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Kavak posted:Why is this a thing? Is there something in British culture that creates a stumbling block for accepting trans people? Three parts of the answer: 1: Having definitively lost the "can we be homophobic and still accepted in polite society?" issue in 2013 in 2015, lead by the Murdoch tabloids (oddly enough The Times more than the Sun) the British press in general decided that trans women were this decade's scapegoat of choice. 2: Britain handled the AIDS crisis overwhelmingly better than America (partly because healthcare in general, partly because the Tory public health minister in the 80s was horrified enough that he thought doing things about the AIDS crisis would be worthwhile if it cost him his career. It did, it was, and he'd make the same choice again.) The lack of that viciousness, the fact our police have issues but at least have ideals and know what good policing actually looks like, and the viciousness from the Southern Baptist Convention means the LGBT community in Britain is a whole lot less "We must all hang together because they are trying to literally hang us separately" than the American one. 3: Britain doesn't have that big a long-standing non-white community - at least not compared to the United States; the 1991 Census showed 94.1% of the British population to be white. And most of Britain's major racism was done overseas. What this means is that there were too few people telling the 1970s-1990s feminists "Yes, women were and are discriminated against, but that's not the only reason people are discriminated against and it's ridiculous to say the white woman sipping mint julep is more discriminated against than the field full of literal slaves she was watching." Which means intersectional feminism is less of a thing over here and a higher proportion of high profile British feminists were RadFems back in the day and are TERFs today. That said, for all I'm talking about TERFs because a lot of high profile transphobes are TERFs a plurality of women in the UK are (at least according to polling) trans-accepting if not trans-friendly, while a plurality of men aren't.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:06
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Haystack posted:An interesting, potentially less problematic population to look towards as a reference for a mercantile population is the Jains of India. Their religious strictures all but forbid them from engage in violence, and they've generally drifted towards taking roles in the mercantile and academic layers of Indian culture. And the British Quakers had a similar relationship to both banking and chocolate making and confectionary for a range of reasons, many of which are related.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:41
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KingKalamari posted:TL:DR - I just want to play a low magic game where a lizard person, a giant spider an orc and a robot delve into dungeons, why aren't more people catering to that? Mostly serious questions here: 1: What's a dungeon in a low magic game? Almost all dungeons are very artificial environments that rely on magic. 2: What's a playable giant spider in a low magic game? And how does it talk or avoid the consequences of the square-cube rule without magic. And you may have answers to those questions - but other people may not have the same answers. For example I'd break out Gamma World 4e - but that might not be what you want at all (especially not if you want grit). And because it's confusing it's a narrow niche
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May 2, 2021 02:01
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KingKalamari posted:I think for me my active definition of "low magic game" is generally "magic is not as universally powerful as in your typical D&Ds". It's much less a matter of being opposed to magic being present in the setting (I'm actually pretty in favor of some form of magic showing up) or the player options and more wanting a system where magic is scaled back to the point where it doesn't dominate player abilities in the latter half of the game. I've long said that a major part of the problem with D&D's worldbuilding is (with the exception of a few artifacts) making everything interesting be a spell. This reached its utter nadir with 3.X where we had the concept of a "spell like ability" getting things precisely backwards by implying that the spell came first. D&D 4e was actually pretty good with what I think you want from a ruleset, and Gamma World 4e is better. Also with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything 5e has made huge steps in the right direction, from the second partial caster becoming actually good (Ranger) and the addition of a third (Artificer) to there being two subclasses for each of the fighter and rogue that have magical abilities without them being spells. If you're looking for something D&Dish that isnt so overwhelmed by spells you could do a whole lot worse than 5e banning the wizard, sorcerer, bard, cleric, and druid, and possibly also the warlock. Premade worlds are harder to find however. Whybird posted:In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about race (and gender and sexuality) come from the Victorians. The medieval period wasn't great of course -- they had their prejudices just like anyone else -- but pretending that it was a neverending tide of bigotry and hatred is primarily an excuse used by people who want to justify their own bigotry and hatred. In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about what the Victorians thought are much more modern and it has always benefited both conservatives and young transgressive radicals to pretend that the past was a whole lot more conservative than it was.
