Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

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.

Yeah, you kind of have to be an rear end in a top hat to be an atheist in FR. You can think the gods are huge pricks (they pretty much are) and think they should all be destroyed, but that doesn't make you an atheist; that makes you a Cyricist.

Arivia posted:

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.

In one of the Avatar sequels, Mystra says that the gods of Kara-Tur's Celestial Bureaucracy are the Faerunian gods by different names. But that's just one aside in one novel.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Define your terms. Why would a buddhist think of Lorth as a "god"

It's Lolth or Lloth. Salvatore moves that second L around, but he never adds an R. :v:

# ¿ Mar 15, 2022 23:00

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:20

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

And the real funny thing is that none of this poo poo is necessary when you just have humans. Mind you, apparently elves and dwarves and orcs were apparently begrudging additions to D&D that Gygax supposedly resented when he just wanted Conan style fantasy adventure. (Which of course has its own problems)

I think a lot of what becomes gross and racist about orcs and other fantasy races stems precisely from Gygax deciding to use them as stand-ins for Howard's Picts, Hyrkanians, Stygians, and the like.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2022 19:54

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:

Is that the premise of Necromunda?

That and falling from those scaffolds unless your gang was lucky enough to roll that some rope was available at the trading post.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2022 14:52

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Telsa Cola posted:

I somewhat get what you are going for but this reeks of the people who sit through an entire movie and then come out and complain they didn't like it and it was too violent or whatever and request a refund.

No you do not get a refund for the media you just consumed in its entirety.

And in the case of RDR and other open world games, you can continue to play without engaging with the story arc. That's kind of the conceit of open world games, especially when you consider that the mechanical point of their stories is to give you a tour of the open world they built for you to explore.

Archonex posted:

It's not, actually.

It's both a way to let you continue side missions and open world content and a continuation of the main story.

If I remember correctly, the tragedy of the last revenge mission isn't that the guy stands there and lets you shoot him--I remember that being another quickdraw--it's that he turns out to have the same desire as John: to leave behind his life of bloodshed and settle somewhere quiet with his family. So by hunting him down and killing him for killing John, you're making (and making Jack make) the same decision he did. To hammer that point home even further, you find him through his wife, using his family against him as he used Abigail and Jack against John.

E: To be clear, I'm only addressing the characterization of that last dude there. I agree with you otherwise about the ending.

PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Apr 2, 2022

# ¿ Apr 2, 2022 17:17

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Archonex posted:

The marshal/FBI guy made it a point to hunt down John and threaten his family despite (and I may be misremembering this) having not been personally harmed by all of John's antics in his youth. Meanwhile, Jack has a legitimate grievance against the marshal/FBI/whatever dude

I kinda disagree here. Ross--I think the dude's name is Ross, gonna call him that for convenience--is not personally harmed by John's criminal past (unless something happens to him in RDR2 that I forget) but he does have a personal motivation that is arguably just as justifiable as Jack's motive: Ross believes in the rule of the state and its laws. He believes outlaws like John and the rest of the Van der Linde gang's killers are his ideological and existential foes, so he has them killed without remorse. But as ruthlessly as he pursues that goal, he does also restrain himself from going beyond it. Note that while he holds Abigail and Jack to coerce John, he never harms them and doesn't appear to have intended to ever harm them. He could pursue them when they flee Beecher's Hope, but he lets them go. John and Jack are men of the fleeting and perhaps never more than mythical wild west while Ross is a man of the modern era.

You can easily argue that John doesn't deserve to just walk away and live a peaceful life. Even if you always choose the honorable options, John will still kill hundreds of people over the course of the game, nevermind his life of crime prior to RDR1.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2022 21:41

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Oh I don't think we actually disagree that much. I'm not trying to justify Ross's actions. I'm just saying he has his own twisted justification for them just as Jack does. Ross acts as a shadow of both John and Jack. Like John, he thought he could retire peacefully after a life of bloodshed. Like Jack, he has an ideological justification for murder. RDR is unsympathetic to the institutions and their agents bringing order to its wild west, but it's equally unsympathetic towards the charlatans and criminals who would keep it wild.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2022 20:13

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

The entire Mexico section of the game is pretty hosed up in general. The only decent man you meet down there is the old white dude who's a former outlaw gunslinger. Everyone else is some type of sexual predator. The leader of the revolution is as corrupt and greedy as the men he's fighting against. Even the little things you can try to do to make life a little better are quickly undermined, like that pimp is going to kill the prostitute even if you save her and sequester her away at the church.

