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MonsieurChoc posted:I did the F&F on the Wraith Holocaust book. AMA. Notably for people unfamiliar with this whole mess, the Wraith Holocaust book is the exact opposite of Gypsies in that it went to great lengths to be historically accurate and respectful of the victims and survivors involved to the point where there's a forward by a rabbi explaining how weird it was to essentially be a sensitivity reader for it.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:39
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AtomikKrab posted:I feel Mage could be improved a bit by like just making it a thing that the Technocracy is running the laws around EARTH but the rest of the universe has its own Consensus, and as scientists study more of the galaxy and wider universe it is coming up against the outside Consensus (and Aliens coming by using their own magic the gently caress with people or maybe free their minds or some stuff.) The rest of the galaxy is Lovecraftian-style Old Ones who are very interested in eating Earth and all the nice tasty meat popsicles on it. We know this because there’s a group of the Technocracy (the Void Engineers) dedicated to protecting humanity from them!
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Jul 29, 2021 17:16
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radmonger posted:You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). I forget if someone's mentioned it in this thread, but White Wolf's politics make a lot more sense when you realize it was a company of young left-ish people trying to make counterculture RPG games in the 90s...that was headquartered and staffed in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:What the organization does in-setting is important in how it set boundaries for the players are willing to do, though. If they know the higher ups are willing to trust a ghoul, they might do the same. 1) Qelong is a book I would not recommend buying (buy it used or :files: it instead if you can). Not because of Hite or the content, but the publisher is James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Raggi/LotFP are full on turbo-chuds. (Hanging out with Jorp, standing up for the infamous Zak Sabbath, etc.) 2) The interesting thing about Delta Green is that several of the other main authors (Dennis Detwiler for sure, and I believe John Tynes) are radical leftists themselves, so it's that mythical balance of people with different viewpoints working together on an artistic political project. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 21:02
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Shrecknet posted:so because 1992 was a long time ago, there was a clan called the Malkavians. their clan flaw was "madness," which led to the 'fishmalk' trope (guy so off his nut he would carry around a raw fish and slap people with it) I have to disagree about not wearing a costume because -never mind, D'Angelo was a loving rad Nosferatu and Hope was the Malkavian, right
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Sep 23, 2021 23:56
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Good on Kai Tave for going legit and I mean this unironically.
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Oct 3, 2021 15:10
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Yeah, PARANOIA is generally satirical/humorous but in the taking pot shots at specific references for single jokes or characters sense. The overall infrastructure is Kafka-esque but definitely not meant to be a specific analog or parallel to any given real world society/nation. So Hunger is likely inspired by stuff like the Chinese problems you’re mentioning, but it for sure isn’t meant to be a critical take on or response to those ideas in the real world. It’s just taking the general idea and seeing how it would work as a scenario in Alpha Complex. I’ve run stuff from WMD, but not Hunger itself, and I definitely don’t know Chinese history well enough to analyze it super deeply.
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Oct 22, 2021 01:41
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fool of sound posted:Paranoia specifically has different tones with different rules and player expectations, ranging for W A C K Y to Brazil to the aforementioned Hunger adventure. One thing that's maybe not apparent if you haven't read PARANOIA is how flexible it is. Like the edition that this Hunger scenario is from is PARANOIA XP, released in like 2002 and literally named after Windows XP (and now called PARANOIA SP1 after Microsoft sent the publisher a nastygram). Depending upon your tone (with Hunger being the serious "Straight" end and the other end being a scenario from the same edition where you're literally the Three Stooges tasked with protecting a warehouse storing a combo of cream pies and nuclear warheads), the Communists can be anywhere on a scale from an incredibly wide-reaching villainous menace lurking in every shadow who are actually trying to tear apart Alpha Complex from the inside to Actually Boris and Natasha and the GM is wearing a fake mustache and taking vodka shots. If you tell a group in the latter tone that everyone is dying because the food vats are square now they'll just ask you if it affects their laser gun ammo and keep on shooting. Or it doesn't need to be the Communists at all. It could be the hair metal Death Leopard group that hate robots and computers, or the mysterious Sierra Club, a secret cult devoted to "the natural way of life" and encouraging Alpha Complex's citizens to return to the Great Outdoors, etc etc. The game and the system and the setting just have a ton of knobs and replacements for whatever the hell you want and as long as you're good for "post-apocalyptic paranoid future with everyone being a secret society member" you really don't need to be tied down to anything you find isn't funny or interesting any more. The Commies get prominence because they're easy to make fun jokes about, that's pretty much it. PARANOIA XP has a relatively unique problem as far as RPG editions go, where it was ridiculously perfectly timed and well done to just do the entire idea once and for all in most every permutation. The Forge (the cutting edge of RPG design) had just come into existence, and XP publicly owes a debt to Forge games for rethinking how to redo the basic play mechanics and tone ideas, so you get a bunch of stuff that's just really simple nailed tight design for fun gameplay and the rest of the game just gets the absolute gently caress out of your way. XP came out during the latter days of the d20 boom, when Mongoose (the publisher) was swimming in money so they got a nice long leash to update the good stuff from previous editions and trash the rest. So there have been other editions of PARANOIA since then - there was the one that was specifically focused on individual sections of Alpha Complex society (RED vs BLUE), there was the one where everything was cards, and there's the James Wallis edition which has been killed by Typical James Wallis Problems - but the essential problem is that XP as a toolkit and a game edition just actually worked its way through pretty much everything and was always ready for open-heart surgery so there's really nothing to actually justify another edition besides raw capitalist desire for profit. Some of the jokes are stale 20 years on, but the game just uses those as starting points to make your own. There's nothing IN or essential TO XP that's going to go suddenly obsolete as long as pen and paper roleplaying games are pen/paper/dice (and it even had a functioning, very popular VTT back in its day.) e: I just took a quick flip through Hunger. It's more detailed about its inspiration than many other PARANOIA scenarios are, with long block quotes of discussions of real-world Chinese communist problems (since the scenario touches on the Great Leap Forward). One of those quotes is specifically about Lysenkoism, and makes the inspiration for the vat problems very, very clear. Arivia fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Oct 22, 2021 |
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Oct 22, 2021 07:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The poster isn't making a random parallel. Inspiration from, yes, but that doesn't make it a parallel or an effort to interpret the actual political event. Unless I, not knowing a lot of Chinese history, missed the part where one area used their mutant powers to survive by eating the tainted food no one else could stomach and the resolution was turning even more people into Soylent INFRARED.
