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Killer robot posted:Honestly the 3e level of caster supremacy was kinda unique to 3e. Before that wizards outpaced fighters at high levels and stuff, but not to the same degree. And casters were also weaker at lower levels so the idea that it balances out over the campaign was more believable. But that's part of how by the time 4e came out 3e WAS D&D to so many assumed any of its quirks presumably must have been around forever. If anything, given how rare high level campaigns are in my experience the wizard weakness at low levels was actually something of a downer for playing one since for most if not all of the game you'd be on the weak side of the equation. I think part of the goal of 3E was to make wizards have something to do at 1st level besides cast their one sleep spell then cower in the back of the party (adding the ability to use crossbows and bonus spells for high casting stat were 3E additions if memory serves?), which was a worthy enough goal. God knows I appreciate the fact useful cantrips are in all modern editions of D&D and Pathfinder, it lets you BE a wizard casting magic all the time instead of becoming useless quickly or plunking away with puny ranged weapons (say what you will about 1st levels of non-caster classes being weak in earlier editions too, they still were able to keep doing what they were meant to do the whole time instead of once a day). It's just that in fixing that but not elevating the non-casters, plus the other changes, they went from weak to strong casters in the game to OK to overpowered casters running rampant. moths posted:I think that impression was strongly shaped by elements of the 3e crowd being unbelievable regressive and using editions as a proxy for culture war. Yeah, there's always some edition friction whenever a new one comes out, but the 3.5E grognards had a much stronger group of the arguers who saw ANY kind of change as a direct insult to their existence, and that behavior definitely brought to mind a lot of the types whining about "Social Justice Warriors" and the like. The subject matter may be different, but the type of arguments sure weren't. And sometimes even the subject matter isn't different; there is sure a lot of jerkass pushback to the idea of LGBTQ people existing in D&D, and the getting rid of the "always evil ugly humanoids it's OK to genocide" thing (some it makes you wonder if they were saying "Jew" instead of "orc" at their table the way they carry on). The thing that also bothers me is it feels like the regressive naysayers got to push things the way they wanted when 5E came along. 4E was certainly not the perfect RPG, and evolved quite a bit over its lifespan like most of them, but it did continue a tradition of trying new things in response to the lessons we'd learned about game design over the years. Some work, some don't, you figure out which and improve next time. But when 5E was announced it felt like there was a definite vibe of "see, we rolled back all those icky changes you didn't like, grognards!" to the marketing. Now, thankfully in retrospect from my experience 5E has continued the tradition of trying to innovate and improve even if it did discard a lot of things from 4E as "bad" without fair analysis (though it feels a lot of the driving of change and improvements lately is coming from WoTC bringing in ideas and freshness from others like Critical Role and such). But when WoTC seemed dedicated to kissing up to the biggest jerks who were mad about any change, it was pretty dismaying at the time, and definitely brought up some parallels in modern politics (and how well letting the regressive bunch call the tune works).
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Nov 7, 2021 21:13
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Arivia posted:It might just be corporate PR bullshit but he said he’s still enjoying them in the same press release/interviews as announced this weird new three drow cultures thing. So naturally the writers of the D&D setting made sure to destroy said orc kingdom in practically a footnote in 5E Forgotten Realms. Can't have any interesting changes now, can we? Though my personal favorite quibble with the series (and a rather political issue itself) is it misgendered the hero's magic panther, since in the first book they used male terms (in particular the line about the panther and "his powerful jaws tearing out the monster's groin" kind of stood out when reading it for some reason...) and yet the following books decided Gwenhwyver the panther was in fact female like the name implies. Sure, it was probably just an early editing mistake, but I thought it much more fitting to mentally tag "the Magic Panther of Indeterminate Gender" onto the end of Gwen's name every time they appeared in the rest of the series. Or perhaps the books were more trans inclusive than I thought (might explain the tearing out of an evil male giant's crotch, very symbolic...).
