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For one, Roma have special connections to certain types of supernatural creatures, namely Gangrel and Ravnos vampires, and there are minor magickal powers that they can have.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:45
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CommieGIR posted:Seems like VtM suffers from the same sort of racial issues that a lot of late 80s early 90s role play games did.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:56
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MonsieurChoc posted:Changeling: the Dreaming has deeply hosed up politics. It's hard to unpack the whole thing, but the way your characters are considered old and fading at like 21, the whole Commoner vs Noble thing, it's weird idea of what is Banal and what is not, how it's bad guys are psychologists, the way the Unseelie switch from unfairly treated minority to pure evil between books, etc.
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Jul 28, 2021 21:10
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Milo and POTUS posted:What's F&F?
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Jul 29, 2021 17:18
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Barker frankly wasn't famous enough for there to be published volumes of his private letters or published interviews. The novel is his verified public anti-Semitic statement.
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Mar 24, 2022 19:48
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Doubleposting because this sure is an argument someone (not Morris) came up with!
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Mar 29, 2022 00:36
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It actually really doesn't help that some D&D editions and Warcraft actually doubled down on the vaguely native peoples characterisation of Orcs, while Warhammer 40k ironically works by specifically having them be an artificial species of super-soldiers complete with their own fully formed ecosystem.
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Mar 29, 2022 18:16
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It's very funny that no one saw "This sentient species is an infection" as a problem, and that they apparently managed a much worse take on it than Warhammer. In early D&D, Law vs. Chaos was basically a shorthand for "will this Creature Type attack me on sight y/n?" It took some time to evolve into the brokebrained cosmology it is in D&D and its imitators today.
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Mar 29, 2022 21:19
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Telsa Cola posted:Hopelessness (in part) and stasis is Nurgles deal and why he is opposed to Tzeentch. Nurgle is about the inevitablility of death and decay which is also why it's funny that he is the "nicest" of the lot.
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Mar 31, 2022 19:25
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I keep forgetting to replay Marathon now that it's free and I have a Mac again. Edit: I would agree that there's an element of moral responsibility in storytelling, but playing through different paths in a video game doesn't make you a storyteller in that sense. It's categorically different from tabletop RPGs. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Apr 1, 2022 20:37
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Idunno if this is political, but I had the same disappointment with the Mad Max game that you all are describing with RDR. I really liked the plot, and the last act was absolutely awful. Max spends the whole game spurning human connection because he just wants to get his car back so he can drive off into the wasteland. In the end, everyone else dies horribly and Max drives off into the wasteland. It completely missed the point of Fury Road, where Max's arc is embracing his humanity instead of trying to be this inhuman thing that survives because it's shorn itself of everything beyond survival.
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Apr 6, 2022 18:29
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I know the game isn't Canon (a fake idea), but were they ever clear about whether it was a prequel or a sequel? Edit: VVV The hallucinatory wedding officiated by a dog was one of the best things I've ever seen in a video game; like they let Refn direct a Mad Max movie. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Apr 7, 2022 |
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Apr 7, 2022 14:06