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May 2, 2021 15:02
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KingKalamari posted:Though in general I think anyone from a pre-1950s period would probably seem pretty stinky to our modern sensibilities as they wouldn't have had widespread access to things like deodorant or running water for pre-20th century people. Very few people actually stink. What stinks is normally our clothes with the stale sweat or worse soaking into them. And this means that people without changes of clothes are likely to stink whether or not they are dirty. Also even relatively rich people from the 50s frequently would seem stinky by today's standards as far fewer of us smoke and those that do smoke a lot less, and our noses aren't used to things like pea souper fogs.
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Jun 6, 2021 00:38
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Jimbozig posted:Hey, so I have a question. If I'm making a sort of template that can be applied to an enemy statblock to modify that enemy, which is better? Why not both? If I am a GM using a monster statblock in play I don't want to have to do any more calculations than the bare minimum. Indeed I consider statblocks where I have to look things up or to do more than basic tracking to be incomplete and to be a sign of a designer who doesn't care that much about play experience. So all the example monsters should have everything calculated. But between sessions if I'm using a template to modify a statblock I can use simple formulae and they show me how things fit together; I have the time without five (or whatever) players having to wait for me and I'm only focusing on one character at a time not two entire forces. And if I'm using a template on the fly in play that's on me and I've already crossed the no lookups/modifications in play barrier and I know what level they are. The modifying template can therefore show some tweaks that way, but the examples of templated monsters should not.
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Jun 13, 2021 19:10
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100YrsofAttitude posted:So, I've been looking at some stuff. Cyberpunk and tech futures seem ok. I like the idea of sailing, primarily on the ocean, then sky, then space in that order. I flipped through some D&D 5e stuff last night and only saw information for Fighter, Rogues, Wizards, and Clerics. In terms of character diversity 5e is far the most efficient D&D ever created. Not the most diversity but the best balance of high diversity for low required system mastery. What you've been looking at is the starter box, which is smaller even than the SRD The PHB contains, I think 11 classes (fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard, barbarian, monk, paladin, Ranger, warlock, druid, sorcerer) and there's one more official one (artificer). And basically only two player facing supplements total; Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything Each class however has a strong subclass that they pick somewhere between level 1 and level 3. For a monk, for example, the PHB contains the Way of the Open Hand (martial artist), the Way of Shadow (ninja), and the Way of Four Elements (Avatar inspired and one of the two actually bad subclasses in the PHB). The mechanics can be very different and lead to different feeling characters; the fighter's three are the Champion (simple static bonuses), the Battlemaster (which gets a pool of dice that refresh on a short rest and can be used for predefined tricks, and the Eldritch Knight, who gets half-caster progression as a wizard. The PHB Ranger is the only class I'd consider an actual dud - and to fix it they gave it alternate class features in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Including reworking the Beast master subclass so having a companion felt more like having an assistant and less like having to do an escort mission. There are also a number of other classes with pet options or subclasses; from memory at least warlocks, druids, and artificers have them although I think the Ranger (ith Tasha’s rework) will suit you best.
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Jul 12, 2021 22:57
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100YrsofAttitude posted:From what I've read of 5e, Monk is definitely the way I'd want to go and I'm torn between Open Hand and Shadow, to the point I'm creating a familial dynasty involving them and possibly a ranger. It depends what you want. The open hand gets riders when they use ki for flurry of blows to make more attacks, the shadow has ways to spend their ki on stealth and dark vision for out of combat power and they get to shadow teleport. Outside the PHB the ones I'd point out are the Way of the Drunken Master which is exactly what it sounds like and bounces through the middle of a combat, and the Way of the Astral Self which is part of the writers of Tasha’s throwing up their hands about psionics in D&D and that no one had clear visions as to what psionics even were and spreading them round various classes with a subclass each for monk, fighter, bard, rogue, and sorcerer; in the monk's case it's a telekinetic who hits you with their mind.
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Jul 12, 2021 23:35
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moths posted:Oh cool, so they've actually distanced themselves from 5e and told everyone why then? Come back here with those goalposts. They play 5e - and other games including Honey Heist and Monsterhearts. And WotC might not be great but they are hardly worst in an industry containing e.g. Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Or if you mean the worst players in the industry were Wendy's (who have done far worse than WotC or even White Wolf's International Incident) then yes Critical Role did distance themselves, acknowledged they'd screwed up, removed the stream, and donated the money to charity. Are they perfect? No. But the sheer amount of goalpost moving, barrel scraping, and nonsense, not to mention slanderous lies (in a previous dose of criticism on this site photoshop was used to "prove" brownface) is ridiculous.