TBF, this is Rockstar we're talking about, and all their games are incredibly cynical. Even RDR2's genuinely beautiful story of redemption is very cynical. Arthur and John will die no matter what.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2022 16:44

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Fuschia tude posted:

The purpose was to tell a DM who rolled an encounter on a wandering monster table whether the creatures would attack on sight. Dwarves and elves won't; vampires and demons will; animals might.

That just reinforces that there were clear moral implications to Law and Chaos, and they weren't some Moorcockian cosmic forces of Order versus Change.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 19:53

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tnega posted:

Good, now you too can wield a +2 rear end jawbone. How do they approach the warlock class? Can I be indentured to a djinn?

They got that covered already in Tasha's.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 15:16

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Disproportionation posted:

To be honest I don't think the Lyran Commonwealth has any characteristics that makes it specifically West German over just "German", other than maybe it entering a union with another state (briefly).

House Steiner is Napoleonic era Prussia right down to the proud professional soldiers being led by social climbers beholden to outdated doctrine.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2022 01:39

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

SirPhoebos posted:

I think this describes my feelings on Cyberpunk settings and what is appropriate for megacorps to actually control vs influence. To me, a cyberpunk corporation needs to at least pretend it's still beholden to national governments even if in reality those governments are wrapped around their fingers, because the underlying story tension is "how much control do they really have". Once corporations start doing poo poo like lobbing nukes at their competition, it ceases being Cyberpunk and is now a grimdark pastiche.

In cyberpunk fiction, it's pretty rare to see megacorps exerting explicit control. Shadowrun and CP:2020/2077/Red feature that because of the outsized influence Walter Jon Williams' Hard Wired has on their settings. And I think a lot of people assume it's a big part of cyberpunk in general because of how Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash is an entry into the genre for them.

But megacorps never replace governments in Gibson's novels or Pat Cadigan's. There's the big evil PMC in Shirley's Eclipse trilogy, but the whole plot revolves around them operating under government sanction. They do replace governments in Shiner's Frontera, but that's because they're the only organizations left in that world. They also replace governments in Sterling's Islands in the Net, but that novel's central joke is they're just other governments and they mostly get overthrown.

Megacorps make good villains, which is why they are prominent in games, but they're more often obstacles or just facts of life in the fiction those games are based one. Cyberpunk is anticapitalist for sure, but it's not anticapitalist in the sense that it's about overthrowing the institutions or systems of capitalism. It's more about surviving within or among the cracks of those institutions and systems. I think this is an important point that distinguishes cyberpunk from other dystopian SF. Like a cyberpunk version of 1984 wouldn't follow a member of the party like Winston; it would instead follow a small cast of proles while they run a score on some cigarettes or something. They'd get caught up in organized crime. They'd get a glimpse of how the system really works. They'd end up happy to go on living their lives.

And maybe they'd meet a database pretending to be some mythical being as the only way it can relate to humans. Focusing on evil megacorps and their exploitation shouldn't detract from how wonderfully weird cyberpunk can and should get.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 05:47

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Archonex posted:

Cyberpunk 2077 is kind of generic edgy garbage though and the only reason it's getting attention is because CDPR spent so much time hyping it up only to make another Witcher 3 ubi-soft tier open world that was buggy as hell. Once that fades i'm not sure anyone will really remember the setting unless they keep putting out memeish laden stuff like the anime.

At least Shadowrun has a setting that's interesting. Like, the whole "combine fantasy races and their cultures with cyberpunk dystopias" has a genuinely interesting spin compared to Cyberpunk's generic TnA focused hellscape that any game or setting could pull off.

Shadowrun sounds as if it just suffers from garbage development management, and could be genuinely good if someone actually took some interest in putting out a good end product. Cyberpunk 2077 is always going to have to struggle with the setting itself being barebones cyberpunk light on depth in favor of shallow edginess, ironically.

That's the thing, though. A buggy triple A video game and a Netflix series are more investment in popularizing the Cyberpunk IP than Shadowrun has seen in decades. And CDPR isn't resting on just that. They've invested the last two years into making CP2077 a stable and decent game. They're about to release a DLC starring Idris Elba. More games and TV shows are in the works. Shadowrun's owners aren't doing anything of the sort.