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Nov 11, 2021 08:04
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Well, yes, but that’s hardly the FUNNY explanation for it, is it?  disposablewords posted:Eberron has run afoul of it, with the dwarves of the Mror Holds being powerful bankers across the continent of Khorvaire (thanks originally to the mineral wealth of the Holds that most of the rest of the continent needs, but now as its own self-sustaining business). Plus there's a secret rich person's club known as the Aurum that originated with the dwarves, with its own conspiratorial designs on power. This was apparently entirely unintentional, especially as basically everyone has some secret conspiracy grasping at power somewhere in the woodwork, and the Aurum is long since not a dwarf-exclusive club. Weren’t gnomes like big into spying in Eberron too? That one at least is harder to call unfortunate implications on, since as I recall it was less “secret racial conspiracy” and more “Moscow rules spy scenario bait” (they had a KGB equivalent and everything).
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Nov 11, 2021 22:00
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lightrook posted:The funny explanation is that Drizz't is really just that bad at ranger things, and never noticed until someone else pointed it out years later. OK, given that the ranger who trained him was blind, I think we have the answer!
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Nov 12, 2021 00:46
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Arivia posted:Guen's canonically been a female for many years and many books prior to The Thousand Orcs, so it sounds like there were some minor copyediting problems in the copy you read. (The current copy I have is one of the reprints so they may have fixed it.) Like I said, literally the first book (The Crystal Shard) and it's in a few places. The Crystal Shard pg. 155 posted:"I have something that may aid us." The drow pulled his pack from his back and took out the small figurine and called his shadow. When the wonderous feline abruptly appeared, the barbarian gasped in horror and leaped away. The Crystal Shard pg. 164 posted:The drow never slowed as he passed, gouging his scimitar into the throat of one of the powdered verbeeg and then rolling backward over the top of the wooden table. Gwenhwyver sprang on the other giant, his powerful jaws tearing out the monster's groin. The Crystal Shard pg. 169 posted:The giant advanced on Drizzt. "Arg, hold yer ground, ye miserable rat!" it growled. "An' none o' yer sneaky tricks! We wants to see how ye does in a fair fight." Anyway, you get the idea. Interestingly enough on review I noted a lot of times Gwen got tagged with "it" instead, as well as several other individuals like the giant here. So even within the book itself the pronoun usage was kind of inconsistent, much less the series. My copy is the 1988 print, so it may indeed be older than yours and they corrected things on reissue though. I just noticed the shift as the series went on and thought it was funny. Anybody remember any other books that mixed up their pronouns like that, tabletop related or not?
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Nov 12, 2021 04:32
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Fuschia tude posted:When in doubt, blame the editor Heh, not surprising really. Although the bit about TSR claiming intelligent magic items having no gender intrigues me; trying to recall if there's any exceptions in real world legends/mythology/fantasy fiction to that. Only talking blade that jumped to my mind immediately was Turin's sword, which I'm pretty sure only identified as bloodthirsty.
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Dec 8, 2021 23:29
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:You could make something interesting about common. It reminds of independent Indonesia choosing malay as the national language. It was a local trading lingua franca almost no one used as their first language, so you avoid the bad look of using dutch without elevating one ethnic language like javanese. A chaotic good linguist's choice. Common is usually like "elf derived, language of the good guy human kingdom" type poo poo Pathfinder has been doing some work with that actually in their default setting; "Common" is generally treated as a localized thing, what counts as "Common" for a character generally depends on location as most continents have their own "common" tongue. They also have other human languages that pretty much match up to the various cultural groups and still get used by preference among themselves, the "common" tongue is generally one of those cultural tongues corresponding to a group that previously dominated most if not all of the region it's used in. Basically like Latin in Europe; Rome didn't stay forever but it had enough influence for its language to stick around afterwards. They've been specifying a lot in the more recent adventure paths what "Common" counts as since every PC starts with it by default (but what particularly language that is depends on the game setting). girl dick energy posted:The best way to handle D&D religion, if you insist on keeping Alignment, is clarifying that it's not what the universe objectively declares is Good or Evil, it's specifically the dogma of long-entrenched deities. Law and Chaos, Good and Evil aren't moral stances, they're factions in the gods' stupidly complex game of political chess. To be honest the "creating undead is evil" thing makes sense to me just because it's always been a thing in D&D undead can break control and uncontrolled undead always attack because the negative energy powering them is anti-life by definition. Even with consent to use the body, it's kind of reasonable to argue your creepy robot equivalents having a default "kill all humans" setting makes it unethically reckless to use them as tools. Sentient undead as a rule tend to involve feeding of some kind on mortals, and frequently enough a wild character change that makes them quite willing to toss ethics out the window to do so no matter what they felt in life (i.e. even a former saint that gets turned into a vampire will cheerfully drain kids dry for lunch). Also they tend to go for power, political and otherwise, around them and the only thing worse than a gerontocracy is one where the old out of touch bastards at the top lack the courtesy to die and get out of the way. About the only moral undead options I recall were certain elven undead in Eberron and Forgotten Realms that didn't use the typical negative energy (so no feeding/anti-life attitude by default) and were mostly there as immortal protectors or advisers not direct rulers. Obviously this applies mainly to games that follow D&D rules, other settings could have those things be creepy but possible to do without moral issues.