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Jul 13, 2021 22:52
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moths posted:They could be doing a lot of good, but they're running infomercials for WotC. Maybe they splash attention on other games, but how successful is that when this is literally the first place I'm learning about it? If you, as a non-watcher of Critical Role have found out about it at all then I'd say very successful. I don't watch it either - but learned about and first played Honey Heist from a Critter thanks to CR. Could they be better? Yes. But aww shucks. I guess when called on arguing with a strawman I guess you're just a poster on a comedy forum.
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Jul 13, 2021 22:59
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Leperflesh posted:Thread search is such a great tool! That wasn't it. That's the actual blackface incident by one cast member from 2010. The manipulated image was something else
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Jul 13, 2021 23:24
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moths posted:You love saying that, but don't seem to know what it means beyond "I win the internet discussion right?" But your initial objection was the false claim that they never promote anything else. You've moved it from not promoting other systems to not treating them as completely equal to D&D. And the thing is Honey Heist and Crash Pandas aren't the equal of D&D - they are one shot games which were used as one shots and promoted as one shots. They aren't suitable for 100 session campaigns. And even Monsterhearts works on short campaigns. Your issue is as ridiculous as if a cooking show were to have a couple of episodes of wine tasting - but somehow that wouldn't be promoting the vineyards because they didn't replace every meal on every show going forward with wine
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Jul 13, 2021 23:37
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Whybird posted:I think I may have posted this elsewhere, but to me the defining feature of Westerns isn't that a land is being colonised but that a land is rough and unsettled, and law comes from the barrel of a gun. Maybe the answer is to have that breakdown of law and order come from some other source instead. There's a reason why post-apocalypse games often feel Wild-West-y, after all. I'm getting an early Arthuriana vibe from this part. The Roman Empire has collapsed, telling the provinces to look to their defences. Vortigern has invited the Saxons over to settle as mercenaries... which hasn't stopped the raids. And now some nobody has ended up with a sword, which is no basis for a system of elective government. quote:I feel the blow is softened here if there's a really good reason why the land is truly empty. Genuine Terra Nulla has been rare for good reason, but the Falkland Islands qualified. And Antarctica arguably still does. It's just hard to have NPCs in Antarctica
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Jul 21, 2021 07:46
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canepazzo posted:I'm guessing Fate also works for low-prep, high-improv? Coincidentally, there's a current Bundle of Holding offer with most/all of its rules and *worlds. Fate is a relatively rules light relatively freeform game where the dice resolution mechanic is ultimately pass/fail. It's better for freeform than D&D but ultimately you prepare sessions the same way (if faster) and you can tell going into a scene the likely ways out. It being so rules light means that if you've a clear vision you can do all the mechanical prep you'd need at the table without ever having to slow down (oddly enough you can also do this in D&D 4e). In Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, and related games the dice resolution mechanic is one where success-with-consequences is the most likely outcome overall. This means that every action is likely to go at least slightly sideways and scenes will end up going in directions no one expected. NPCs have minimal stats because they don't need them (and the GM never picks up a dice). Scenes therefore have a richness because so many details are brought in and you seldom know how a scene is going to end when you start one.
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Aug 2, 2021 13:23
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Halloween Jack posted:Now that I think about it, I believe Fate was one of those games that was released during the Dark Age of D20 and got a lot of credit for being refreshingly simple in comparison to D20. This definitely applies to Spirit of the Century and the original Dresden Files.
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Aug 6, 2021 00:06
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No one's suggested either Urban Shadows or Dresden Files Accelerated? (The Fate Core rather than Spirit of the Century era Dresden Files Fate game).
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Aug 6, 2021 19:17
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100 degrees Calcium posted:I have been looking these games up and they all sound amazing. I had no idea so many interesting things were happening in the RPG space. From the outside it looks like D&D rules the world with Pathfinder nipping at its heels but I have a feeling the truth is there's a lot more going on than that. I'd absolutely recommend Blades in the Dark here. Also Apocalypse World as it runs to short campaigns. Also Fiasco for one-shots. Pathfinder's basically been on a downward spiral since 5e launched and Pathfinder 2e appears to have gone almost nowhere. There's been a lot bubbling up over the past decade, but 5e is an absolute monster and 2019 was the most successful year in D&D history - and then 2020 improved on it by about a third.
