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Mundrial Mantis posted:Anyways, have some complaining about 3E not being real D&D. I'm in an ongoing Fading Suns game (2e, started before the newest edition came out), and the GM is definitely one of these guys. He's a really good GM! But he also kind of resents any game system after the 90s, especially 3e D&D. I also recall running into some of these people in the wild back when 3e was first coming out, just did not want to shift systems mid-campaign (which is fine!) and also got preemptively defensive about the very idea. Not to mention that a lot of people asked about Shadowrun will have serious Opinions about which edition you should be playing. The internet cast a stark spotlight on edition warring during the 3.5->4e shift but oh man it was already there.
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Nov 7, 2021 17:23
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Cobalt-60 posted:Has anyone ever run into a case of dwarves being depicted as jews, besides Tolkien's footnotes? Every dwarf I've ever run into has been some version of "Beardy McDrunk", "Hammer McSmash," or "Gruff McStone;" those are the stereotypes I associate with dwarves. (How did dwarves become scottish stereotypes?) 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. I don't know what official word is, but I feel like they were also meant to be more like the Florentine Republic, with the powerful dragonmarked House Kundarak meant to invoke magically-gifted Medicis. Just, well, what you aim for and what you hit isn't always the same thing.
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Nov 11, 2021 21:29
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MadDogMike posted: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). Yeah, the gnomes of Zilargo basically use secret police, called the Trust. They culturally value intelligence and control of information, far more than they do force. It's generally attributed to them being caught between an expansionist (at the time) human kingdom to the north and west, and a saber-rattling declining hobgoblin state to the east. So their solution, as a small (hah) population without much materiel means to make war, was to throw in with the humans and make themselves valuable as informants in the region. Like with many things in Eberron, the bits are present to have a deeper reading where clearly there's something incredibly scary to be a common gnome living in a state that constantly practices espionage on its own people as a matter of accepted policy. But you can also just accept the surface-level reading where it's just some quirky trait of a relatively non-violent people (because they live surrounded by very tall people who are WAY better than them at violence), as an excuse for the niche they occupy. That said, really everyone in Eberron is big into spying. It's shortly after a major war and everybody in power is jockeying for any advantage for the next one. The gnomes have the Trust and the dwarves have the Aurum, but the dragons have the Chamber, demon lords have the Lords of Dust, the various dragonmarked houses have their own agents, Breland (generically Good kingdom) has the King's Dark Lanterns (CIA ratfuckers), and so on. There's a conspiracy everywhere, which I feel helps disarm a little bit of the stereotypes hanging on the gnomes and dwarves.
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Nov 11, 2021 23:24
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Telsa Cola posted:I never really found it lovely because in order to be an atheist in that setting you have to ignore the many many many gods and divine poo poo and actual loving angels and demons popping out all willy nilly. 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.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, I've always been suspicious of the idea that the way to "fix" orcs is by lathering detail onto them without actually changing the situation. Oh, they have their own culture (it's tribal) and religion (shamanism of course). I bet they also have really good music and food, but they remain bad guys you can feel good about killing. IMO it's better, if not great, when they're automatons summoned by evil wizards or whatever. As always I will shill Eberron, which took this approach and then changed enough of the context to make it infinitely less terrible. To wit, that they're tribal because they've been stuck in marginal lands with a low population while other empires come and go, and shamanism demonstrably works great so why abandon it? Plus, why would you feel good about killing them, they're not bothering anyone! Same with most of the other "monster races," really, the orcs are just some of the more prominent of a bunch of marginalized groups.
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Mar 29, 2022 19:38
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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. As someone who's been through a campaign where this came up a lot with a single plot-important language that only one PC spoke (and no real downtime for anyone else to pick it up), I recommend using this sparingly because it's real easy to get overdone, though.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:44
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Mystic Theurge appeals to a greedy little weirdo part of my brain that giggles and screams about getting all the spells and schemes how to add stuff that's exclusive to other spell lists as well, no matter how suboptimal it actually is. I still desperately want to play one.
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Dec 14, 2022 01:11
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Archonex posted:Ironically, rebelling in this system would be creating working and sustainable alternative systems of legal revenue that don't require going into medical debt or selling parts of yourself off to be chromed up. Which is a much trickier concept to envision in a game or a book while keeping it as entertaining as "edgy outsider shoots authority figures to make a living" or whatever. I've joked occasionally to some friends that Stardew Valley, with the overreaching megacorp and actual supernatural poo poo hanging around, is secretly set in Shadowrun and you burn your SIN to escape to this back-to-earth enclave. It's not super-realistic in most cyberpunk settings that such an enclave could hope to keep the megacorp out, but Shadowrun might allow just such a one guarded through various magical means. Now phrased in this light, I... actually want that? Like maybe it's just me slowly calcifying into an old man who lives in bumfuck nowhere but I do some of the hobby animal-raising and gardening and such, and a game that gets into that actively in such a context sounds really oddly appealing.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:51
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I consider it also akin to the belief that long books in even longer series are a Good Thing, too. More plot, rules, lore, etc. to acquire a command over as if that's a primary virtue. I'm still somewhat susceptible to that but oh man I was incredibly bad about it in my teens and early 20s.
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Dec 21, 2022 18:05
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Kobolds are outright still little dog (or at least mammalian) people in AD&D 2e, it was a noteworthy change that Wizards made them lizardy and tied to dragons in 3rd Edition. Japanese nerd-media dog kobolds are most different in that they're often depicted as big dudes almost like dog gnolls instead of dog goblins.
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Aug 2, 2023 21:11
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Balrogs are also a subset of the Maiar, spirits who generally seem able to take on different forms though with a tendency to stick to those that suit them. Maybe the wings do or don't exist at whim. (Never mind that this shape-changing power can be broken and limited, as happened with Sauron. And also apparently there's a reference to balrogs riding dragons during an ancient battle and some being unseated, falling to the earth which they wouldn't necessarily have had to do if they had wings.)
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Oct 18, 2023 23:07
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Hostile V posted:Anyone worth a drat who listens to System Mastery knows Dwarves are Italian-American New Yorkers. Which dovetails nicely with Eberron making them Italian merchant republics except in the mountains.
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Oct 22, 2023 15:37
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