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Tolkien (per his letters) was really deeply bothered later in life by his own portrayal of orcs as sapient creatures incapable of anything but evil. It's just that his objection was that this was incompatible with Catholic theology regarding grace and free will rather than nature vs. nurture specifically. It's also never really made clear if they're a biological species at all, since he was still flipping back and forth between various specific origins for orc-kind even after publication of LotR and some of them would have precluded that or at least complicated the issue.
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Mar 29, 2022 17:33
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:54 |
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Nurgle is Love
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Mar 31, 2022 19:44
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while i'm not inclined to give John Wick in particular the benefit of the doubt, how would you best implement a game where the players are supposed to be people "of their era" in some genuinely uncomfortable context and discourage players from trying to pseudo-isekai their way to modernity, at least as a default state of play? like, we've obviously seen the bad way, what's the good one?
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Jul 3, 2022 20:20
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might be shallow of me but a lot of my irritation with Battletech is that if you're going to have a designated Evil Socialist Faction you could at least make their shortcomings flow from their material conditions and not just a laundry list of conservative "omg big gubermint" stereotypes played completely straight it's offset somewhat by "the Clans' eugenics program doesn't work and in fact results in them constantly shooting themselves in the foot" which is very charming as far as setting conceits go, but still
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Dec 4, 2022 19:08
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traditionally nobility implied an inalienable attachment to a particular piece of land, and american lawmakers were absolutely loving terrified of such a thing emerging organically and took incredible steps to make sure parents couldn't stop their failsons from selling the estate (you wanna make a law student cringe, ask them about the rule against perpetuities) whether this very specific characteristic is what matters for anyone else's analysis isn't for me to say, of course, i just think it's funny that a lot of 19th century assholes would've been both very snippy and very paranoid about the subject
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Dec 8, 2022 15:36
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Let me tell you about the faction wherein you have game mechanics toy torture a baby elephant to buff your other monsters. warmahordes lore is at its best when not only is everyone the bad guy but they're also various flavors of huge losers my faction is the psychically enslaved army of a sulky teenage dragon whose sole motivation is "no, gently caress YOU, dad!" e: the aforementioned baby elephant torturers have only recently overthrown a deposed nobleman who conned them into believing he was their messiah and are basically invading the warmachine side of the continent out of sheer embarrassment the circle of druids trying to stop the apocalypse are Wile E. Coyote-levels of self-sabotaging dumbasses who've alienated every potential ally they ever had Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Dec 12, 2022 |
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Dec 12, 2022 14:28
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Harrison Armory isn't SecComm. You're not piloting a Tiger tank, you're piloting a heavily armed Ford automobile and/or IBM computer in the sci-fi equivalent of the year 1950. You're definitely still morally compromised (and frankly the default presentation for who/what a Lancer is is more "somewhere between a mercenary and a cop" than "hero of the revolution") but it's far more in the context of tacitly supporting economic repression and horrific labor relations than siding with the literal genocidaires, which is exactly what Josef said.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:13
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Do the Aztechnology blood sorcerers know they're ushering in the Horrors and they're all aboard with it, or is it just a matter of greed (or even thinking they're doing the right thing?) Presenting Mexica-Tenochca human sacrifice as a thing and as horrific is basically just historical accuracy, but presenting it as purposeful self-annihilation rubs me the wrong way, as strange as that sounds. It's something that was supposed to prevent or at least delay the apocalypse!