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Aug 13, 2021 00:22
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pog boyfriend posted:the dnd game genre(which should have a name that isnt tied to dnd) is just very widely appealing to a lot of people, regardless of what edition it is. dnd has the advantage over every game of its genre in being widely more popular and with far more resources available for it It also has the second advantage in that it has cross-pollinated the CRPG genre and computer games in general both itself and from direct descendents so many times from Colossal Cave Adventure and Rogue onwards that you don't even have to have heard of D&D to understand what you are supposed to do.
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Aug 13, 2021 17:43
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90s Cringe Rock posted:They do this all the time in slightly more specific forums, like sf or fantasy books. What does Terry Pratchett count as?
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Aug 14, 2021 23:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Wow, thank you for posting this. It really sums up everything I find problematic in D&D game design. Paring it down to the essentials: I can't agree here at all. The puzzle piece you're missing is that in 2021 everyone is familiar with D&D tropes, even people who have never even heard of D&D. This is because D&D underlies such a large part of computer gaming that tropes that should have been D&D specific have escaped into the wider world. Everyone knows what hit points, character classes, and levels are, including classes like the paladin that are fundamentally weird. Nonsense like item weights that generally get ignored work ... because so many computer games have nonsense like item weight and tables of mundane equipment that generally get ignored. Because they got it from D&D. Possibly they got it in in the mid-late 70s with Colossal Cave Adventure as an attempt to move a D&D campaign onto computer because they couldn't organise a group and MUDding (and two separate games, one called dnd and another called DND), possibly in the early 80s with Zork, Ultima, and Wizardry all leaning heavily on D&D and existing computer games to found the Western RPG genre, possibly in the mid-late 80s with Final Fantasy having its combat system explicitly inspired by D&D and Dragon Quest having a lot of D&D in its inspiration to the point they were deliberately looking at D&D and doing other things. Possibly they got it in the mid 90s when the first two games of the Elder Scrolls were a translation of a D&D setting and Warcraft was ripping off Warhammer (only one step from D&D). Possibly in the late 90s/early 00s when Bioware were making Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Knights, and even KOTOR was using the d20 rules. And that's just scratching the surface. D&D's cross-pollination of computer RPGs is outright incestuous. Regardless of how you come by it shared cultural context does amazing things for accessibility. And 5e, with cultural context to do the heavy lifting does do some things pretty well. For all I think that the combat sucks thanks to the bullet sponge enemies and the DMing tools are at least 20 years behind the times it does some things right. In particular the character creation with classes and subclasses produces strongly drawn and accessible characters, while leaving alignment where it belongs as something almost vestigial.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:51
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Xiahou Dun posted:1) If alignment is vestigial, why should it be kept around? I said almost vestigial. It has a few purposes. First there's the meme value. Second there's grognard appeal meaning they weren't going to get rid of it. Third some obvious, crude characterisation. Fourth there's a handful of effects that interact with alignment; the Paladin's auto-detect-evil is annoying and silly, but major magical artifacts like the Book of Vile Darkness or a Talisman of Pure Good? Sure. (The Great Wheel? No thanks - but the 5e Realms cosmology owes more to 4e than 2e anyway; it's basically the World Axis in the middle with the Wheel being the most distant parts and replacing the Astral Sea). Is nine point alignment something I'd create from scratch? No. But it's been beaten back into its corner and once put in its place is far more useful and comprehensible than e.g. Werewolf the Apocalypse's