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Oct 22, 2021 16:14
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Disproportionation posted:Sort of, there is wiggle room with regard to how much control the computer has over things (considering it barely works at the best of times) and the book does point out that the computer is possibly being a bit hypocritical in that regard, but at the same time the computer explicitly has an extremely fragmented idea of what communism actually is due to its only source being old US cold war propaganda. How Alpha Complex ultimately works is moot - the computer hates communists purely because whatever data it has tells it that communists are the enemy, and that leads to the cyclical logic that therefore anything a threat to Alpha Complex must be communist. It was absolutely meant to be ironic, Greg Costikyan and Allen Varney said as much. It's also pointed out in the introduction to C-Bay in XP.
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Oct 24, 2021 04:27
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Tibalt posted:The other key difference between the OGL and other types of open licenses is that TTRPGs don't really need it the same way that software does. The firmly established rule is that mechanics aren't copyrightable, so effectively nothing is stopping me from taking the mechanics of D&D wholesale and releasing it as my own game - something that is so common that retroclones have their own dedicated thread on the forums with ~40 different flavors to choose from, along with several popular RPG reddits. This is really, really incorrect. The problem with retrocloning D&D (or another RPG) isn't the pure dice mechanics, but the way that RPGs mix narrative and rules elements, which isn't clearly established in US copyright law and is something WotC could take people to court over. Most (but not all) D&D retroclones actually use the 3e SRD (the parts of 3e D&D released under the OGL) and the Open Gaming Content monsters from the Tome of Horrors to legally gain access to the narrative elements of D&D for their own works, regardless of the actual game rules themselves. Retroclones actually started as a product of the OGL, with Matt Finch and that other guy I always forget the name of trying OSRIC as a test balloon to see if WotC would let them get away with interpreting 1e under the 3e SRD. Retroclones keep using the OGL because they do need (or want) access to that source material for monsters, magic items, spells, et cetera. Most of the underlying reasoning and documentation behind this is stuff from 20 year old forums posts on Dragonsfoot and Knights and Knaves Alehouse, so here's the first video from Matt Finch discussing his use of the OGL, it's only four years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVOxLcR5A-Q e: there's a lot of telephone about the OGL these days and a lot of people who don't understand how it works or have forgotten the test cases (ie: when someone actually did A Thing Wrong and WotC sued them over it). There's a fair amount of legal precedent about how to interpret the OGL, and it's not SUPER hard to work with as long as you keep your resources pretty well demarcated (you need to essentially do design in a clean room of only the things you're legally allowed to use is what trips people up) e2: things were apparently very uncomfortable around the WotC rpg offices when kestrel did the BoEF, and it lead to some license changes - NOT to the OGL, but to the d20 compatibility license, which was basically the license WotC had at the time that let you say "requires the D&D Player's Handbook" on your own OGL product and put the fancy d20 logo on your cover. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Nov 6, 2021 |
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Nov 6, 2021 21:00
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Xander77 posted:Explain? When 4e was starting to come about, Wizards made some really lovely moves towards second-parties who produced D&D compatible content (like the OGL products talked about above). One of those companies was Paizo, which had been spun out of WotC less than ten years earlier to produce the two magazines for D&D (Dragon and Dungeon). WotC pulled Paizo's license to produce the magazines with little notice, because they brought them back to WotC itself as part of its D&D Insider subscription for 4e. This left Paizo, which was an actual company with employees to pay and everything, no products and no license to produce anything else within a year and they had to scramble to find something. Paizo had been producing high-quality popular serialized adventures (called adventure paths) in Dungeon magazine for years, so they ended up continuing doing this under the OGL as their new Pathfinder line. It was a gamble to try and do the exact same thing with no official license, but they tried it: and it succeeded. Paizo had enough of a reputation for quality that people stuck with their monthly adventure path (essentially a magazine subscription), and it was enough to keep the company afloat. With WotC producing 4e, the 3.5 rulebooks people needed to play Paizo's Pathfinder adventures were no longer being actively produced, and there was significant disappointment among many D&D fans with 4e's design decisions. Paizo was run by a very smart veteran of RPG gaming business at the time, Lisa Stevens, and they saw an opportunity to grow their product line. Paizo announced the playtest for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, an updated and polished version of 3.5 to be the new rules for their own Pathfinder adventure paths. Playtesting the Pathfinder RPG itself was contentious: there were a lot of very experienced people working at Paizo who saw the new Pathfinder RPG as an opportunity to fix longstanding issues with the game rules, but playtesters responded overwhelmingly negatively to major or consequential changes. The audience very much wanted a new coat of paint on the rules they already knew and liked, and that was what the final version of Pathfinder RPG delivered. Because Paizo was now selling not just adventures but a whole RPG in opposition to WotC's D&D, they came up with an ad campaign to position themselves as a viable contender product. What they settled on was the tagline "3.5 THRIVES", which was directly stoking feelings of factionalism and edition war purity among the people playing 3.5 versus the people playing 4e. All data points to Paizo's Pathfinder being a strong competitor to 4e, especially as 4e slid into senescence and then death under Mike Mearls' leadership. There is a single source of dubious accuracy about how well RPGs sell at hobby stores (the ICv3 survey), and it had Pathfinder outselling D&D for months at a time. (The only other time this has happened since D&D's release was the heights of Vampire the Masquerade during the 90s.) Regardless of which edition anyone prefers or for whatever reason, the facts are pretty clear: WotC tried to screw Paizo over, and Paizo made a gamble and became a strong, self-supporting competitor with a dedicated fan base. Paizo did this, however, by marketing and product decisions that directly played into lovely nerd factionalism.