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Dec 14, 2022 17:28
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Archonex posted:Edit: Also, oddly enough they're an aversion of out of universe stereotyping. In setting Aztechnology makes a big deal about being related to the Mayan, Aztec, etc, etc, empires and affecting their trappings. However it's an open secret that most of their upper membership are pure spanish people and have nothing to do with them whatsoever. They're basically appropriating the cultural trappings of those their ancestors killed in the most shallow and parasitic way possible to make a buck via capitalism. lmao okay yeah that actually works pretty well then
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Dec 14, 2022 21:19
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Triskelli posted:Tangential, but the D&D/Warmahordes/Shadowrun stuff brings it to mind, when did Dragons make the change from “big evil lizard” to “suave greed elementals, basically demigods”? The recent Fizban’s Treasury book has this HARD, with a preamble that says “oh yeah most individual dragons exist simultaneously in all multiverses fyi” change? i think you're just describing the standard for most mythological dragons, nevermind fantasy ones St. George (killing something dangerous but ultimately just a weird animal) is an outlier, most western and eastern dragon myths describe creatures that are basically demigods
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Dec 14, 2022 21:34
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Fafnir's kind of an edge case I guess, he's a cursed prince whose greed (plus kinslaying) made him into a dragon
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Dec 14, 2022 21:40
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a good RPG core book (and most supplements that aren't completely narrative and/or system-agnostic) should read and be organized like a reference manual the only reasonable alternative is a tutorial but in my experience players don't read that poo poo anyways so might as well prioritize lookup time (which is to say, as usual, 4E's "failure" was mostly a product of doing things right) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 20, 2022 |
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Dec 20, 2022 00:37
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Those aren't mutually exclusive things, though. It doesn't matter what "players" do, it needs to provide tools for someone learning the system to actually put it into practice, whether it's just a GM or all the participants together. Reference manuals are great once the standard operation of something is already straightforward for you, they're a terrible way of learning how to do your very first laundry. this is true, but tutorials can be accomplished in a much shorter page count, doubly so if you don't assume that every game has to be written as if it's someone's first TTRPG ever, and imo their ideal format is a separate, free document while collections of mechanical options remain monetized
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Dec 20, 2022 00:57
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ironically the monster manual -- probably the one place where you really do want narrative and mechanical information densely packed together for practical reasons, in order to more easily construct adventures from whole cloth -- has mostly retreated from that model since AD&D (where virtually every monster has, like, ecology, history, and if applicable cultural background sections)
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Dec 20, 2022 01:05
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i think the worst of my fate is i would have to run Dungeon World
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Dec 21, 2022 14:04
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Complexity is a budget. A simple game doesn't have much room for improvement as a player (if that's something the designer values) but a complicated game where most of the overhead is only tangentially related to the player's decisions, or where the player doesn't have much control over or interaction with the complexity, is the worst of both worlds.
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Dec 21, 2022 15:58
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The fallacy is that it generalizes in either direction. It's a question of elegance or efficiency with respect to design goals, not where you stand on the spectrum taken by itself.
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Dec 21, 2022 16:59
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cards are good as surfaces to put text on, as ways to privately convey information to some players but not others, as reminders that you have something or that something applies to you, and (while good shuffling is a much rarer and more difficult skill than people assume) useful for history-dependent bounded randomness where e.g. you eventually want every outcome to happen once in some period they are, however, an absolutely garbage replacement for dice, e.g. tools for generating history-independent randomness
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Dec 21, 2022 17:14
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Father Wendigo posted:A standard deck of 52 playing cards is absolutely superior to a fixed die (d20) or set of dice (usually 2d6). Assuming it's not shuffled after every draw, it allows for a more predictable set of results over a long period of time. You're not going to draw five duces unless something very untoward is going on. "a more predictable set of results over a long period of time" is exactly what's being purposefully avoided in the line you quoted; that's the whole point which one you need and when varies but cards are very bad at doing it unless you shuffle them every time, which is super tedious and has a high risk of human error contaminating the results
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Dec 21, 2022 17:36
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ChubbyChecker posted:and since were on the subject, balrogs didn't have wings fine i'll take the bait quote:The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, pg. 430 of the Fellowship of the Ring
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Oct 18, 2023 22:00
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if you REALLY wanted to start a nerd fight a much more fruitful question is "how many balrogs were there"
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Oct 18, 2023 22:08
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it's a balrog, it's fire and shadow all the way down
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Oct 18, 2023 22:48
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:54 |
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LashLightning posted:Er, loads? They were practically foot-soldiers at the start, if I understand right. I don't think it goes against Tolkein's shtick that people were just built different back in the days the Elves and Humans first laid siege to Angmar, and that a couple elves or so could totally go toe-to-toe with a Durin's Bane-style Balrog. i ain't weighing in on this one but IIRC there's another place where he says there were only ever seven
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Oct 18, 2023 22:52
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