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Werewolf, even moreso than Mage, always had the lowkey problem that the players/writers often tended to be on very different pages over whether the protagonists were genuinely heroes against The Man, or deeply flawed antiheroes from lines whose hubris created most of the evils that they now struggled against. The ones who didn't buy into the idea that they were still playing monsters often manifested in kinda problematic ways, but most that I encountered was just general anprim and ecoterrorism stuff.
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Jul 30, 2021 05:38
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Ironslave posted:This is the primary problem with a lot of games across the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness. This is very true, but at least most Vampire players seemed to get that they were monsters, even when they went into dashing antihero stuff.
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Jul 30, 2021 06:07
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people. With this and the rest of the recent posts I see the sort of common pattern of X-Men writing, where every so often editorial notices that whoopsie we just did three worldwide plots in a year that involved either mutant supremacists or dumbass uncontrolled mutants coming within a hairsbreadth of destroying the world, so we'd better make sure that everyone even worried about this eats a lot of (mutant) babies so everyone knows their motivation is pure bigotry. In Mage, the traditions are a mix of people who either aren't useful allies against the initially described Technocracy-dominated world since their only quarrel is who's wearing the boot, or those who aren't useful allies because they want something even more horrifying for anyone not actually in their circle. So the easiest way to write out of that corner was the whole evil future selves plotline and stuff like that to make an "Oh no, it would be even worse!" stakes raising.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:08
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Geisladisk posted:I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage. From what I can tell the earlier editions at least were written with the conceit that you were only playing one game in a campaign, for all that you could use the same overall setting and tone otherwise. If you played a Vampire game there would be NPC werewolves and mages, but they're not really the Garou or Traditions so much as superficially similar, and the world was really run by Vampires. Likewise if you played Werewolf or mage, there are ancient bloodsuckers lurking around but there they're clearly secondary/subservient to the forces that the PCs are set against. Obviously this all lasted until a game had two players dead-set on being vampires and two on being mages so they had to both be "right" about what's going on in the shadows of the world. But the writing conceit lasted longer, and by the time they really gave up on that they were in too deep to change things much,
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Jul 31, 2021 14:40
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Night10194 posted:A lot of players will also tell you they want this when what they really want is for the atmosphere to start out that way before transitioning into, as you say, burning Hitler to the ground after shooting him eighty times. People love to feel like they beat the odds, like this was impossible but somehow their characters made it. One thing Exalted did on that front (at least in the first couple of editions, don't know about newer ones) was set up a world that was doomed by about a half dozen apocalypses at once so it was perfectly legitimate to play a game about tragic heroes acting out their personal dramas on a dying world, or even being monsters helping in its fall. But also being very explicit that you're playing divine fate-altering heroes and for all that you start off in a bad place, here's how you can do a campaign where even the darkest things are redeemed and the most crushing evils are overthrown.
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Aug 4, 2021 21:18
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Reveilled posted:But again, that supports the point I'm making. There's two games here, The Landlord's Game, which was the original, and Monopoly, which was the Parker Bros ripoff. In Monopoly, you play only as the unrestrained capitalists until one person wins. In The Landlord's Game, you may start out playing as the capitalists, but there are specific mechanics which allow and indeed encourage you as players to transition instead to playing as the working class. And of these two, only the one where you play as the working class is an adequate critique of landlordism, because it's the only one which supports play as the oppressed. The other one is just a poo poo game. One of the weird things about Monopoly being a "poo poo game" is that 90% of the reason is how common house rules modify it. House rules that get baked in so much that like you're playing it how your grandparents did and no one in the family ever really read the rules. Money on Free Parking and eliminating auctions are the most pervasive examples, but there are a bunch of common ones, all of which feel desirable and forgiving but make the game take forever. By the rules, Monopoly is a cutthroat game and tends to make early leads snowball by design, but making it much easier to build property sets when you're competitive or driving losing players out of a (much shorter) game makes it much less stressful for all participants. Even when you lose you feel less invested since you're not being slowly crushed in marathon play. It's a pretty good example of how rule tweaks that sound fun and friendly can spoil a game. You could probably also read some political statements in about how it reflects on capitalism too, I suppose.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:04
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Arivia posted:It goes back farther than that, sadly. Edition warring among nerds has been a thing since the 1980s, it just happened in magazine columns. More into the internet era: Specifically, the complaints about 3e were almost exactly the same as the complaints about 4e, all about it trying to be dumbed-down, balanced, like a video game, throwing away all sorts of proud tradition. There was even a Pathfinder analog then with how HackMaster used AD&D material under license for what was a bit more tongue-in-cheek parody of older versions, but still definitely a draw to angry grognards who couldn't cope with losing THAC0. It's just that it was before "real" social media, so the internet drama played out on smaller and less organized forums and stuff.