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Nov 6, 2021 21:53
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It feels like 4e stuff was like, the beginning of weird nerd unionization, where nerds learned they could band together and bully companies directly using the internet. It goes back farther than that, sadly. Edition warring among nerds has been a thing since the 1980s, it just happened in magazine columns. The first organized death threat campaign against people working on D&D that I can think of was actually started by a woman of colour - the infamous Winterfox (see https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Report_on_Damage_Done_by_One_Individual_Under_Several_Names) started going after the writers of D&D novels on the old WotC forums, leading to the books section of those forums being shut down and many of the authors just quitting online communities in general. But yeah, the vast majority of D&D poo poo was just rules tribalism. It wasn't until really, really recently around the time of 5e that diversity and inclusion became big culture war issues in the RPG scene.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:58
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Fuschia tude posted:Yup. As much as people at the 4e launch complained it was WoW poo poo for babies, circa 2000 there were a ton complaining that 3e represented the Diabloification and dumbing down of the system from 2e, as well. This is ironic because WotC released a Diablo 2 supplement for 2e in the last couple months of its life
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Nov 7, 2021 18:29
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Killer robot 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. The other problem is that wizard is like literally nine classes worth of spells all at once, it’s ridiculously flexible, far more so than any newly designed class should be. Specialist mages (where wizards pick a subsection to be really good at and another subsection they can’t do nearly as well or at all) help with this a lot, but there’s a ton of narrative and game design inertia around a “universal” wizard who can do all of them, so the full stupid flexible wizard is pretty much something D&D is stuck with. Even 4e didn’t touch it. The breadth of the generic universal wizard wasn’t really a problem or obvious until 2e AD&D, but it was very obvious then. There’s a lot of 2e supplements with differently focused kinds of wizards.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:37
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Without making an overlong TG-style post about how it all works, 3E character theorycrafting involves planning everything the character will do from levels 1-20+ because of how levels stack on top of each other for requirements purposes, often fudging assumptions about rules interactions that won't actually work if interpreted honestly by the reader, or generous assumptions about what their DM will actually tolerate in play (or read to check whether it's even technically allowed). There's no real design model for how powerful anything should be at any given level, so the mechanical interactions between two classes that were developed in isolation from each other are unbound. Yes, but the internet offering a community for that theorycrafting to happen in significantly changed how D&D 3e (and games descended from it) were played and designed for. The old “CharOp” (Character Optimization) forum on the WotC forums was infamous for warping how discussion of the game worked, and a lot of what people consider common terms for discussing those editions (class tiers, crunch vs. fluff, et cetera) came from those boards. WotC designers were pretty upfront about how the feedback they were getting from online communities influenced how they wrote new sourcebooks and created new material for the game, eventually leading to Orcus (what became the Book of Nine Swords for 3e) and then 4e itself. It is positively stark how different products were during 3e’s lifetime, the design and writing of 3.0 and its supplements is miles away from what happened in late 3.5. (And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I’d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision.) Tons and tons of nerd factionalism. e: in contrast to the 3e community’s focus on “builds”, most 5e posts are “look at how cool my bisexual disaster tiefling bard is”, and most OSR community discussion is “look at this cool new tool I came up with for GMs and how I used it in the last session I ran.” No opinions which is better or worse, but the game editions definitely lead to different kinds of excited discussions.
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Nov 8, 2021 02:04
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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. Spellcasting types can also generally recruit monsters of various kinds. BECMI (the last version of Basic for those unaware) has the best version, where fighters can choose to become paladins and get an order of knights, or avengers who build their own dungeons and get an army of monsters. Killer robot posted: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. This isn't quite true. XP is mostly received for treasure safely recovered from the dungeon in OD&D/1e/Basic, with some minor suggestions about XP for gold spent in places like the 1e AD&D DMG. The idea of carousing as a game mechanic (XP for gold absolutely fuckin wasted on partying) wasn't anything more than the most minor of suggestions until Jeff Rients (an influential OSR blogger) fleshed it out into a whole system in 2009.