And in 2077's defense, none of its many bugs were as infuriating as the game breaking bug that punished me for doing the cool thing and befriending the vampire lady in Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

I'd also suggest that CP's more generic take on the genre can be to its benefit. You can play all sorts of different cyberpunk games with CP: Red's relatively simple and workable system. With Shadowrun, you have to contend with a game system that grows more and more messy with each edition and is only really suited to playing Shadowrun's specific genre mashup. Cyberpunk's setting is shallow and flashy, in keeping with Pondsmith's particular style-over-substance take on the genre, but for all its metaplot and lore, I don't think Shadowrun's setting has that much more depth to it. You can quickly pick up the CP:R rulebook and start running a game for your friends whose only experience with TTRPGs is D&D and only knowledge of the cyberpunk genre is a passing interest in its major works. Shadowrun requires you to learn and make work a system that ranges from overly complex to downright unplayable and that's designed specifically for its own specific genre mashup. There's a reason why "I want to play Shadowrun; what non-Shadowrun rules should I use?" is a perennial point of discussion over in TG.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 22:49

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Magnetic North posted:

So, weird tangent but: I hated basically every inch of Snowcrash and I would call that book style-over-substance. In your seemingly informed opinion: is something like Neuromancer still worth reading if I reacted so negatively so something everyone seems to like?

Yes, Neuromancer is definitely worth reading still. I'd argue that all of Gibson's stuff is worth checking out.

Snowcrash is really more of a spoof of cyberpunk to humorously frame Stephenson's info dumps about coding and language. I found it entertaining the first time I read it, but it did not reward a second reading.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Neuromancer is really outdated but a lot more heartfelt. Snowcrash is pretty much a satire of 80s cyberpunk, I imagine either bouncing off it or coming to weird conclusions if you go at it without prior genre exposure.

Neuromancer dates itself with its takes on the technology of the near future, but I think what it's saying more broadly about surviving late capitalism, the meaning of personhood, and the commodification of human bodies is all still very relevant to our current world.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 23:42

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Archonex posted:

Again, this doesn't really disagree with what i'm saying. Shadowrun needs better managerial oversight to ensure it's massive gently caress ups and lack of modern publicity don't screw it over. Cyberpunk by contrast only has that attention to begin with because of CDPR's gently caress ups and ridiculous hype alongside the transphobia bullshit that gets extremist right wing culture warriors rocks off.

Shadowrun definitely has lots of potential depth to it. The stuff related to the Horrors and Earthdawn, the magic spikes that can be worked as an allegory to rampant global warming or any other form of rampant economics, literally everything to do with the post humanistic stuff that keeps creeping into the games and novels (along with the debate of what a human even is and how this perception is manipulated by people in power - Thais, Rachter, along with any persecuted metahuman archetype and whatnot as an example), the rights of artificial life-forms ala Bladerunner (Deus and co), whether a long approach is better to a short term approach in terms of planning (Elves/dragons versus everyone else), etc, etc. The problem is that later editions don't capitalize on this as much as some of the older lore does. Again, it's a management and design issue.

The problem with the "glitz and glam" Pondsmith approach is that at the end of the day, any shallow near-future setting with cybernetic augmentations can do what Cyberpunk 2077 does and has it as a given in the setting. Meanwhile, Shadowrun is trying something more expansive than that and often botches the final product and their handling of the IP. Obviously opinions differ between each person out there, but if I had to choose which one was more interesting and could be expanded on in interesting ways assuming both had public attention and well managed success i'd go for Shadowrun since I can see the sum total of what Cyberpunk 2077 offers just about anywhere that handles Cyberpunk literature, Shadowrun included.

It's just deeply ironic that Shadowrun as an IP has been botched so hard despite the wasted potential it has while Cyberpunk 2077, the most watered down interpretation of a cyberpunk setting, is getting a second breath of life at the hands of CDPR's lovely behavior.

Also, the vampire lady was cool, you should try it out again if you have still have a save. She'll join your party for the last dungeon if you teach her how to be a proper vampiric crime boss instead of letting her awkwardly going on about thralls and mortal servants and what not like a hilarious Stoker cliche. Ironically, if you go the right path with her she's probably one of the nicest characters in the game too. Which says something about the people you can meet along the way, I guess.

I think I am disagreeing with what you're saying in a few important ways. I don't disagree that Shadowrun could probably be a much bigger IP if it had real investment behind it in terms of marketing and design. But I think we disagree on why CP has become popular. You pin it on CDPR's lovely behavior. I pin it on CDPR investing a lot of money and effort to make it into a brand name.