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Nov 7, 2021 02:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:People getting up in arms over the balance of class power is the weirdest complaint to me. Like I can understand people being upset about the texture of the classes all becoming the same and playing about the same, but people clinging to the way that magical power is supposed to grow exponentially faster than physical classes was very weird. It seems like a weird way of fantasizing about nerds overcoming jocks more than anything else. 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.
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Nov 7, 2021 20:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:. Funny thing is how Gygax and Arneson created D&D from a sword and sorcery background, the kinds of stories where wizards were creepy puppetmasters who got their poo poo wrecked as soon as Conan or whoever confronted them face to face. I read an early newsletter article by Gygax I think explaining how D&D wizards are so much more capable than their fictional counterparts specifically so they wouldn't be useless. Edit: Though also back when the only two classes were "Fighting man" and "Magic user" fighters also got all the mundane abilities like wilderness skills and what later became thief abilities.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:31
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fool of sound posted:This was a mechanic in earlier editions of D&D. All classes got followers of various types at a certain point, with wizards getting a few apprentices and fighters getting a platoon of men-at-arms, ect. This is also how the "get experience points for finding gold" mechanic originally worked. You didn't get XP directly for money, but rather for non-adventuring expenditures during downtime. Again, like the old sword and sorcery stories where you get sacks of loot at the end of each plot, then at the beginning of the next story you drank and partied yourself broke and want more money. That worked okay at early levels, but once you get powerful and the stakes get higher it's hard to justify and you start pouring the money into building a castle/church/guild/tower and the organization to support it.
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Nov 8, 2021 04:25
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Another story I remember hearing about 3e playtesting not catching spellcaster issues was related to that. It wasn't that 1e/2e casters really lacked for "save or die" spells, but because of how saves worked and fighters/monsters having really good saves at high level, anything negated entirely by a save was going to be hit or miss. While damage spells that were halved by a save would still hurt - and HP was lower across the board in old editions even if the fighter/wizard HP gap was larger. Consequently, playtesters encouraged to try breaking the system tended to focus more on damage spells and other mechanics that had been powerful in 2e. Those seemed okay, but the focus on testing against known issues had distracted from testing for new ones. The end result was that that while they were earnestly looking for balance issues with magic, in a number of cases they were just looking in the wrong place.
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Nov 9, 2021 06:06
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Everything about Dragonlance is exceptionally dumb and Kender are no exception. Dragonlance is a prime example about how most D&D aggressively avoids making any internal sense and just tries to perpetuate Saturday morning cartoon logic to everything. Evil wizards wear black robes and good ones white. If you are non-committal to good or evil you wear red. Being a black robe isn't really enough to get you killed on sight by anyone unless you officially join a war, because black robes are subtle whenever possible you see, aside from wearing their morality as an armband that is. Aside from Kender there were also the Gully Dwarves, a degenerate subspecies of dwarf that was smaller, incredibly stupid and uncultured, and tended to live in slums, ruins, and garbage dumps. When I last looked at any Dragonlance stuff in detail I was young and not prone to think hard about a lot of implications past them being a dumb comic relief race, but in retrospect it sounds worse than that.