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Nov 8, 2021 05:10
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Sodomy Hussein posted:And I meant to address this earlier, but the design model throughout the lifespan of 3E is notoriously tummyfeels. There's no banded math and often no math. Monster challenge rating math for example was never described because it didn't exist, everything just ended up with what amounted to an approximation of what they thought the monster was for, but in practice if the math even existed it wouldn't matter because the casters could obviate anything. This is incorrect. There wasn't banded math (as in math designed to have specific boundaries of high and low values) because that wasn't what WotC designed the system to have. There is a lot of math, but it's frequently obscured and hard to find. For example, there are monster creation guidelines including a table of possible Challenge Ratings - but they're not in the 3.0 core rulebooks, it's an article by Skip Williams in Dragon #276 (October 2000, so the same month as the Monster Manual itself). Most of a page in the 3.5 MM (page 302, to be specific) is dedicated to gauging, estimating, and playtesting a monster's Challenge Rating. There are internal math structures to a lot of stuff in 3e/3.5/PF, from character creation to class design to treasure distribution and monsters. All of it. There's very little where the game throws its hands up and goes "i dunno, you do what feels right." The problem is that those tools didn't reflect how many people played the game, especially after online character optimization became a trend, and therefore those tools don't effectively challenge or balance for how many people ended up playing the game. Like, you probably didn't think there's math for creating monsters of a specific challenge rating because the way you construct monsters in 3e isn't actually solving for creating monsters of a specific challenge. It's instead asking you to create a monster with a specific thematic idea, of a specific size, that is of a general strength you choose. This is how monster design worked prior to the 3.5 emphasis on balanced encounters - you created monsters and challenges as if they filled ecological niches, like a food web where dragons ate your hyperbeast but your hyperbeast chowed down on blink dogs in turn. And there's significant material in the 3.0 core rulebooks (especially the DMG) to facilitate these kinds of play, with effort spent on creating wilderness encounters and travel in ways 3.5 just dropped (and the 3.5 rulebooks are significantly larger, making cuts was a deliberate choice). The Dragon magazine article by Skip Williams that I mentioned fits this model - it's naturalistic design of choosing a type of creature (like dragon or animal), its size, and then comparing it to other monsters after you've completed it to figure out where it fits in. It adds effective hit dice to the creature's actual hit dice to get an estimated challenge rating, which is the same model used going back to Basic and 1e AD&D (in those it looks like HD 8+1*** but it's the same idea) So WotC had models of play and models of design that were effective for years for D&D and it built 3.0 using those. The audience changed, the kinds of games played changed, and the game needed to change with them to still be exciting and challenging. But they couldn't redo everything, so, yes, 3.5 has huge gaps in balance and effectiveness and challenge from things they couldn't change in a revision that was supposed to be largely compatible with what came before it (and was mostly successful in that compatibility). That's a far, far cry from there being no math or no published guidelines or even no attempt to balance things in 3e. Those are all factually incorrect. The balance didn't end up playing well for many people, but WotC did try, and did give people tools to do it. They were just severely unaware and underprepared for what the first edition post-2000 would look like in terms of audience response and analysis, and they didn't design for that. We mentioned that fighters should have armies, and that's something 3.0 allowed for; 3.5 largely drops it (you go from "get an army for your 6th level ability [Leadership feat] and use these rules about the classic mid-high level play arc, with stronghold design and the like" to "get Leadership, here's your cohort (a second, slightly weaker PC) which is the only part that really matters, actual wars don't care about your followers, please use miniatures rules for that"). It is absolutely staggering when you read it closely how much closer to "old-school" D&D 3.0 really was, and how much of a break 3.5 made to facilitate the play people were participating in. (And for those unfamiliar with all of this, the designers' eventual fresh new modern balanced take on D&D with no compatibility concerns was 4e, and it had some birthing pains but ended up pretty drat great for purpose. Do give it a try if you haven't yet, it's a blast.)