Galiard/Ragabash/Philodox/Arhoun/Theurge (I think that's the set) that are basically nonsense words. With almost no mechanics except when things get weird and only two easily understood words it has very little overhead, especially when in a post-Tasha's world it's vanished from monster statblocks. quote:2) I can kind of guess that "accessible" here means something like, "easy to fit inside a given mental framework". Is that what you were going for? Like the name/description of the class make you think of some kind of cultural touchstone, e.g. "fighter" and Conan or "paladin" and Roland? I vehemently disagree if that's the case but we'd at least be using the same term to mean the same thing. Pretty much - but Conan and Roland are both pretty obscure. If I were looking for modern mythology I wouldn't be looking at stories published almost 90 years ago let alone about 900 years ago. Instead I'd be looking at things from this century. Our strongest cultural touchstones are things that have made it to pop culture, starting with the MCU and video game tropes. And as I spent quite a lot of words demonstrating video game tropes are frequently to the point of incestuously derived from D&D. It's 'Fighter' and WoW Fighter and Cloud Strife and Captain America and possibly Gimli these days. And like it or not fighter works because WoW fighter and because FFXIV Warrior and because Dragon Age Warrior. Of course those classes are all traceable back to the D&D fighter (with the original Final Fantasy Warrior being called the Fighter in the NES version) quote:3) I have no idea what "strongly drawn" would mean on any level. Could you elaborate? One of the things character classes do is provide much of the high concept for a given character fast and easily. You can tell quite a lot about a character from just the class names of the 11+1 5e classes with the biggest questions being "how are sorcerers and wizards different?" and "why isn't barbarian a subclass of fighter"*, but those take only seconds to explain and the mechanics back up the distinctiveness. You never have to ask the question "Wtf is an ardent?" or "How is an avenger different from a paladin?" (I'm picking on 4e because it's a much harder target than 3.X or 2e here). The individual classes are in this sense strongly drawn in that they communicate what a character does and are distinct from each other. The subclasses are almost as strongly drawn; it's relatively obvious how the mastermind rogue should differ from the swashbuckler rogue, the thief rogue, or the soulknife rogue (even if the soulknife needs a touch of explaining and is a callback to one of the worst classes ever). * The 3.0 barbarian was IMO a mistake and one of the many things dragging 3.0 fighters down; there was no reason at all it shouldn't have been feats for the fighter. By contrast, the 5e barbarian, after passing through the hands of 4e, allows for supernatural and mostly primal rages and opens the game up to things like the Path of the Storm Herald that would make for an awkward fighter.
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Aug 17, 2021 18:22
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If I see love of it from anyone these days it's primarily 3.X and Pathfinder fans.
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Aug 18, 2021 01:02
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moths posted:If you liked 5e's ideas and potential, try checking out 2e where they came from. This isn't a snarky shitpost - the best 5e lore is legit just watered down 2e content. Did you mean to write "try checking out 4e where they came from"? The best 5e lore is legit just watered down 4e content. Meanwhile e.g. 2e brings us things like the Great Wheel with an Afterlife For Every Half-Alignment while the good parts of the cosmological lore that are places that you can visit and aren't tied to the alignment (Feywild/Shadowfell/Elemental Chaos) are straight from 4e.
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Aug 18, 2021 09:36
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:I like the great wheel. I like how it felt interconnected and vast YMMV. For me it felt like nothing more than a box-ticking exercise that destroyed the mystical nature and variation I'd expect in there being different afterlives and narrowed things down both by the planes being "infinite" (and thus ultimately pretty homogenous) and by being complete rather than having the potential of new realms to explore.