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Nov 10, 2021 12:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like mario has to jump on the goombas because goombas are enemies. they don't get individual personalities, you just jump on them. Funnily, Goombas were however the people of the Mushroom kingdom who sided with the Koopa invaders, so their story is in fact political. Also Mario can readily avoid stepping on most enemies and still progress through the game, so SMB makes violence more of a player choice than many RPGs.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:51
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On the topic of nature vs free will for fantasy races, I'm reminded of Hollow World, part of the Mystara setting for BECMI D&D. As the name implies, it's a massive hollow space inside the planet with its own central sun and a profusion of cultures that absolutely never change or evolve, though it's not impossible for individual people to escape their cultural bounds. For a little background, Mystara is the sort of D&D setting the original Final Fantasy games ripped off of, with airships, technofantasy stuff, a crashed spaceship somewhere, and a current world largely existing in the aftermath of an ancient elven super-civilization that caused a nuclear apocalypse (though the present is more or less healed). Its gods are called Immortals: some of them are inherently otherworldly or cosmological manifestations or things like that, but a great many of them are just ascended mortals of one sort or another. Once you reach the mortal level cap in BECMI, you can do an endgame quest series of ascending to immortality, then even play a new campaign starting as a first level god. Anyway, one of the oldest of those ascended mortals was originally an unusually intelligent dinosaur who uncovered many of the secrets of magic and was eventually shown the path to immortality by one of the existing Immortals. As time passed, he came to celebrate the diversity of life and species, intervening where he could to prevent any he learned of from becoming extinct. Eventually with the help of other like-minded Immortals he expanded an existing mysterious space inside the planet and set it aside as a preserve for any species or culture that was wiped out on the outer world, moving some of the last examples in to place in their own little spaces on the Hollow World. In addition to dinosaurs and other "Lost World" species, the Hollow World is full of long-lost civilizations and the ancestors of the "present" Mystara. The outer world has a lot of common western fantasy stuff: the Roman Empire standin, viking coasts, classic Arabia, woodsy elves, underground dwarves, that sort of thing. It even has "Shadow Elves" who are a little like Drow except they're not particularly evil, just weird underground remnants of that old elven apocalypse. By contrast, the Hollow World has classical Greek civilizations the Roman-types ripped from (both historic city-state era and mythic bronze age heroic era flavors), Ancient Egypt, the surface-dwelling alpine herder dwarves from before they went underground, cavemen, halfling pirates, the stem race of the various goblinoid species, and even a remnant of the decadent high-tech elven civilization with their dangerous devices replaced with harmless magic substitutes that won't work outside of their valleys. Since it was designed as the gods' own wildlife preserve/ cultural museum, there's a lot of powerful divine magic keeping the Hollow World in a static state. It's harder to learn magic in the first place, and a lot of spells related mostly to fast travel, divination, and mind control just don't work in there. Many others, like most destructive spells, work if you learned them on the outer world but none of the natives know it. Most importantly, cultures inside don't change over time. Some are in isolated valleys with little external contact, but even those who contact, trade with, or war with others don't really exchange customs or technologies to any meaningful extent. If you conquer your neighbors they're not going to pick up your ways, or for that matter assimilate their conquerors; as a result, the long-term result of war is typically stalemate. Same thing is true for weapons and armor. Mechanically stone/copper/bronze/iron/steel are equivalent in stats, but people are only really comfortable with the materials/designs native to their culture. For example there's one Mesoamerican flavor culture with bronze age technology: a fighter from there is likely to have a spear or short sword and wear scale mail. They wouldn't feel the urge to "upgrade" to a long-sword or plate mail they found. A high quality or magical spear or suit of scale mail of foreign design might be more interesting, even if it's iron, but before they feel really comfortable using it they'll decorate and customize it to look and feel more like the gear they grew up with. Now, these protections were designed to prevent cultural change, but at the same time people are still individuals and can break free of their culture. Particularly for PCs, reluctance to do so is not just culture, but mechanical penalties. Individuals can go travel in foreign lands and be friendly with others while mostly keeping their ways, but if you break from your culture, take up foreign ways and tools, and that sort of thing you start getting experience penalties and people of your own culture start treating you as anything from a weirdo to an outcast or traitor. You might also lose "racial bonuses" of your culture, like ability bonuses, or else they just stop improving with new levels. Once you go up a few levels outside of your cultural bounds, the XP penalty goes away and you have as much free will as anyone born in the outer world, but the cultural cost becomes permanent. Even if you take up your own ways again, you don''t get the mechanical bonuses back, and your people will all instinctively feel something is wrong about you even they never see you display any foreign traits.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:03
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Telsa Cola posted:Warhammer fantasy dwarves have a gold greed/lust they can fall into and maybe one or two other things. Even Tolkien's inspirations for dwarves were 80% Norse/German folklore, with just the linguistic cues and diaspora inspired by Jewish people. It's not like how in his fictitious history today's cultures are literal descendants of ancient races of Men; the dwarves stayed dwarves, withdrew underground, and you might see them in the quiet and magical places of the world today. So Tolkien wasn't lying when he said they were the real-world people he most associated with his dwarves, but it's not the bulk of who they are nor is it more prominent in D&D or other Tolkien knockoff dwarves. I mean, it's a direction you can go and get problematic with, but like you said that doesn't seem to happen much while with other fantasy races it happens all the time. Also, Firefox autocorrect wants "dwarves " to be "adwares."