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Nov 9, 2021 05:08
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Randalor posted:How much of an issue of Caster Supremacy is due to "We ignore the downsides of spells in the name of fun" and how much was due to changing the spell save system to being "There are three categories of saves, you excel at one and suck at one" and then expanding the casters list with stuff that target specific saves rather than generic "This character/monster is especially resilient to magic, you have a 30% of your non-damaging spell sticking" that was in older editions? Remember there were multiple save categories prior to 3e, but they focused on what kind of effect you were saving against, not how you resisted it. So the classes have saves they're better and worse at, but most saves against spells were in the general "saves against spells" category, which fighter types were better at overall than the "good save/bad save" model of 3e. I mentioned it in my last post, but one of the frequent criticisms against 3e these days is that it didn't have "banded math" - everything is a d20 + modifiers against a target number you need to meet or exceed, and the modifiers and the target number keep getting bigger and bigger. There's no real point where you can go "oh, hey, this is just universally good or protective against this effect" when it engages with the basic math of the system. In contrast, most things prior to 3e were banded in some way or another - AC bottoms out around -10 (with lower being infamously better, so negative 10 was GREAT) and your to hit system (THAC0) also hits a effective banded ending to match, same with saving throws and damage and so on. The problem with this was that publications and long-lasting campaigns would get up to near the bounds of the system and the game just turned to crap - everyone can hit everyone or no one, spells always or never work, that kind of stuff. If you look at the extremities of the pre-3e systems, so the Master rules of Basic (let's not even talk about Immortals) and the High-Level Campaigns book for 2e, both have extended replacement tables for basic game mechanics that end up with some absurd footnote corner case poo poo. What happens when a 36th level fighter attacks an AC 9 regular person in Master Set Basic? They roll to hit, the roll doesn't matter unless it's 1 in which case they miss, and they add 8 extra damage because their attack bonus effectively overflowed on the table. (Disclaimer for turbonerds: I used the Rules Cyclopedia table because I knew where to find it easier, it's mostly the same thing.) How does your high-level fighter save against my high-level wizard spell in 2e? Well we need to compare our levels and the level of the spell, then check the table to get your adjusted saving throw number, and you need to roll above that but don't forget the inherent penalty because it's a ninth level spell, this only came into effect at like 14th level because before that you weren't high level and didn't need to worry about any of this stuff. These problems also affected earlier levels - thieves from the same edition of Basic as the Master Set are infamously worse than thieves in the previous editions of Basic because their basic functions (a percentage chance to do something capped at 100% for most things) needed to be stretched out over 36 levels now, so they start lower and advance slower. TSR/WotC still received letters and playtesting data (from their organized play campaigns of the time) that went "hey, this sucks" a lot. If you think recent rules debates from the last 20 years of D&D poo poo is confusing, I invite you to look at pre-2000 Sage Advice columns in Dragon magazine and try not to go insane. I remember one where Skip Williams was explaining how to calculate the volcanic activity in a generic fantasy village, because the Volcanic Potential Points (VPPs) or whatever were an essential component of some spell someone was trying to cast and they were fighting with their DM on how likely it was they could blow Fucktown, Nowheresville up with a spontaneous volcano. When 3e was announced and went through playtesting and public comment, WotC did a year long series of columns going over the changes in Dragon magazine and when they talked about the new basic D&D mechanic it was "hey, look, this math doesn't make you want to kill yourself just trying to fight someone. it doesn't require a giant table (or a literal paper rotating wheel for calculations, TSR sold these for YEARS) to just figure out what happens. This is so much incredibly better and fun to play." And they intentionally positioned it as being better for high-level play, as WotC's president at the time (Peter Adkison) loved high-level D&D games. In other words, getting rid of banded math was seen as an incredible leap forward in accessibility and simplicity of play for 3e. It was not supported with enough mathematical rigor to be air-tight or not perfectly great all the time, but it was a reasonable and thoughtful advancement of D&D's mechanics and math to respond to existing problems with the game. You mentioned spell resistance, and that is a pretty good example of what happened. Spell resistance in 2e is a binary percentage chance - 50% chance (or whatever, it changes from monster to monster) the monster isn't affected by a spell. In 3e it's the same core mechanic as everything else - the caster rolls a d20 and adds modifiers (their wizard/cleric/etc level, the level of the spell, et cetera) versus a target number for each creature (this target number is larger the stronger the creature gets, effectively). Same as with saving throws and attack rolls, there are weird corner case rules in Master set Basic and High-Level Campaigns to make high-level characters more effective versus lower-level monsters with spell resistance. Same as with saving throws, it's possible for a 3e character to be built in such a way they can trivially crush most spell resistance checks and be effective against any monster. The effect ends up being a little different though - prior to 3e, spell resistance was a road block. Because it was banded, most spell resistant monsters just no-sold spells and kept going. In 3e it's more of a speed bump, it slows you down and sometimes diverts things but it's not really meant to be a complete stop, and WotC did realize this and treat it differently. Monsters that are supposed to be immune to specific things in 3e just have actual immunities stated - golems, for example, are immune to all magic except for like 4 spells each. (Other changes in how 3e does things mean that the golem may be immune but the stuff around it isn't, so you just destroy the floor underneath it and keep it stuck in a pit it can't climb out of.) e: the point I'm trying to make overall in this post and the last one is that 3e might feel bad and like it was poorly designed and no one actually cared to do the math right, but it was actually well designed and people did do a lot of math and playtesting for it. There was a seismic shift in how RPGs were played immediately afterwards with mass Internet access, there was a huge advancement in how RPG rules were designed and tested that I think 3e honestly did a lot to facilitate (because you're not finding great banded math tightly balanced RPG systems prior to August 2000), and everything changed around it. But 3e was not regressive or lazy or intentionally bad (in comparison to 5e, for example) - it was a fundamental reimagining of D&D, the biggest revision up until that point, and worked very hard to respond to the problems people were actually having with their D&D games when it was in development. It doesn't play well now, sure, it has definitely been made obsolete by new editions of D&D and other games since, absolutely, and it is missing a lot of the rigor people expect from combat-emphasis RPGs today: but none of that was in effect when the game itself was being created, tested, and introduced. Arivia fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 05:36