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Jul 5, 2022 20:16
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Absurd Alhazred posted:It can actually be a lot of fun to have communications issues be an important adventure point. You can leverage that to, say, make one or more of your characters matter because you're the only ones who can mediate between two hostile factions who otherwise have no way of communicating with each other. Oddly enough I wound up doing that in one 2nd edition AD&D game because my DM back then (who I think might have actually studied linguistics) liked to use different real-world languages as "monster tongues", and when he used Spanish for lizard people I knew just enough to comment about it out of character and he let me use my real-world Spanish knowledge for my character. So my somewhat cowardly less than clever elven fighter-thief wound up previously having randomly picked up some lizardfolk language knowledge somewhere (probably in prison going by how I played him  ) and got to negotiate for the group. It was kind of amusing using my garbage Spanish-speaking skills and some charades to communicate, it felt very much like I expect such a conversation would logically go. Have had somewhat similar "don't know the local tongue because you're explorers" situations in our current D&D-like game too, although my priest character having a mass long-duration version of the comprehend languages spell tended to remove the issue beyond a daily upkeep thing.That said though, I do agree with the people who note this sort of thing gets tiresome if stretched too long, even if it is more "realistic" for language to be a barrier. At minimum PCs need to have a common tongue they can use with at least a significant local population as well, some way to bypass the issue like magic, or else you need some way to do the Star Wars thing where something or someone translates everything for the speech-impaired. Most in-character extra language use I've seen work well has been used either the typical archaeologist "translate long-forgotten writing in crypts" or similar, or catching out people who don't know you happen to speak their language and talking about important things in their tongue "secretly".
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Jul 26, 2022 02:06
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SirPhoebos posted:The most eye-raising thing about pre-jihad Battletech is the Draconis Combine. It's basically every 80s sinophobic trope, but in space. The only thing missing (as far as I know) is House Kurita still being upset about WW2, hundreds of years later. I admit the main thing that irritates me about the Combine is it very much is a facist nation among a bunch of monarchies (the DC isn't samurai, it's WWII Japanese cosplaying as samurai), and the writing tends to buy too much into the fascist stereotypes that fascists are somehow great warriors instead of absolutely crap as reality has frequently demonstrated. I gather they are meant to be a darker grey than the rest of the setting's "no good guys" nations, but unapologetically buying into the weeaboo "samurai spirit makes them bestest at war!" bullshit is something that's aged REAL bad with all the current fascists running around in real life. The DC should have long ago imploded under their own stupidity, but the writers keep acting like just being brutal thugs should somehow keep the DC having fewer internal issues than all the other nations which at least have some existing internal factions with real influence in the fluff. The Clans are also pretty fascist, but at least there they have a designated villain role so we get to see that stuff bite them in the rear end more often than it happens to DC; certainly they've nicely imploded over that crap finally and realistically coming home to roost. I will admit as far as racially insensitive BT stuff goes, "scheming Chinese" Capella is probably worse than the DC, though they share the same "we're brutal and it keeps us strong" crap. Ghost Leviathan posted:I do feel Battletech could use at least a soft reboot. Maybe a treatment like The Great Pendragon Campaign would actually work really well. Retcon a lot, be a bit more culturally sensitive, keep the overall tone and events because that still can pretty much work. Plus, makes for a fun campaign book concept. Honestly they've been trying to soft reboot it with all the various more recent eras for a while now; current stuff from my viewpoint seems interested in effectively breaking all the factions down into smaller groups with less power (which has the advantage of making the small scale battles that classic BT works best at, more realistically important to the setting; a lance or company might be all these tiny factions can actually deploy at a location), which could certainly do the trick of getting rid of the more offensive groups by way of destroying them and replacing them with new groups with different desires.