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Nov 11, 2021 21:28
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disposablewords posted:If I recall, it's not atheist of the "does not believe these things are real" kind. It's instead the idea that while they may know such things are real, the atheist does not offer proper devotion to any of them. The Toril atheist says, "None of you are worth it," and the gods in return say, "Then you're not worth a proper afterlife," and shove you in the wall. It makes sense. In a world with real deities who have real power you can still say "gently caress Olympus, why should I give tribute to that bunch of inbred petty rapists," but whether you're punished or not that's not much at all like being a real-world atheist, it's just rejection of authority.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares? Plenty of real-world religions have gods that aren't omniscient or omnipotent. Even that are very small or limited in their presence and abilities. They even have mythologies about ordinary mortals who bested gods at things. Those stories never seem to lead to a lesson of "yeah, treat the gods just like any other dude" though, and even little gods and minor spirits get their shrines and sacrifices as part of the order of things or just because of the transactional nature of magic and divinity. People raised in modern Christian-dominated cultures tend to frame pretty much any fantasy religion in light of Christian practice and mythology, especially in RPGs, but it often doesn't really line up well. Part of that is the specifically Christian definition of "faith", which also needs to be divided between how that word is used in Christian theology, and how it's used in casual speech about Christians. It doesn't really apply neatly to many real-world religions, let alone into worlds where the gods are a verifiable, daily presence.
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Mar 12, 2022 01:12
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I think we have some competing definitions of atheist going on here. That's exactly the point though. It would not make sense to be a real world atheist in those settings in the same way that it would not make sense to disbelieve in ghosts. Or to disbelieve in alien encounters in a world where they're landed and at the UN. This seems to discomfit some atheists in much the same way that fantasy worlds with explicitly non-Christian cosmology discomfits some Christian fantasy fans. But it makes a little less sense since the case for real-world atheism is the lack of evidence for real world divinity, and "what if fake poo poo were real" is a core fantasy conceit.
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Mar 12, 2022 21:34
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NikkolasKing posted:The last Rockstar game I played was GTAIV. Before that...Vice City Stories. I don't think I ever finished VCS (Though I recall the protagonist is someone who dies at the start of Vice City), but I remember the dark streak of the GTA4 ending where whoever's advice you listen to at the end is the one that ends up dying due to the consequences of your actions. It's really interesting how much Saints Row 2 and on picked right up from the GTA3/VC/SA approach where the world is a cynical cartoon show but your personal story has a lot of focus on coming out on top and going on criming with your awful buddies, even if SA has some of where the more serious Rockstar takes go later.
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Apr 6, 2022 03:27
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Schwarzwald posted:"Law and Chaos" have been used as distinct godly political factions of no overt moral bearing in fantasy for quite a while. This was actually how they were originally presented in D&D. It was so much of a team allegiance thing that early D&D had "alignment languages" you could use to communicate with others of your alignment regardless of species, as I recall.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:47
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SirPhoebos posted:From my understanding, 3rd Ed suffered from poor playtesting: whoever was testing the rules wasn't trying to break the game just assumed that it would be played like 2nd edition, not just in terms of party composition but tactical choices. So it wasn't until the game was in consumer hands that it became clear that the changes they made to saving throws, hit point progression, multiple attacks, and spellcasting massively blew up how good wizards were even at a low level. That's what I gather too. In AD&D HP was low across the board, save-or-die was relatively rare, and fighters had good saves anyway, so direct damage was a great way to make a powerful wizard, with the downside that you were super fragile yourself. Playtesters told to break the system made builds and used strategies that would have been powerful in 2e, and found out that wizards were less fragile but opponents were better at tanking fireballs too so it was better balanced, right?