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Xander77 posted:I mean, leaving aside how transactional you find the most immaterial good promised by Monotheistic faiths... yeah, that's how pantheons operate. You pray and sacrifice (now that the satanic panic is largely in the past, it would be neat to have some ritual \ sacrifice rules) in return for actual benefits. this is a good series of articles about how polytheism worked irl from an actual religious studies scholar (in comparison to fantasy RPGs), and honestly I read most of this earlier in the day and it matches up pretty well with the Forgotten Realms, which is the most detailed polytheist setup in D&D https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/ (obligatory note that other games do do religion better when they're not shackled to D&D, like glorantha) also, there were sacrifice rules in the Book of Vile Darkness for 3e, but they were pretty skimpy and were just for "evil person sacrifices the innocent maiden for an unholy ritual" not general "please make an offering to the harvest god for good apple crops this year" e: i'm passing on the 5e question because I've been talking a lot and don't want to come off as dominating the thread/being an edition warrior Arivia fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 07:49
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TheCenturion posted:The original Drizzt books could be interpreted as any of the possibilities. Drizzt, with his unique lavender eyes, and having his father also unusually kind for his people, hints that it's something heritable. His father, taken in isolation, is the 'do what I must to survive' thing. The entire schooling system, especially the 'gently caress a demon to get your priestess title' points at cultural indoctrination. Pressure from other underdark dangers hints at a siege mentality. Lolth explicitly shows up and says 'yo, you can't let this unique Drizzt dude get away with this poo poo' which triggers an unprecedented invasion of the surface. I can't imagine Drow society is full of hidden renegades if a literal god comes down from on high when one shows up. Don't worry, WotC has already sorted this out, the drow we all knew for decades are just one of three groups who were especially cursed by Lolth to be evil and there are other hidden groups of drow who have been good this entire time! BUY THE NEW TRILOGY NOW TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY MEET DRIZZIT. 
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Nov 10, 2021 20:10
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TheCenturion posted:You know, I feel bad for Salvatore; he really wants to drop the whole Drizzt line, but he also doesn't want somebody else loving it up. 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. But I’m pretty sure anyone enjoys writing easy books that make them lots of money E: also probably more on topic for this thread, the drizzt trilogy that follows servant of the shard is really interesting when talking about representation. It’s called the Hunter’s Blades, and it’s about a orc messiah/visionary trying to create a viable, stable orc kingdom near Drizzt’s usual haunts and all the wars and cultural trouble that causes. It’s probably the single best Drizzt trilogy in terms of actually doing something interesting and new. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 21:49
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MadDogMike posted: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? 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.)
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Nov 12, 2021 01:37
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Triskelli posted:Apparently that was set up by the forgotten realms version of the Reaper, a former human turned thaumaturge and the crummy kind of Malevolent Death instead of the more modern sympathetic/overworked Death. It’s really unclear. There’s an offhand mention in the Avatar Series book 4 or 5 that the “current” system of the afterlife was created around when Myrkul (your Reaper) came to power, but specifically who did it or why isn’t stated. What is clear is that trying to undo it like Kelemvor (your overworked Death) makes everything break, really really quick. The Wall of the Faithless is basically the theological (NOT thematic) equivalent to Christian Hell - believe in a God or face eternal suffering for not doing your part.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:01
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Schwarzwald posted:If I'm not mistaken, it's actually weirder than that. The eventual fate of every dead person is eventually becoming part of the (spiritual) landscape. Being faithful to a God might mean you become a nice rock on top of some holy mountain instead of a literal brick in a literal wall, but eventually everyone turns into something.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:34
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Reveilled posted:Apparently though, while he publically backed down and toed the line, he seems to have sent a letter to Ao's luminous manager who backed him up a few editions later: It's important to know that the D&D designers on 5e have publicly said they don't consider anything other than the actual 5e game book products canon so making critical comparisons between editions is now sadly illegible. Of course, whatever works for you and your game is what matters most. The Wall's necessity was reiterated when the relationship between Powers and mortals was reconstructed after the Time of Troubles, so when Cyric and then Kelemvor were gods of the dead. It's entirely possible it wasn't necessary beforehand, but it was explicitly so afterwards (and frankly as horrible as the Wall is, I shudder to think of what utter nightmare Jergal had going beforehand.) And yes, you're right that it's never really connected to the non-Faerunian pantheons, I think there's a note in the Player's Guide to Faerun for 3e that they have their own separate afterlives.
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Mar 12, 2022 20:00
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Reveilled posted:I think both of those definitions make sense as atheism, but the understanding I have of owlofcreamcheese's "atheism" is that it's neither of these, it's "Thinks the gods are merely particularly powerful magical beings", and my objection isn't that this is a silly position for an atheist to take, it's that it is not a particularly controversial position for a theist to hold. Like, it's an objection to the gods that comes across as a complete non-sequitur, since you don't need to believe that a god is "special" or "different" from merely being a particularly powerful magical being to do sacrifice to get blessings or ward curses, and you don't need to believe Lathander has some ephemeral spark of divinity (even if, as it happens, he does) to hope that he takes you into his service in the afterlife. Lathander is on the list of 10 or so deities that definitely demonstrably has a divine spark hes’s been hosed with so much. Poor guy.
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Mar 12, 2022 21:58
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Reveilled posted:The various heresies surrounding Lathander and Amaunator are one of the go-to things I use to explain why I like FR as a setting, how FR religion is weird and overlapping and messy in a way that feels very realistic for a setting which have actual gods vying for influence over varying domains and mortals who only kinda sorta understand what's going on above their heads. I like you.