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Aug 18, 2021 13:41
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SkyeAuroline posted:Done some self-reflection on RPGs and the issues I've been having with playing them, think I've managed to narrow it down some. I'm pretty reactive, rather than proactive, by nature. This works okay-to-well for GMing, where I've been mildly successful by repurposing prewritten material and reacting to players' actions. This sometimes works as a player, if I'm something very basic like "be the street samurai in this shadowrun party" where the solution to problems is straightforward and established in advance. This doesn't work as well with anything more complex than "go fight mans"; I've had to drop from two campaigns (Cyberpunk RED as a Media, Hard Wired Island as a Thief) from complete paralysis on "what do I even do as a character", and struggled with my other games-as-player before it. Solo endeavors have mostly met similar fates. It's not something "just get in the character's head" can easily solve, either - I can't get into characters' headspaces, at all. They don't exist as an entity in my mind, more than levers to interact with the game world, and I don't know how to make them exist in any more useful format to guide play. It sounds as if you aren't answering the actor's classic question "What's my motivation?" It doesn't matter whether it's the enforced oD&D/1e motivation of wanting gold (which is partly why it being worthless in 5e is such a travesty) or you "want to be the very best like no one ever was", or your motivation is religious or revenge, or you've something behind you driving you. The proactive characters that aren't instigators for the lulz are mostly slightly broken people with high ambitions who want to carry out some sort of grand ambition rather than staying safe in a decently paying job or down the pub with their friends. In adventure paths the bad guys normally come to you, and the strategic proactivity options are much more limited.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:13
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KingKalamari posted:Kender are really a case study in why basing an entire fictional species off the characteristics of a single person is generally a poor idea. I'm sure the guy who played Tasslehoff Burrfoot was a real hoot at the gaming table, but "Comically naïve kleptomaniacs with no sense of personal property or self preservation" just doesn't make any goddamned sense when applied to an entire species. Warhammer Fantasy handles this pretty well as something that can work but isn't too far away. Halflings are raised as a village rather than as nuclear families, which means most halflings have 28 brothers or sisters and as many again aunts and uncles. And while personal property is a thing, borrowing another halfling's stuff is like borrowing your sibling's toys or clothes (and if your own goes missing it's a question as to which of your siblings to hunt down). They also do have self preservation instincts - but also get on really well with ogres for lore reasons and are pretty resistant to Chaos. Of course they are also (like everything in Warhammer) dangerous and not that naive.
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Sep 14, 2021 03:05
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Arivia posted:I don’t understand this sentiment. Rolling basic attacks is a failure? What? Do you object to people rolling “basic” moves in a PbtA game? What about a basic attempt to open a door? Is it only good if you get to use some special ability in place of a “basic” attack - and does that apply if it’s an at-will power in 4e D&D or a cantrip in 3e or 5e? Yes, rolling basic attacks is a failure. It takes up time without making a meaningful choice other than to keep the combat going and you're all going to make a lot of them in every session. All you do is decide who to attack - and then roll (multiple stages) to find out what happened. The amount either of roleplaying or tactical depth added to the game for the sheer time spent rolling basic attacks to whittle away at an enemy health pool is negligible; all you are doing is filling time. To put them into context:
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Sep 25, 2021 00:55
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hyphz posted:Does anyone know anything definite about Morrus’ attempt to upgrade 5e? There's a reason it's called Level Up. It's targeted at people who've played a lot of 5e, think 5e is an excellent game, and have mastered the mechanics to the point they wish there was more out there. Or who accept that 3.X was flawed with linear fighter quadratic wizard but want something with more complexity than 5e. If all you like is 5e and possibly 3.X I can see the appeal - and it's certainly decent whalebait.
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Oct 25, 2021 14:11
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Leperflesh posted:Replace class levels with XP spendable on class features, and you just got Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. You start with one of dozens of base You've got half of WFRP there. The other thing you need is a limited hp pool (rather than one that scales ridiculously) but when you run out of hp instead of dropping you start taking serious wounds with every hit you take. Wounds that are actually debilitating and take time to heal if they do at all (no healing from an amputation for example). So PCs accumulate wounds and scars over time as well as power, and you can win a fight but really wish you hadn't. The other part you need is the 2e/4e magic system (1e used a basic spell point system) where every spell has an element of risk; you roll a number of dice and on a double a mishap happens (and on a triple a bad mishap happens and you hope to never see a quadruple). You're literally risking summoning a demon when you cast a spell. As for how it plays, it has traditional problems of clunkiness, especially as you roll to attack and then the person being attacked rolls to parry, and one of the percentages (the skill system is percentile) being too low with designers who didn't realise how compound math works. There's a notorious review by Ryan Dancey praising WFRP for having a design ethos influenced by D&D 3.X although a bit simpler - and all of his examples were things WFRP 1e had done in about 1985.
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Dec 11, 2021 04:10
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Kestral posted:Yeah, "PPP has is perfectly optimal" has always been a thing that floats around in BW discussion circles, so often in fact that it got pagecount devoted to debunking it in later supplements. I bounced off Burning Wheel myself but I've seen the effect in other systems where all out attack is the least risky strategy simply because, although you might take more damage per round because you neglect your defence the fact that you take your opponent out faster means that they have fewer opportunities to harm you and therefore you on average take less overall damage. @jimbozig is that what you are saying?
