three visits to Montreal, all curated by genuine local canadians, ranging from the basic timmy's through to fancy restaurant poutine. And they're drat good, don't get me wrong. But scarfing down scaldingly hot fish & chips in the drizzle outside a chippy in Caernaerfon where the folks behind the counter are yammering away in welsh is a life-altering experience that cannot be beat. 90s Cringe Rock posted:fried halloumi fried cheese is alright but I can't eat all that much of it, it's just too much concentrated grease chips & ketchup on sliced white bread is one of those "bad british food" things people were just complaining about, come on hyphz posted:*Points to Greggs' Sausage Rolls* Sausage rolls in general are a thing yep and I've had some drat good ones yep but greggs? Ehhhh.
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Jan 27, 2021 21:45
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Heya folks: We have added SA user LifeLynx to the trad games IK team! LifeLynx will be IK for the main Magic the Gathering thread. You may also have noticed that Reene's name has dropped off of the mod list for the subforum. This is simply a reflection of her extended absence; there is absolutely no animosity intended, it's just that sometimes folks might send her a PM for TG business and get no response and that's not great, so jeffrey decided to do a little adjustment to avoid that source of confusion.
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Jan 28, 2021 01:11
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aldantefax posted:I think I basically want this but turned into a fully featured game: I would describe this trailer as "cowboy romancing the stone kung fu hustle" and, yes, that seems good. Xiahou Dun posted:Huh. I have no horse in this fight and just my own half-assed memory, but I thought Robert E. Howard was supposed to be relatively not-racist considering his time and up-bringing (which, you know 1920's Texas so still racist as balls), but that's mostly just from the vaguest of vague recollections and him being one of the few pulp authors I read that wrote non-white male characters as actually people adjacent. Howard was racist, no doubt. He lived in booming texan oil towns and was writing in the 1930s and he was submitting content to pulp magazines with a particular audience. His influences were guys like Burroughs, you know, loving tarzan. But he evolved; if you read all the conan stories, they range from "white man naturally the leader of ignorant black savages" all the way to "conan's good buddy is a black dude who is pretty much just as competent and he pals around with the guy." Lovecraft, on the other hand, was so racist that other people in his racist times thought he was really fuckin' racist. Like, shockingly. I won't pretend to understand the hows and whys of it all. Their differing viewpoints come out in their philosophies of writing, too. Howard seems to have believed that civilization was a temporary and inherently corrupt edifice, teetering over a yawning chasm of natural savagery that was probably mankind's future as well as his past. If you have a viewpoint like that, it's hard to believe in an inherent superiority of white people. Lovecraft, on the other hand, felt that immigrants and miscegenation were the greatest threats to superior white humanity, and the metaphors he used to express that were of nightmarish outsider creatures and pagan blasphemy being inherently corruptive, forces that had to be held back because any attempt to engage with them brought inevitable ruin. Later in life Lovecraft did call himself a fool for some of what he'd believed and written when he was younger: but my read of it is that he is definitely not chagrined by his racism, but rather by a foolish certainty he recognized in his younger self. I don't see much evidence that he actually changed his mind at all about white superiority. My own relationship to both of these authors is complex. I think they both produced, at times, work that rises to the level of literature. I find enjoyment and value in their respective capacities for evocative phrasing and description, weird fantastical journeys and mind-expanding vistas. Of the two, I greatly prefer Howard, but I still have a couple Lovecraft stories on my shelf, such as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I do not believe that owning or reading these works makes me racist, particularly if I'm acutely aware of the racism in the work. It's also far too late for me to be financially rewarding either man for their efforts, both of them being long-dead. I do believe that the authors of modern works, such as RPGs, which draw upon or are based directly on these long-dead racist men's writings, have a responsibility to explicitly recognize and discuss the racism in the source material, and create safe games that do not encourage or expose players and readers to offensive material and harmful situations. I'm putting together a Modiphius 2d20 Conan game right now, reading some of the setting material for Not-Africa regions of the game world, and kind of watching the authors make their efforts to do exactly that, imperfectly but at least satisfactorily in my view. Outside of establish that sort of requirement, I think it can be interesting and productive to compare and contrast these two contemporaries (and their racism), but I hope nobody feels upset by those discussions and of course differing opinions about exactly how racist either men were, and to what degree if any either or both of them softened on their views, are worthwhile and valid. We cannot, ultimately, know what was in their hearts, so it's all just piecing together scant evidence, reading between lines, and educated guesswork.
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Jan 30, 2021 08:48
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IMO a spinner is dice, so just make a spinner with 110 perfectly equal segments. If you don't want to have fights about whether the pointer is pointing at a line, fabricate a clicker-style spinwheel with pegs that force the pointer to always be unequivocally on a value. Then, program a random number generator to spin the spinner, to remove the human cheating element, and you're all set! e. alternatively, get 110 unique cards (you probably have enough board games in your closet to do this right now), sleeve them, and make a chart that maps cards to numeric values. Shuffle up and deal!
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Feb 3, 2021 06:24
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aldantefax posted:Anybody playing any games recently? I'm quietly gearing up to run a PbP conan game with four other mods, lol. I've never even played this system and I foolishly said "just make dudes with the char generator with all options turned on" so of course they've pulled character abilities from like five other supplements that I then needed to track down and read about, and of course one player on a whim decided to engage with the game's most complicated subsystem (sorcery), but y'know gently caress it we're all into the deep end and it seems like the kinda group that can cheerfully cope with the chaos. The PbP bit helps a ton. You can take 20m to look up a rule between every post without slowing down the game at all. There's no chance I could just wing this in a live game. It's not that the system is especially complex, it's more that there's a pretty large amount of lore, and action is supposed to be fast-paced and skipping over the downtime stuff for the most part, so you don't get tons of slow scenes while the PCs are, say, spending three sessions bumbling their way through a dungeon searching every 10' corridor in which to thumb through the bestiary or whatever. In a single 3-4hr session you'd want to be ready to run like four action scenes and four noncombat scenes? I guess?
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Feb 4, 2021 21:46
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aldantefax posted:Is there an "Enough talk!" clause in the Conan game which allows you cut to the point and whoever throws a knife at a cultist first gets the game moving again? If not, missed opportunity imo It sure as heck does! The rules say the GM should start tossing Doom tokens into the Doom pool if the PCs are hemming and hawing too long about what they're gonna do. And Doom tokens directly translate into poo poo like free actions & interrupts by enemies, fresh reinforcements, and other twists of fate that go against the PCs.
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Feb 4, 2021 22:29
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