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fr0id posted:So, several years on, what are folks takeaways from that edition war? What does it mean politically, and socially. For a short while, the most politically dramatic forum on SA was the very small traditional games forum. First, I think you're conflating the Edition Wars with a broader culture war within tabletop. That's the problem with using grognards.txt as a lens. There were grognards who hated anything that changed after their favourite edition, and grognards who insisted that if something was okay with their gaming group in 1980, it can't not be okay today. There was a lot of overlap between the two, but the Venn diagram wasn't a circle. What they had in common was throwing tantrums at anything that seemed to criticize their nostalgia. And none of this connects one-for-one to any kind of partisan kulturkampf, because for all these people the Republican Party was extremely uncool. None of them, from the twentysomething edgelords to the middle-aged grognards, wanted to be associated with McCain or Palin or Romney or old men whining about Barfsack Ocrumbo. Bear in mind that some of these people would call you Tipper Gore or Pat Pulling for suggesting that roleplaying games shouldn't feature rape fetish porn. The connection to the broader culture war was through Gamergate. Alexander Macris, writer of ACKS and cofounder of the Escapist, was of course a big Gamergater. I believe James Desborough and Venger Satanis also identified as part of the movement. John Tarnowski (RPGPundit) whined about critics of Gamergate, then whined about being identified with Gamergate for doing so. Macris actually ran a site about video game journalism, the others latched onto it because they are, before anything else, incredibly fragile attention whores. All of these people, plus more I haven't mentioned and plenty of randos I've never heard of, all used the language that developed around Gamergate and helped spawn the alt-Right. Whining about SJWs and how liberals are the real fascists, etc. It was very "alt-light" in character. For what it's worth, Satanis is a Republican and Tarnowski is some kind of mystical fascist. Zak S has a pattern of trying to portray himself as a left-anarchist while writing reactionary rants with the terminology changed. (For example, he writes about being persecuted by an "online hatemob" because he knows that saying "cancel culture" would paint him as a reactionary.) The takeaway is that the anti-4e side of the Edition Wars tended to be deeply reactionary without identifying as right-wing, and often refusing and resenting attempts to label them as such. fr0id posted:Is the OSR still seen as a mostly regressive force? thoughts on those assignments of politics to edition preference? How did it affect game design? Lessons learned? Etc. But it's not all good now. For example, Cavegirl (author of Esoteric Enterprises) made a couple posts about how she's going to focus on 5e content instead of labeling what she does OSR, because she can make more sales while dealing with much less hostility. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 18:30
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TheRPGSite is weird because it wasn't built around a philosophy/approach to RPGs, as opposed to forums like Dragonsfoot, which is explicitly dedicated to AD&D1e, or The Gaming Den, which is dedicated to Frank Trollman's incredibly blinkered theories of game design. It was a catchment for people who got banned from RPGnet and ENWorld, and the only uniting factor is that it's made up of people who can't talk about games on other forums without losing their temper and publicly melting down. Last I checked, its members argue bitterly about the most mundane poo poo imaginable when they're not united in hatred against some outside force. (Zak's signature there is "Buy something. 100% of the proceeds go toward legal action against people this forum hates.") Of course, people like that tend to be reactionary turbonerds who hate indie games. The attitudes toward certain RPGs and types of RPGs grew out of Tarnowski's own idiosyncratic tastes and fascist politics, as much as anything else. Like, he loves Amber Diceless and wrote a ripoff of it, so it is officially not one of the hated Storygames. I think it's actually less fervently right wing than it was a few years ago, when they had regular posters who would constantly call people beta cuck faggots and ramble about the Cultural Marxist conspiracy. Those people were so angry all the time that even Tarnowski got sick of their bullshit, and I think the 5e consulting gig gave him an incentive to cool things down a bit.
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Aug 8, 2022 15:42
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 Everything old is new again.
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Aug 12, 2022 14:54
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I don't forgive it because, setting religion aside, this stuff is just a repeat of the D20 glut and it sucks.