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Mar 12, 2022 23:38
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Haystack posted:https://twitter.com/gshowitt/status/1501642466725965832 PC mortality really, really differs from OSR game to OSR game, especially as we move out of pure retroclones into new old-school inspired games. Like, there are many OSR games where there's a fair bit of PC fortitude built in (AS&SH and a lot of the Crawford stuff off the top of my head), and some if not all of the most commonly used house rules actually give PCs more chances to survive: shields must be sundered, death and dismemberment tables, even just using Gygax's post-2000s house rules with negative hp until death. However, most of what has been popularly shown about the OSR and its most popular products do promote that mortality: DCC's funnel adventures, LotFP negadungeons, and 39,000 B/X clones or hacks with incredibly dangerous, precise low-level dungeon play. Excepting LotFP's negadungeons, the idea that's behind these and how people play them themselves is that low-level characters are interchangeable and consumable, but the lucky ones who survive are incredibly precious, experienced, and strongly characterized by the dangers they've already escaped from (which DCC shows off quite clearly). So the common model is "it's fun to kill a bunch of dirt farmers" and then the game changes significantly as soon as one hits level 2 or 3 or gets some special items or something going on. If you think about most "modern" RPGs with involved character creation as creating a character "you want to play" that you can inhabit the role of, OSR games have a much thinner line between player and character, and the character you're playing is developed for you during play instead of being chosen ahead of time. Whybird posted:I think it's also true of non-OSR games though. I think the big difference is that in non-OSR games the cycle is that a PC's personality or history pushes them down a hole, and their skillset digs them out again. There's still a degree of player buy-in. The OSR cycle feels more like it's the GM and the module pushing the PC down the hole, so there's less buyin from the player (besides , I guess, the fact that they're turning up to play at your table at all) One of the big things that gets reiterated in how to GM for OSR games is that the GM needs to be an impartial narrator. If danger lurks at every turn and the players are supposed to use their wits and skills to figure out how to get through, the GM fudging dice significantly damages the players' ability to make those decisions. In other words, the world is an unforgiving place and the GM presents it fairly and accurately that way the players can get one over it with their smarts and teamwork. Arivia fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 16:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't know, x-com has written tons about how playing it 'real' feels bad and dumb and how a ton of the game is built around the 75% on screen actually being a complex formula to give the player the most intuitively 75% esq experiance instead of being a real 75% odds. Computers in general could be perfect objective arbiters and videogames design in tons and tons of slack and fudging, to make it feel more fun. Even games like xcom that are known to be tough and unforgiving make sure when you die it feels like you messed up, not because three guys got a low odds crit 5 times in a row in one turn before you could move. How many tabletop RPGs have you played? What’s your personal experience with the culture of slinging dice at the table? Because you frankly sound like you’re freshly arrived from Mars with how poorly fitting this argument is.
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Mar 15, 2022 19:26
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TheCenturion posted:Diablo had the same issue; random tends to feel unfair. And it makes sense to try and craft a player-positive experience in X-Com where player agency is significantly curtailed - you’re able to use your tools to fight the mutoid or whatever, or you lose. That’s it. Old-school RPG dungeon design is instead about alternatives or lateral thinking - the GM is crafting difficult situations for the group to collectively think out of band about. It’s okay to have early monsters that are mathematically unfair with the fun being in finding ways to do unfair things to those monsters in turn. That’s why comparing the play experience to X-Com is so absurd, because you’re not going “oh I’ve only got a 10% chance to hit this sucks” to yourself, you’re instead scheming with the other players about how to make a chlorine bomb or something.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:09
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Xiahou Dun posted:Hey hoss, it’s not my gaming philosophy, I play hippy story games, but that is a play style and people love it. He just got banned(+30) for doing some gross poo poo in CSPAM, so don't expect an answer lol. In tabletop games politics, I'm seeing scattered references (sourced in languages I don't read) that Ukrainian Azov fighters are specifically calling Chechens orcs who deserve to be slaughtered. D&D monster politics leading to actual real life war crimes, gross! https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/28/ukrainian-fighters-grease-bullets-against-chechens-with-pig-fat (And yes, orcs originally come from Tolkien but it's D&D and Warhammer and Warcraft that have kept the idea going strongest I think.) Arivia fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Mar 16, 2022 16:07
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Ionicpsycho posted:Hey, this has been bugging me for a bit and might actually be on topic. The very short answer is no, it's the result of a bunch of pre-existing developments in the Forgotten Realms setting leading up to 5e. The longer answer: DR (Dalereckoning) is the calendar used by humans who basically decided to stop being idiots and actually make a go of this civilization thing with others. At the time of the original Forgotten Realms box set, the setting started at 1356-1358 DR, and novels, supplements, and other products pushed the timeline forward to 1375 DR over about 20 years of real life (1987-2007). For 4e, WotC decided to push the setting forward a hundred years for an effective reset, along with a magical apocalypse changing many of the major powers and geographies. For the 4e setting, the date was set at 1479 DR to start, but then new supplements and novels kept it moving forward again. When WotC moved to 5e, they wanted to keep SOME of the existing continuity and events from 4e, but also wanted to undo a good chunk of the changes from the magical apocalypse. So they needed a chunk of time from the last supplements and novels published in 4e, which go to 1484 DR. They can't gently caress with these dates, because it's the dates for the cross-media program they pushed in