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Ah come on mate, it's a waste of time to say you think I'm wrong but don't have the time to explain why. Give me a reference or a premise or something to work with.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 21:10 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:22 |
UnCO3 posted:Ah come on mate, it's a waste of time to say you think I'm wrong but don't have the time to explain why. Give me a reference or a premise or something to work with. Okay. The basic problem I have is that the heuristic doesn't really do what you say it does. Take D&D, for example. If we look at an encounter, (using the 1e/2e definition where every situation where you have interact with specific things in the game) we generally have a spectrum of possible outcomes from best to worst, sometimes forked. The party can accomplish all of its goals, end up getting completely killed, or anything in between. Just a four-person party, regardless of its objectives, has five possible final states without considering limited resources. It's in fact quite possible to construct an encounter in, say, D&D 4e, that has more meaningful outcomes than Heroquest's nonary resolution mechanics and is still eminently playable. Of course, it would be a combat encounter and most of them don't achieve that level in any case. So there's that, one pretty important example of D&D falling into the "storygame" quadrant. It's also the most important one. "Failure driving the story forward", if it is distinct from more-or-less consensual railroading, is encapsulated in this as well. "Equivalent mechanical significance and depth"? I have no idea what this means, really. Binary resolution means that success and failure are equivalently important automatically, and while critical hits may break this, it's also not anything that draws much discussion except in a highly altered form. "Influence over when and how" and making an infinite string of failures non-discouraging are things that require a lot more clarity, because as they stand they suggest bad design. If you mean something like Fate Points for the first one, though, that's a great segue into what your heuristic seems to be sorting, to me. It's sorting out abstraction from concreteness. Because, well, if we take an idealized RPG that has one roll for attack and damage, and where each unit only rolls once per turn, a four-turn combat between two teams of four involves 32 rolls. In something like Fate, it would involve 8. In D&D, the number of rolls would be even higher, and so you'd need more than quadruple the number of Fate Points in order for them to have the same mechanical weight and power, and they would need to be individually weaker. Because Fate is abstract. AW is even more so. But this abstraction is why you need trinary resolution and so on and so forth, because you have to compress all the things that would go down in a concrete game's fight or hacking sequence or whatever into one or two rolls. Abstract versus concrete really shouldn't, in my opinion, be a gigantic split when it comes to design. AW doesn't have gigantically different GM advice from D&D, at its core level. And for that matter, it's also a spectral phenomenon. Note that you can apply this not only to D&D but also to a lot of other conventional games.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 22:46 |
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Effectronica posted:Okay. The basic problem I have is that the heuristic doesn't really do what you say it does. Take D&D, for example. If we look at an encounter, (using the 1e/2e definition where every situation where you have interact with specific things in the game) we generally have a spectrum of possible outcomes from best to worst, sometimes forked. The party can accomplish all of its goals, end up getting completely killed, or anything in between. Just a four-person party, regardless of its objectives, has five possible final states without considering limited resources. It's in fact quite possible to construct an encounter in, say, D&D 4e, that has more meaningful outcomes than Heroquest's nonary resolution mechanics and is still eminently playable. Of course, it would be a combat encounter and most of them don't achieve that level in any case.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:00 |
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ive read a lot of words but i still dont know whats going on in this thread
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:10 |
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i think it's just a bunch of people posting a lot of words about nothing
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:10 |
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Endorph posted:ive read a lot of words but i still dont know whats going on in this thread I made jokes about this in the chat thread, which people didn't get, because it's a chat thread in Trad Games, so somebody made this thread to continue the discussion, which isn't a discussion anyone needs to be having ever, because holy poo poo Effectronica posted:Okay. The basic problem I have is that the heuristic doesn't really do what you say it does. Take D&D, for example. If we look at an encounter, (using the 1e/2e definition where every situation where you have interact with specific things in the game) we generally have a spectrum of possible outcomes from best to worst, sometimes forked. The party can accomplish all of its goals, end up getting completely killed, or anything in between. Just a four-person party, regardless of its objectives, has five possible final states without considering limited resources. It's in fact quite possible to construct an encounter in, say, D&D 4e, that has more meaningful outcomes than Heroquest's nonary resolution mechanics and is still eminently playable. Of course, it would be a combat encounter and most of them don't achieve that level in any case. It's so UnCO3 posted:This is starting to sound a bit GNS. goddamn stupid.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:12 |
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Endorph posted:ive read a lot of words but i still dont know whats going on in this thread I...think someone is trolling someone else? But the person being trolled is also trolling in return? And the result is some kind of strange in-jokey thing that nobody really understands, even the original posters?
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:13 |
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Davin Valkri posted:I...think someone is trolling someone else? But the person being trolled is also trolling in return? And the result is some kind of strange in-jokey thing that nobody really understands, even the original posters?