I also think we disagree on how much more depth there is to Shadowrun's setting. I think Shadowrun's setting is just as generic as CP's, only it adds generic fantasy poo poo into the mix. Post humanism is a basic part of cyberpunk. As are ecological collapse and exploitation and the marginalization of different peoples. You don't need orcs or ghouls to explore racism. You don't need magic bugs from another dimension to explore climate change. I love that Shadowrun mashes up cyberpunk with fantasy, but I don't think it gains a great deal of depth by doing so.

As for vampire lady, I did befriend her and was very excited to see her show up to help me at the door to that last dungeon. Then the game broke because her dialog window would not completely close and so I couldn't interact with that door and actually enter the last dungeon. CP2077 never broke in a way that prevented me from actually completing the game. It's doubly infuriating because Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a great game that I would like to finish.

quote:

As for the punk aspects of cyberpunk as a genre, the punk aspect sometimes goes completely out the window. If you want, you can even take jobs from the (extremely corrupt, extremely brutal) police! Like, that's literally the most anti-punk thing possible.

This, like the Screenrant article you linked (and -rant articles in general; don't follow those sites--they are just the most basic of trash), is kinda missing the point of the "punk" part of cyberpunk. Sterling didn't coin the term because the characters in the genre should be anti-police or anti- other institutions. He coined the term because the writers he was promoting were all young "punks" coming from outside the SF establishment. There's nothing un-cyberpunk about working for the cops. The main character of the seminal cyberpunk film is a former cop who now works as an assassin for the cops. And heck, the basic premise of Shadowrun--the Shadowrun--is doing an illegal job for a corporation. That's just as anti-punk in the sense you're using it as is working for the cops.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2022 22:14

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Archonex posted:

I can't comment much on screenrant as a whole. If the screenrant article isn't good enough I can provide others. It's a sentiment i've heard echoed elsewhere by people who were dissatisfied with the punk aspects of it.

As for punk, punk also has roots in anti-establishment and anti-authority. It was just, for lack of a better word, colonized by various corporations and marketing attempts later on. Heck, the gothic punk in WoD is a great example of this. Sure, the anti-establishment types are representative of an authority, but it's one against the actual authority that is openly corrupt and old world in it's thinking. Working for the police in a setting where the police are one of the prospective bad guys (and you are one of the downtrodden masses they police.) representative of that establishment type authority is an example of siding with the latter over the former.

To make a comparison: Shadowrun's Shadowrunners can weirdly often meet the requirement for the punk part of cyberpunk despite working for corporations, as the methodology behind most runs is explicitly working in between the cracks and exploiting the corporation's hatred of each other for your own benefit rather than just signing up for a direct salary or paycheck (in fact, in the games siding with the establishment/antagonists can end up being bad ends depending on the game and how deep into the lore you are) to shoot people for the cops part time. And this isn't taking into account that on many runs that there's a good chance you end up shooting the representative at the end of the run (especially if they betray you) or botching it intentionally due to a double cross or just because the corps crossed ethical lines the characters can't stomach (Looking at you, Saeder-Krupp, Horizon, or Aztechnology.) rather than taking the paycheck.

Unless I forgot something that sort of thing generally doesn't come up more than a few times in Cyberpunk 2077 because the characters tend to not have that amount of freeform agency. Most of what we get is go here kill poo poo, take the money, and get out. You're basically a part time employee with a grudge against certain factions.

Like, I get what you're saying, but I think insofar as the politics of _____ punk games go we're going to have to agree to disagree here on the Shadowrun parts of things and the depth of each of the two settings in general.

Also, that sucks about the vampire lady. She's hands down one of the strongest melee characters in the trilogy. Which is fitting for an awakened HMHVV I infected character. Probably is patched by now though, if that helps Not sure if Shadowrun Hong Kong keeps saves on the steam cloud. .

Yeah, it's a perspective I've seen elsewhere as well. I just wanted to take the opportunity to get a dig in on the -Rant sites. They're such low-effort clickbait garbage. Inverse and Kotaku articles have made the same point with a lot more thought and nuance. But I think that perspective overlooks the origins of the term Cyberpunk.