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Feb 11, 2022 05:00
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Arivia posted:2e AD&D, the one and only edition designed for theater of the mind (supplements like Combat and Tactics added grid combat mechanics though). I'm trying to work out whether this was deliberate satire or just a very wrong take. 2e decided to keep almost all the baked in minatures rules from 1e right down to the appropriate measure of a fireball not actually being a radius spread but "approximately 33,000 cubic feet". AD&D 2e wasn't designed for theatre of the mind - it was designed for map and tape measure, the rules were almost unchanged - but it was suggested you ignore parts of the rules.
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Mar 9, 2022 19:47
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Arivia posted:Huh? 2e systematically tosses out all the miniatures measurements (like the literal tape measurements in inches) for feet, yards and other Imperial theater of the mind measurements. All of which does nothing to prevent there being hard distances in the system. 3.X uses the 1 square = 5 ft scale. And unlike 2e it doesn't make you try and work out the volumes of what is going on. These two things make 3.X quite simply a better theatre of the mind system than the one that uses imperial measurements (as both 3.X measurements also do) but that also wants you to work out literal volumes of spells (fireball) or that you can reflect off walls to line up bank shots (lightning bolt). quote:It's not a great theater of the mind system, sure, but 2e is pretty clearly saying that the basic rules don't need miniatures or a grid, And then it makes you make decisions that require exact details on a map. As a theatre of the mind system 2e doesn't even come close to 5e (and I wouldn't call that a good theatre of the mind system). With things like volumetric fireballs and bouncing lightning bolts I'd question whether 2e is even better than 3.0 or 3.5 quote:e2: in contrast, flipping through the 1e books has voluminous sections about measuring with tape, using miniatures, different scales, and mechanics such as size, flanking and facing are explicitly defined as using miniatures to determine scale and positioning. But without actually changing the rules this doesn't make 2e actually better for theatre of the mind than 1e. It just means that it can't tell the difference between theatre of the mind and half-arsing. Even 5e's theatre of the mind doesn't have the 2e nonsense that was left over from 1e.
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Mar 10, 2022 01:26
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, part of it is... when does the exact volumetric blast zone of a fireball matter? Like the main point of it is that if you toss it into a melee, it will also fry your own dudes, not just the enemy dudes. I don't think fireballs having a stated blast radius is necessarily the sick slam dunk against ToTM 2e that you feel it is. The thing is that fireballs don't have a stated blast radius. They have a stated blast volume (in cubic feet, no less) and the radius matters only in so far as it determines the volume. In 2e if you airburst a fireball it has a 20ft radius but if you drop it on the ground its radius is multiplied by the cube root of 2 for about 25ft because the fire can't go down and therefore needs to expand the top half of the sphere. Throw it in a corner and its radius is a whole lot larger again - and bad things happen when you drop one in kobold tunnels.
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Mar 10, 2022 14:01
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Any opinions or experiences with the #iHunt rpg or feelings on the FATE system in general? I don't know anything about how the mechanics of this would play out, but the style and presentation is very much my poo poo. When I sit down and think of what I think would be a good system for a given non-gritty setting Fate is always on my shortlist but never the winner. The thing to remember is that if the PCs stack the fate points they can succeed at almost anything - but fate points are a limited resource. Other than that it's a clean system that encourages players to play into their weaknesses. And as mentioned Fate of Cthulhu is probably the best implementation.
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Apr 8, 2022 01:57
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5.5e is coming in 2014. Why do I think that? Because I can't see WotC not pushing the boat out for what is both the tenth and the fiftieth anniversary edition of D&D. And they know most of what they did well (subclasses make it easy for beginners to get extra layers to their characters and don't feel like bloat in the same way as prestige classes thanks to much better chunking) and what they did badly (they have a perfect opportunity to make the Tasha's ranger core, fix the bad subclasses (berserker, four elements monk) and upgrade the sorcerer subclasses, plus a few other tweaks. 5e is conceptually easy to understand for someone used to crpgs because CRPGs have been based on D&D to the point of being incestuous. 4e was pretty profitable, largely thanks to the character builder. I think it was something like $7 million that WotC made from DDI in 2013 after they'd given up on it - this wasn't public information but the number of people with access to the relevant Gleemax forum, and that they only were members while they were subscribers was hence the estimate. But that was just very profitable, not the silly money 5e has been raking in in the past few years. Its problem was that it was released at the wrong time - and I don't mean 2008 as opposed to 2020. I mean 2008 as opposed to 2009 or 2010. They were given a far too short two year deadline - and threw the whole first draft out after ten months. The 4e that was originally shipped had ... issues. Which got resolved and by 2010 4e was an excellent game - but what was released in 2008 was full of bugs and should have been the beta test.