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Dec 4, 2022 21:17
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Haystack posted:The southern planter class was always incredibly good at propaganda. Even before the lost cause, they had the entire south and half the north eating up their fake gentry act. Eh, given how real gentry acted, I don't know that the southern planters were that "fake". Both sure believed in their souls that everybody who wasn't them didn't count as "real people", and earning a living was for those sorts.
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Dec 7, 2022 21:49
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Halloween Jack posted:May I ask why you think so little of CP as an IP? I mean, I'm not a CP defender or anything, and I spent my high school years playing Shadowrun because it was much more accessible for several reasons. But CP never struck me as offensively crappy or anything. My biggest criticism is that I wish it had leaned more on the post-apocalyptic and punk inspirations rather than "classic" cyberpunk novels and contemporary anime. Honestly Cyberpunk has some surprisingly deep thoughts in its background the more I looked into it; I particularly like that it didn't just make the dystopic parts all just a result of terminal stage capitalism but actual fascism screwing things up. The US basically broke up because it got taken over not-so-secretly by a fascist cabal (and still has some elements of that fascism to this day), and of course the main "bad guy" corporation Arasaka is led by an actual WWII Japanese fascist fanatic. It's not just that everyone's greedy idiots, it's that most of the power figures have swallowed down the idea they should use their power to dominate everybody else for more than just getting money. Like the video game itself argues, once they got everything else they just kept going to try to steal everybody else's souls too (and oof, the ending where you sell out to let them do that is UGLY). Shadowrun has these elements in its background, but it doesn't tie them directly into the upper echelons of power as obviously, and it kind of chickens out in some ways (it argues prejudice against all the different magic races has more or less replaced regular racist and sexist stuff, whereas in reality I presume bigots would quite happily just add despising orcs/trolls/etc. into the rest of their bigotry and continue hating all of them).
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Dec 16, 2022 18:52
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Archonex posted:Cthulhutech is weird because it has a few legitimately good parts* despite what some forum goers say. Which are unfortunately surrounded by a not insignificant number of other parts that are just creepy and unpleasant to read about in a rapey and just downright disgusting "not fit for play or really anything" sort of way. Hard to recommend without the table being ready to excise the creep-bait parts. Those old reviews about bad RPG's like FATAL on here went into the awful parts of it years ago, if you can dig up the thread. I admit humanity just rolling with the Lovecraft stuff and trying to adapt is one of the things I did enjoy about the setting in the middle of all the horrible stuff (well, that and I loved the basic idea of smacking horrors beyond the stars with mecha/Evas with the serial numbers filed off/off-brand Guyvers), particularly, like you mentioned, how they just did therapy to deal with all the SAN loss to scientists and such messing with the Things Man Was Not Meant to Know But Decided to Exploit Anyway. I swear there was a good idea somewhere in there to start for the game, it's just that we got... THAT instead  .
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Jan 26, 2023 03:35
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ungulateman posted:this tracks with the orks being lead by margaret thatcher (although i think that's in the other warhammer) Yeah, pretty sure the equivalent famous orc in fantasy just beat up the Chaos super champion and walked off afterwards after humiliating him that way (though I think they retconned that away, the cowards).
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Nov 12, 2023 18:57
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