As for the -punk part of cyberpunk, I think we're talking past each other somewhat. Yes, capital P Punk has its roots in anti-authority, anti-capitalism, and anti-establishment. Yes, it has been colonized and commodified by capitalist forces. But those aren't the reasons why Bruce Sterling coined the term and assembled the original Mirror Shades authors. He called his "movement" Cyberpunk because it was a reaction to established SF of the 60s and 70s. Now a lot of the Punk ethos does make its way into Cyberpunk--a lot of it was there from the start--but maintaining that Cyberpunk is not cyber-punk without that ethos is a very narrow way to look at the genre. Punk style and aesthetic is another thing that Cyberpunk takes from Punk, and Pondsmith's mistake is overly focusing on that aesthetic, but Shadowrun also really plays up the aesthetic side of Cyberpunk.

The side hustles in 2077 are largely trash, smash and grab missions. The problem with them is less that they're not punk enough and more that they're just the same kind of trash you encounter in Fallout 4 radiant missions. But that's a little tangential to the working for the cops thing. I don't remember actually working for the cops in 2077. I remember working for a politician to solve a murder that he thinks the police are covering up, in the process befriending a detective, and then helping that detective go rogue to solve a case the rest of the department is not interested in. That's not really working for authority or helping tread on the downtrodden. There are other times you work alongside some cops, and you can take Netwatch's side in the whole Voodoo Boys plot, but there you're not really invested in their conflict and have all sorts of reasons to turn on the VBs. I might be forgetting some other big plot. It's been about a year since I've played the game.

I also think you're being unfair to use the rote side missions in CP2077 as the only examples of CP's potential depth. lovely side missions in an open-world game simply won't have much depth to them. Would you use FO4's crap radiant missions to suggest that the FO setting is shallow?

As for HK, I played it on Gamepass, so my save is good. I'll go back and replay one day because it was generally an excellent game and I want to see its ending.

E: Oh I just remembered there are those NCPD dispatch encounters where you can shoot up some gangers for the cops. Yeah, those are very un-punk trash.

PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Dec 17, 2022

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 00:04

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Sorry to double post, but I want to look at a few things from CP2077 that I think are "deeper" and more clever than they initially appear.

Hiring Keanu to play Johnny is on the surface just really smart fan-service. Everyone knows Keanu. Everyone loves Keanu. He's the star of the most successful cyberpunk or at least cyberpunk adjacent film franchise of all time: The Matrix. In that he is a literal messiah who discovers the path to salvation lies in compromise and a shared desire to live. In CP2077 he is an uncompromising psychopath with a messiah complex who leads a daring and successful terrorist attack, the sum result of which as far as you can see is a bunch of unnamed innocent people die, the corporation he attacks is perhaps even more powerful and just rebuilds their fancy headquarters, and he gets his "soul" trapped by their gizmos, leading to him, or maybe just a recording of him, living in your head as an annoying, cantankerous drunk.

Hiring the Refused to play as his band Samurai is equally inspired. Here's a band who 20 years ago had a massive impact on punk music and even named their opus, The Shape of Punk to Come. But in the decades that followed, their influence has wained and their bombastic claims about changing the shape of punk music seem just that. This is exactly the same place Samurai finds itself in the year 2077. The goons who are about to reply to this post and tell me how I'm not giving Refused enough credit here are that dude selling the Samurai memorabilia or that other dude collecting it. :v:

Some of the major conflicts you come across are cyberpunk as all get-out. Take Panem's plot. You have this nomad clan (a really neat concept that is one of the few cyberpunk tropes that Shadowrun lacks) who are essentially torn between Saul's desire to take the false security of working for the corps and Panem's desire to remain independent even if that threatens the clan's security. The problem with that sequence is you really don't have any opportunity to take Saul's side in the major conflict. It's do Panem's missions or let it drop. The weird crucifixion is edge-lord as all hell, but it's also all about commodifying human life and experience. Do you tell this dude he is deluded, ruining his last moments on Earth but also ruining the corp's scheme to make money off his death, or do you let him maintain that this act is redemptive and also provide the corp with a product that will make them millions?

On the trans ads, let me first say that I'm the cissiest of fucks, so take what I say with the biggest grain of salt. Those ads are gross, but I don't think the point is to send up or express transphobia. Instead, I think the point is how capitalism will banally exploit trans acceptance just like it would anything else to sell loving energy drinks. The game is gross and juvenile about sex and sexuality in general, so it's easy to imagine the devs yucking it up over their dumb transphobic "joke". (It probably doesn't help that the devs are mostly straight dudes from a conservative eastern-European country). But aside from those ads, the game is very chill and nonchalant about trans people. You run into a few characters who are trans, most notably the bartender, but it's never presented as their defining characteristic or a problem. The bartender's problem is that she's obsessed with avenging an accidental death.