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May 12, 2022 02:59
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Jimbozig posted:Rather than another reality, that just sounds like from another generation. Those games are all from a very small time window. Aside from Blue Planet, which was from 1997 those were all new or newly republished in 2005. Those specific games are from a narrow window - but semi physics sim is a long standing genre dating back to Runequest and Traveller and definitely including GURPS. Indeed I'm not joking when I say that 3.0 advanced D&D design to the RPG design standards of the mid 80s (and if necessary break out Ryan Dancey's review of WFRP 3e to prove it). But it's a pretty naively intuitive design paradigm.
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May 12, 2022 03:03
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Leperflesh posted:Alignment makes the fundamental error of placing human motivations, convictions, and behaviors onto axes. They don't work like that. Alignment makes the fundamental error of placing what should be something that highlights campaign/setting themes and turning them into universals. In oD&D alignment was handled properly for that game's themes (I'm condoning the implementation here not the themes themselves) with a single L/N/C axis. oD&D was a Fantasy Western with Law representing "Civilisation" back west that might have had things to offer but would crush the indivdiuals, Chaos representing the natives beyond the Keep on the Borderlands and Neutrality representing trying to keep the balance for the ordinary people (human and allied, naturally). And good vs evil? Not really metaphysical. Meanwhile Dragonlance is a giant Saturday Morning Cartoon with Good vs Evil while law and chaos were secondary where the rubber met the road. And nine point alignment? Doesn't really match anything.
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Sep 4, 2022 21:48
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theironjef posted:Yeah, I saw basically "If you're picking boring abilities (for any reason, really) that's on you" and was responding "if the game has boring abilities, that's on the game." Different people have different things they find boring. If I'm playing a Supers game I would prefer The Hulk to be a lot simpler to play and thinking about a lot less than Tony Stark. There are also a non-trivial number of people that will find "Hulk Smash" boring and want something to mechanically sink their teeth into and a non-trivial number of people who will find a quasi-engineering approach with suit customisation and energy allocation in the suit to be boring and just want to get to playing their character. And there are some people that play different things at different times or in different types of game (for example I only really play non-4e D&D rogues in one shots as once I've got the character's rhythm down it doesn't feel like I need to try and that makes it feel less roguelike). That said there are things almost no one finds interesting. But if everything a game has is interesting to you it's probably either pretty light or pretty narrowly focused.
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Sep 21, 2022 11:41
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Nessus posted:Niven isn't going to win you any antifa supersoldier Book-It points but did not, at least, stand out as particularly propagandistic. There's no excuse for the propaganda of The Burning City - and the plotting was Niven's not Pournelle's. Niven is a scion of a wealthy oil family, and his early short stories are great. He used to hone them on oil rigs (where pre-internet there was basically nothing to do) telling stories and honing them in response to which parts the oil workers liked them. Neutron Star (1968) is a strong SF short story collection although with hindsight I wonder how many female characters in the entire anthology. But the more his physical storytelling was in the past the weaker his strengths and also he started getting more and more "Rich California Republican". For how extreme Niven is his advice in 2008 for lowering healthcare costs was to plant, in Spanish, rumours that emergency rooms were killing Latino patients and harvesting their organs.
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Dec 16, 2022 20:35
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Ferrinus posted:Absolutely, yes. Like 4E, the prequels were the only logical development of the series given what had come before, and their actual flaws were largely incidental to the highly ideological attacks against them. Eventually, an attempt was made to appease the audience launching those ideological attacks, and - surprise! - the result was just utter dreck. "The only logical development" is utter nonsense. Before they came out I assumed that the Clone Wars were about clones of Jedi. Which was part of why the Jedi were driven into hiding. The only prequel film that was close to the OT was Revenge of the Sith; Anakin had to be a war hero, to have twins, to be corrupted to the dark side by Palpatine, and to be left for dead. (But he didn't have to become a school shooter).
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Dec 17, 2022 04:15
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