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:14 |
FactsAreUseless posted:Okay in all seriousness real short summary: People get very, very angry if you don't carefully define the difference between an RPG and a "storygame," and there's an entire website dedicated to it (RPGSite), the owner of whom sincerely believes there is some sort of insane thoughtcrime conspiracy to destroy RPGs forever. Okay. So does the stupidity come in because the posts are too long, or is it just that any kind of thinking about roleplaying games beyond "is this good/bad" is stupid in and of itself, or is it for some reason that you can't articulate in a single sentence, or what?
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:15 |
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Effectronica posted:Okay. So does the stupidity come in because the posts are too long, or is it just that any kind of thinking about roleplaying games beyond "is this good/bad" is stupid in and of itself, or is it for some reason that you can't articulate in a single sentence, or what?
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:20 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:I am the only person making jokes. Everyone else is deadly serious. i'm seriously laughing at it, does that count
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:21 |
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Captain Foo posted:i'm seriously laughing at it, does that count
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:22 |
FactsAreUseless posted:The storygames vs. RPGs thing is stupid on its face, and writing this many words about it is stupid, and also the words in the word pile are stupid words, like "heuristic" and "wobbling." Okay. I'm not arguing about "storygames vs. RPGs", and I'm sorry that I misinterpreted your jokes in this thread as being in good fun.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:23 |
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Effectronica posted:Okay. I'm not arguing about "storygames vs. RPGs", and I'm sorry that I misinterpreted your jokes in this thread as being in good fun.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:24 |
FactsAreUseless posted:Did you think it was in good fun when I mocked you for melting down in QCS also? No, I didn't. I didn't suspect, though, that you would jump in solely or primarily to make fun of me, because I had a higher opinion of you than that. Oh well.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:25 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:I didn't realize you'd posted, but you are exempted from the "giant idiot moron" category. you quoted me
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:31 |
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Captain Foo posted:you quoted me
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:32 |
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When I think of "storygames" I think of games whose resolution or reward mechanics are primarily out-of-character, such that e.g. an alcoholic character drinks to excess because that character's player gets some narrative-altering resource point whenever they do.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:37 |
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Lol if you seriouspost in tg for any reason other than cuz someone in a game you're in saying they can't post cuz they're sick or something and you say 'hey feel better soon".
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:48 |
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Here's the impression I got: a couple of people noticed that certain games have certain playstyles that they tend to be played with. We have been trying to pin down what those playstyles are (while keeping in mind that hybridization is likely) as to better understand the building blocks of TG design; this way we can give suggestions to people who want to try new games more easily and we can better articulate what certain games are about. I know Pundit and co. gave the concept of distinctions between games a bad rap, especially when the word storygame is used, and maybe this thread would have needed a different title, but it would be stupid to pretend that it doesn't happen. Do it to spite him if nothing else.
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# ? Mar 17, 2015 23:50 |
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At RPGNet, a well-meaning (but ignorant) man started a thread about a not-RPG, a storygame, by the name of Fiasco. This is not a proper tabletop RPG. This is a product that takes the process of writing a movie by committee and formalizes it into a playable cooperative tabletop game. My other post today, which summarizes what a proper tabletop RPG is, is from this same thread. The man was wrong. I corrected the man, and I included that I appreciated Fiasco for what it truly is. (If a formalized writing committee exercise is what you want, then that is a good game for the job.) After one moderator--typical of the moral cowardice of the clique--decided to chide me for "edition warring", one of the Tradgames Chat Thread clique (ProfessorCirno) attempted to bait me as I describe above, saying: "So you're telling a story in real time as opposed to telling a story in real time in a different way?" (This is a fraudulent question; TRPGs don't tell stories.) I declined his invitation, and I exposed him for what he is and what he attempted do so, saying: "You are a known Anime fan, and a frequent poster in the grognards.txt thread. You are not an honest or honorable actor, and your engagement is nothing more than a bait for more posts in that thread. Take your morsel and go." What I said is true. The truth is an absolute defense. Therefore is it a criminal act of fraud to sanction me under the "personal attack" clause and ban my account for two weeks. The moderator in question-- P aul Ettin--committed an act of moral cowardice and paternalistic hubris; the excuse is the same, always the same- a fraudulent peace, regardless of sacrifice, is better than an honorable war. Appeasers, quislings, quonsters- sellouts. RPGNet chooses peace over both truth and justice, just like school districts all over the United States, and unlike my experiences of this sort that were commonplace throughout my childhood I know now how to show how wrong these petty despots are in their actions and I have no qualms in doing so if I'm pushed.