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Aug 12, 2022 17:51
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Epicurius posted:It's still an incredibly popular system. There's nothing inherently wrong with D20, or at least, not the d20+modifiers vs. target number mechanic. Several good and well-supported games were based on D20. But the vast majority of content produced for it was low-effort garbage. 5e is bad, and most content produced for it is low-effort garbage. I'd gladly play a 5e-compatible Hellboy that wasn't lazy dreck, but it is what it is. Talking about the specific Biblical games ITT: D20 Testament didn't have to be bad, because there's no fundamental incompatibility between running a game in ancient Canaan and a d20-based resolution mechanic. But they did it by starting with D&D 3e and modifying it, which was inevitably going to be a hash. Same problem with the Adventurer's Guide to the Bible. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 15:26
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KobunFan posted:As a person who read 2e rulebooks, played 3.5 AND d20 Modern AND the Storyteller System AND a handful of other systems, I can say that 5e is definitely not low effort. I don't know what your problem is with it. The basic problem with 5e is that it has lots of rules that don't actually matter and just trail off into nothingness. Because it's D&D, it has to have a bunch of stuff that most people won't use, but people would scream bloody murder about if they didn't include it. This is the problem with a franchise that runs on the nostalgia and doubleplusgood tummyfeels of a few old men. There are price lists for how many pennies a ladder (or whatever) costs, even though that doesn't matter past level 2 or 3 at the most. There are rules for how long it takes to pick a lock, but zero time pressure, because this isn't Brown Box D&D where we assume the entire game takes place in the dungeon and check for wandering monsters every ten minutes. The game is supposedly gridless and "theatre of the mind," but everything is statted out as if you were using a grid with 5' squares. (This one was purely a sop to grognards. They broke their combat system because Mike Mearls wanted to jerk off some damaged freaks on a message board.) It's a bunch of rules in search of an actual game. What every actually well-made iteration of D&D has in common--and I'm including everything from retroclones to PBTA games like Fellowship--is that it's an actual game that was actually made for people who want a specific playstyle.
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Aug 16, 2022 14:02
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So WotC owns everything TSR created, but apparently they let the "TSR" trademark lapse. A guy named Jayson Elliott registered it on a whim, he says, and approached Ernie and Luke Gygax about doing something with it. They published Gygax Magazine and a new edition of Top Secret. (Written by the original creator, who I guess has the rights.) This company was called TSR Games and is now called Solarian. Elliott missed a filing date in 2020, which allowed a guy named Justin LaNasa to swoop in and grab it for himself. LaNasa made Ernie Gygax the president of a new company, also called TSR Games. Elliot was at one point licensing the rights to use the TSR name from LaNasa, but he rebranded as Solarian Games to distance himself from the constant stream of bigoted remarks and general PR seppuku underway at the new TSR Games. I have no idea why TSR Games (3rd Edition) thinks they have the rights to use old TSR logos or to publish a new version of Star Frontiers. AFAIK they've never even worked with any of the people who worked on Star Frontiers. They tried to bolster their claim over the logo by offering a shady contract to Darlene, the artist who designed one of them, but she saw through their bullshit immediately. I suspect that Ernie Gygax went along with LaNasa's plans in large part because LaNasa was planning to purchase the Gygax family home and turn it into the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum, which he has done. I think LaNasa has deep pockets by the standards of the RPG business. He owns a couple stores and the first Google result for his name is a judgment for uncollected sales taxes at his sleazy oxygen bar. He's the sort of Republican small business owner with delusions of grandeur that was mostly a punchline on Chapo Trap House until Greene and Boebert were elected to COngress.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:47
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MAYBE "TRANSBOTS"?
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Sep 15, 2022 17:58
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:While Battletech derives from a bunch of sources, like any fictional universe, it's sometimes useful to remember that in many ways it's not a game patterned on the future but the past - the Lyrans are Napoleonic Prussia,
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Dec 12, 2022 14:42
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Perestroika posted:These warjacks radiate power!
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Dec 13, 2022 12:47
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I actually played a Mystic Theurge once. I know, I know...
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Dec 13, 2022 16:01
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Rand Brittain posted:It has a lot of lower-level spells but is perpetually behind the curve on higher-level ones. Basically, you'll be a 13-th level wizard/13th-level cleric when the rest of the party is at 16th level, and in many cases casting a higher-level spell once is more useful than having to cast several lower-level ones over several turns.
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Dec 14, 2022 01:48
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I think that's part and parcel of 80s-90s cyberpunk. I've noticed near-future dystopias tend to fall into one of two extremes: either The Government takes over everything and creates a totalitarian state with a single hierarchy, or governments dissolve in favour of Megacorporations, who create privatized dystopias while the spaces between them become a free-for-all. I feel like there was a period where a lot of sci-fi authors felt that actually-existing Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism were both consolidated, unaccountable bureaucracies that weren't so different from each other and might even merge together, which I guess dissolved throughout the 80s and died with the USSR. That strain of dystopian thinking is most visible in low-to-middlebrow films like Colossus, Rollerball, Robot Jox, and finally Terminator 2, which kinda tied a bow on it and gave way to more conspiracist and apocalyptic visions.