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Dec 14, 2022 00:39
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mossyfisk posted:...were any of those things different in the 80s? That's part of the secret of classic cyberpunk. It's a mix of "things that were already there in the 80s," "things so visibly right around the corner in the 1980s that anyone with a Newsweek or Popular Science subscription was reading about them on the regular," "noir tropes going back to the 1940s," "things they got fantastically wrong like jacking in at pay phones or the Soviet Union lasting longer than the US," and just a dash of eerily prescient future prediction. But every sci-fi genre is like that.
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Dec 19, 2022 00:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:A lot of JRPGs sure do like specifically borrowing and evoking judeo-christian symbology for its final bosses, and then the JRPGs that don't will still doing something where the villain at the end apparently has some kind of god aspects. And of course, if there is an established organized religion in the world, that will normally end up being an evil conspiracy. Especially if it has catholic trappings. Japanese fiction is pretty heavily anti-papist. But most of that is just borrowing christianity for aesthetic purposes. The most common thing is some sort of evil church along the way which is simple enough, but fighting some kind of god at the end is common enough even if it's the more a godlike cosmic entity (Chrono Trigger/Earthbound) or has possessed some formerly mortal being (FF7/etc) or something like that. Some go whole hog on real-world religions of course. In addition to the whole Megami Tensei franchise as mentioned, or also shout out to FFL2 where the bosses along the way are assorted gods, there are the Xeno games. Xenogears has you start off as some villager caught in a war between rival nations and quickly ramps you into fighting the weapon system Deus which is also (sort of ) the creator of humanity and was itself made by entrapping a legit divine entity inside of it. Then Xenosaga, which was the same creator using the same motifs in a legally distinct universe, went full Gnosticism where your party members include a robot with the soul of Mary Magdalene and a dude who wasn't Jesus but got confused with him back in the day while you go to confront the agents of the Demiurge. (In one of the games the last fight is against the Space Pope though.) It's just full of the Judaeo-Christian references front to back, though Gnostic-flavored so there's a distinction between the true God and the material God. Fake edit: I'll spoil even for ancient games since if anyone is looking to play them they're a hell of a ride and not nearly as well-spoiled as like the twists of FF7 or FF10. But they were still well known enough at least by reputation that if you were into JRPGs during the late 1990s and early 2000s when many westerners really discovered the genre and its weirdness, they're among the games that really helped build the idea that it's normal to start fighting rats and end up killing God.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:40
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Haystack posted:Japan's religious landscape is wild. It's got a polytheistic cosmology, Buddhist eschatology, animism, ancestor worship, Taoist philosophy, a bit of shamanism, wild-rear end folklore, an emperor-pope as the bureaucratic figurehead for much of the above, the works. A consequence of that is their concept of godhood is way broader than most other parts of the world, especially the west. That old tree over there? God. An ascended human? God. A really neat rock? A river dragon? The very literal, physical Mt. Fugi? All gods. And all of this is very present and interwoven with the landscape, in a very casual sort of way. Given all that, it's not a big wonder that Japanese media is willing to come up with wild cosmologies to confront their protagonists with. There's a town in eastern Japan that claims to have the tomb of Christ. The legend is that actually Jesus' ministry was based on his studies of Buddhism as a young man, and after he faked his death when his brother Isukiri was crucified, he went east to Japan, became a farmer, and married a local woman. There's an annual festival about it and everything. Mashing up bits of seemingly conflicting religions and other mythology happens everywhere, so Japan isn't unique in it happening of course, it just has its own particular flavor that shows in its media.
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Aug 3, 2023 05:21
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