That's not to say that CP2077 is much more than a FO4-grade open world adventure. It's ultimately pretty shallow, and Archonex is correct to describe it as a theme park. I'd describe it as a juvenile love letter to the genre. To compare the recent HBS Shadowrun games to it, I'd say that Returns is equally light on nuance, while DragonFall and Hong Kong have it beat on narrative depth. Hong Kong probably does the best job of marrying Shadowrun's cyberpunk elements to its fantasy ones. I'm not sure I'd describe the plot as deeper due to that marriage, but it finds a really great point of overlap between the two in which to set its story. I would ascribe the better stories in DragonFall and Hong Kong to making better use of their setting than necessarily having the better setting.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 01:13

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Funny how different that is from Reeves` more classic Cyberpunk role as a literal Gibson protagonist in Johnny Mnemonic.

Yeah, great point. I figured I was already gonna be long winded enough, so I skipped over that. :v:

E: Though I should add that being a recording of a dead guy is also a classic Gibson cyberpunk character.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 01:21

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Old Dixie Flatline. Let's not try to dig into why "Dixie" of all nicknames.

This is from the guy who decided his story needed a classic mol and named her Molly.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 01:36

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Archonex posted:

Not really disagreeing with a fair bit of this, just want to say that CDPR's PR management team was notoriously transphobic and would shoot off snarky transphobic bullshit on twitter to get the right wing throwbacks riled up prior to people calling them out and the account getting somewhat squelched on that front. So in light of that it came off as kind of lovely since y'know, regressives gonna slip in regressive bullshit in whatever way they can.

Ahh. I didn't pay one lick of attention to the game before it came out, so I missed out on that poo poo, but it's not surprising in the least.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 17:40

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

It's okay if you can't really figure out what Snowcrash is supposed to be doing. Neither could Stephenson.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2022 22:08

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

moths posted:

In Shadowrun, it was mostly a balancing mechanic so you couldn't be an awesome wizard AND full of hardware.

It wasn't that you were losing your humanity, it's that you replaced your chakras with hardpoints and gadgets.

Even CP:2020's humanity loss was a balancing mechanic so you couldn't just keep loading up on new gear. The whole "trade your humanity for a technological edge" thing is largely an invention of cyberpunk roleplaying, much like how "Vancian" magic only has the thinnest of connections to how magic works in the Dying Earth series. When it appears in cyberpunk fiction, it's a more figurative thing, like how Molly sells her self to afford her implants.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2022 01:34

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

ChubbyChecker posted:

i have no sources for it, but my take is that this is the main market these days

I think it's always been the main market. I still maintain that 4E D&D's real failure was that its books didn't make for good casual reading.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 00:26

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

a good RPG core book (and most supplements that aren't completely narrative and/or system-agnostic) should read and be organized like a reference manual

the only reasonable alternative is a tutorial but in my experience players don't read that poo poo anyways so might as well prioritize lookup time

(which is to say, as usual, 4E's "failure" was mostly a product of doing things right)

Yeah, I should've put "failure" in scare quotes. My point is that 4E D&D's rulebooks are excellent instruction manuals for actually playing 4E, but aren't terribly entertaining sources of casual reading, and a lot of people who buy RPG books just do the latter.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 00:59

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Schwarzwald posted:

That kind of follows previous editions of D&D. Traditionally, if you wanted good reading you didn't pick up the Player's Handbook or the Dungeon Master's Guide, you took the Monster Manual.

The monster manual was king for good reading, but don't sleep on the weapon and armor esoterica and spell lists from the PHB or the magic item lists from the DMG.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 01:12

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tolkien never gave his elves pointy ears.

Luka can definitely dunk.

The issue with fantasy races like elves is that the whole concept of fantasy races (and most SF aliens) is rooted in taking a set of stereotypes about humans and labeling that set of stereotypes as non-human. But if you strip away all the stereotypes that make elves distinct from humans, you essentially take away the entire point of having elves.

The truth is fantasy RPGs are just rooted in a lot of odious poo poo. Fantasy races are rooted in racist stereotypes. Fantasy adventures are rooted in colonialist and Orientalist narratives. You can mitigate or interrogate a lot of that, but it's all so deeply baked into the genre that at some level you just have to ignore or accept it to enjoy the game.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2023 20:14

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:20

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Randalor posted:

But then how did Gandalf get off of Orthanc?

Dude, he's a wizard. He cast Featherfall.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2023 18:58

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