late 4e (the Neverwinter supplement, Drizzt Do'Urden novels, and MMO) and their most profitable and popular products (we're talking about planning before 5e's explosion in popularity and cultural attention). They have to line up a bunch of weird, specific things to revert what they want to do and keep the parts they want, so there's ANOTHER big cross-media project to reset things (if you're familiar with comic book continuity, think of it as putting the toys back in the toy box for the next writer after your weird status quo changing run ends and all your stuff gets reverted) and that takes about five years to sort itself out. There's ANOTHER factor that also contributes to this, which is that each Forgotten Realms year after a certain point has a prophetic name or two (called the Roll of Years or its evil counterpart, the Roll of Black) which WotC likes aligning their big events up with as prophecies. WotC's definitely lined some stuff up, like 1490 fits a Drizzt Do'Urden novel, but some of them are also pretty obscure (which is normal for the Roll of Years). 5e FR products have been all over the calendar - the adventures are definitely stand alone things, as later ones are set in years before earlier published ones (Dragon Heist is in 1492 DR for example, but Rime of the Frostmaiden is 1489 DR). So in conclusion, WotC needed to move the timeline forward for a few years of transition after the pre-existing 4e products, which ended in 1484, and five years later to 1489 as the new "normal" is a reasonable addition. It's a coincidence of involved fantasy setting planning, and I would be extremely surprised if it was ever anything else. AmiYumi posted:I don't know, it's easy to jump at shadows with that sort of thing. I'd only worry if the company in question had a long history of racial essentialism, a founder who shaped the game itself after his own racist beliefs, a workplace hostile to marginalized groups of all kinds, and perhaps even some sort of issues directly at the time of writing the book in question with the company hiring a ton of alt-right types and infamous abusers and then secretly feeding them info about the people outraged at their presence. The thing is, none of the Mearls/Zak/Pundit poo poo ever looked to have affected the FR line planning, which was its own mess. Contrast to the openly-Nazi courting Martin Ericsson who was running White Wolf for awhile and all but said "we did that intentionally" when the dice example in the Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition core rulebook was 1,4,8,8. Scipiotik posted:I don't think it's true to say 5e takes place in 1489 anyway. Most of the adventures seem to be in the 1490s if they even bother giving a date. The adventures are all over the place like I said, but the 5e setting book (the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) sets itself firmly in 1489 as the current date. Arivia fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 01:07
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War and Pieces posted:This is only if you ignore some of the more out there bits of the fluff like the Star Child or the Sensei (Call me a Grog if you must). It's completely reasonable for someone within the universe to make the faith claim that this was Just As Planned. Z you fuckin grog you (please ignore me being literally surrounded by shelves of decades old D&D books)
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Apr 25, 2022 07:40
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Triskelli posted:Have the sensei appeared at all past The Lost & The Damned? I did some quick googling and they were in the Inquisitor War trilogy in 2004, at least as a story told in setting.
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Apr 25, 2022 11:36
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moths posted:Inquisitor War got a reprint in 2004 but it's actually an Ian Watson Rogue Trader era series. Thank you for the correction, that’s very important for this discussion.
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Apr 25, 2022 12:06
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90s Cringe Rock posted:40K logistics people perform miracles every second of every day, even with some big freebies thrown their way. Sure, they lose a planet occasionally, but it's the unit in a continent-wide desert getting an orbital drop of inflatable boats that you hear about, not the 999,999 that get the right resupply. The PARANOIA intensifies.
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Apr 26, 2022 05:25
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Xander77 posted:The Courier ending in F:NV is the first thing that springs to mind. The courier ending? What one do you mean?
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Jun 15, 2022 21:04
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Josef bugman posted:Essentially you choose to tell Mr House, the Legion and the NCR to gently caress themselves as you take over the entirety of Nevada as a separate beginning to a state. Much of it is predicated on you finding none of the other factions to be in line with what you believe. Oh, you mean Yes Man. Gotcha. I've never heard anyone call it the "Courier ending" before, I was wondering if you meant the ending of Lonesome Road or something.
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Jun 15, 2022 21:30
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Reveilled posted:As I recall, it's never actually implied in the ending of the game that you actually assume rulership over the independent Mojave. Getting the ending does involve you carrying out Benny's plan to topple House and take over, but I'm not sure you ever actually get the opportunity to affirm at any point that taking over is what you are intending to do. You can certainly infer that, since you probably have command over a vast securitron army, that your character does take over, but the game is strangely uninterested in having the player character articulate what "an independent Mojave" actually means to them. It's easy to miss, but there is an opportunity to decide what your New Vegas is going to be. As part of Finishing Touches Part 2, if you have high reputation with the Followers of the Apocalypse, you can talk to Julie Farkas about what you want Freeside to be like and how regular people should be cared for. You also get to very squarely say what you're doing when you face down General Oliver at the Dam, whether you're going "this is my town now, get out" or "yeah I just did all this to give it to the NCR mostly." The ending slides undercut the bit with the Followers, but you are actively making choices with Yes Man about who you're ignoring, who you're including and why or how, and so on. If you just skip all of Side Bets you've made dramatically different choices than if you actually engage with any or all of the factions.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:43
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