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Dec 14, 2022 21:01
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Rappaport posted:The Forbin Project reflected the fears of the Cold War, but surely its point was that regardless of the system, it was the cold logic of the war itself that dictated the actions of all players?
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Dec 14, 2022 22:08
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Josef bugman posted:Shadowrun also has the dubious honour of having their newest system be so bad that everyone just stopped playing it.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:56
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That is true. I mean, I don't know about the video game. But having talked to some friends who played CP back-in-the-day, they all agreed that nobody was as hyped for CP's setting as people were for Shadowrun's. Johnny Silverhand and the Arasaka Brainworm don't have the same cache as Harlequin and the Renraku Arcology. Maybe they should get Hugo Weaving to play the CEO of Militech. Shadowrun Anarchy seems like the end result of a "we should design rules for people who don't care about rules" philosophy.
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Dec 15, 2022 17:31
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Archonex posted: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.
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Dec 16, 2022 17:21
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Well, now I feel like a jerk for prompting you to write all that; I haven't actually played 2077 yet. My spouse and I decided to play it as soon as it's free or super-discounted. All the stuff you mentioned sounds pointlessly edgy. I was just thinking about the setting in general. The historical timeline, the society it proposes, the NPCs and organizations and all that. In that regard, Adam Smasher just doesn't hold a candle to Hatchetman, and so on. (It's hard to compare the social realism in the two settings since so many Shadowrun events hinge on "a super duper big magic happened.")
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Dec 16, 2022 21:36
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Imagine if we were sentenced to run the systems we own. Yuck! I don't think I know anyone else who owns a Masterbook. And I won't be buying that used copy of Nightbane.
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Dec 20, 2022 02:24
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As I recall, the problem with Metabarons is that you don't play them, you play hapless schmucks like John Difool.
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Dec 20, 2022 03:14
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Randalor posted:You are a monster for even implying that people might be forced to play FATAL.
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Dec 21, 2022 14:51
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My specific issue is with gamers who are like "My game has more complicated rules than your game, so I'm smarter than you." As I said to the guy who told me this in a store, you are not smart for buying Palladium products.
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Dec 21, 2022 17:04
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Cards shouldn't just be thematically appropriate; using them as random number generators is a pain in the rear end. I'd like to see more games that actually use cards for the things cards are good for--a pool of resources you can spend, where the resources have traits that let you combine them or do specific things with them, etc. Cards are inferior to a d20 for doing the specific thing that a d20 does: generating a random number between 1 and 20
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Dec 21, 2022 17:35
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I haven't done the reading to see how the AD&D ruleset developed, but the impression I got was that as problems came up, Gygax and his contemporaries came up with patch rules, and these all got incorporated into AD&D without much regard for the fact that these rules often used different die mechanics and didn't interact with each other intuitively.
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Dec 21, 2022 20:17
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The Deadlands rules remind me of The Everlasting, where every contested action (including any combat action) is subject to a mechanic where anyone and everyone else at the table can bet experience points on the outcome. This triggers a process where the two combatants actually involved lay their cards face-down on the table and reveal them one by one, and can spend experience points to redraw them. That game has a lot of rules that were clearly never really meant to be used, at least not all at once.
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Dec 21, 2022 22:22
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There's been such a deluge of Lovecraft stuff in the past 15 years ranging from masterpieces to forgettable shovelware, that it could be a lot of things. It feels like there were three dozen people waiting for the precise moment Lovecraft's stories became public domain to hit that button and launch that Kickstarter. Anyway, maybe you're thinking of Degenesis?
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Jan 26, 2023 19:09
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In Final Fantasy Legend you can kill your Creator with a chainsaw and eat His flesh.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:44
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Charlz Guybon posted:Didn't he release them into the public domain when he was alive? That's why there's always been a ton of lovecraft stuff published.
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Aug 2, 2023 16:29
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