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 00:18 |
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Glorified Scrivener posted:Now to make a fool of myself by discussing doors; I agree that the door being locked or unlocked depending on the drama of the situation doesn't make for a boring game – but also that it can potentially make for a game that never has boring moments. Which I admit sounds stupid. But if you elide everything surrounding the dramatic portions of the game with narration, so that choices only ever exist in dramatic contexts, it lessens the impact of those moments because they’re all dramatic. Even most roller coasters have long slow climbs that build tension and anticipation because they're not fast downhills. I will agree that a danger with RPGs/GMs that emphasize direct control over narrative flow too strongly is that you can easily end up with a game that feels a bit flat drama-wise, where the pacing is all thrown off and everything is so urgent that nothing ever really feels especially significant. That's an issue with just being bad at pacing, though, not an issue inherent to hands-on control. Locked doors in general are weird in RPGs, though. Even in cases where failure is interesting, it's way too common that they just end up being boring-rear end "make a skill check and hope the dice don't gently caress you" challenges. They might be more interesting if, like, somebody with an agenda has the keys but needs to be persuaded to hand them over, or if a lock-picking skill check is treated as a chance to bypass the encounter and not as the default solution. "Roll well to go through plot door A, roll poorly to go through plot door B" is boring, though. Maybe that's one of the things people complain about with storygames sometimes? I felt like My Life With Master was super guilty of being built around a series of die-rolls that dictated where the game would go, but that the players really didn't have much ability to modify. The mechanics of that game felt much more like arbitrary and somewhat intrusive procedural dramatic prompts than dramatic facilitators, but again I think that might be just an issue with its specific design rather than an issue with storygames. I'm not sure the feeling of "oh great, the GM told us to pick the door's lock to progress the plot, but then we rolled a 1 and now we're fighting a bunch of spiders and the GM is blaming it on us being bad at the game" and "well, my last scene with the Master was leading to something pretty interesting, but the dice say I need to kill him now so I guess I'll just do that instead" are that different from each other, even if one is classic "RPG" and the other is classic "storygame". FactsAreUseless posted:The storygames vs. RPGs thing is stupid on its face, and writing this many words about it is stupid, and also the words in the word pile are stupid words, like "heuristic" and "wobbling." I HAVE NO REGRETS. Although, yeah, despite being part of the initial conversation that led to this thread I'm not really sure what to post here. Are we just breaking down the ways that the storygame/rpg divide is artificial, while also trying to make sense of and salvage the underlying reasons for the divide? (or at least the reasons that aren't just tribalism). It's a big and super unfocused topic.
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 02:18 |
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Thanks for posting this, these are good points. I didn't make my point clear, but it comes down to whether failure is the absence of success or something else - a different path for the story to take (e.g. DitV), or an equal and opposite outcome (e.g. Fiasco). Like you say (and I said) it's a spectrum and an older game like, say, Promethean won't necessarily be right over to the 'conventional' side. You're right that the idea doesn't actually work the way I thought it would.FactsAreUseless posted:The storygames vs. RPGs thing is stupid on its face, and writing this many words about it is stupid, and also the words in the word pile are stupid words, like "heuristic" and "wobbling." On that note, it would be really interesting to see more theoretical threads, but on more worthwhile and well-defined topics in areas like mythology, psychology, the history of storytelling, probability or anything else where people can take a look at storytelling in general and how rpgs work in specific, by people who are well-read or actively working in the area (grad students count ). Things like Liesmith posting about Arthurian myth or Mors Rattus posting about (if I'm right) Middle Eastern myth and culture.
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 02:46 |
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UnCO3 posted:Thanks for posting this, these are good points. I didn't make my point clear, but it comes down to whether failure is the absence of success or something else - a different path for the story to take (e.g. DitV), or an equal and opposite outcome (e.g. Fiasco). Like you say (and I said) it's a spectrum and an older game like, say, Promethean won't necessarily be right over to the 'conventional' side. You're right that the idea doesn't actually work the way I thought it would.
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 04:01 |
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Even though there was a grog flipping out about Fiasco not being an RPG, grog's got a point. It's not, by certain definitions. This definition separates an RPG from a storytelling game or a board game. Or at least it stretches out the spectrum, and I'm stealing it from over here so if you've read some lumpley you probably know what I'm going to say. There are two parts at work here, and we'll call them the plot and the props. The plot is the fictional sweep of things. The props are everything physical, the representation of the game on paper, board, tokens, and dice. Rules connect these things, either to themselves or to each others. Rules that connect plot to plot govern who has narrative control and what they can say. Rules that connect props to props govern how they affect each other in the course of play. The interconnections are what make an RPG though. When the events in the plot affect the props, and when manipulation of props affects the plot. My go-to example for this is a camp of bandits with archers in a watchtower. That's a plot thing, but being in a watchtower gives them props advantages like being distant from adjacent squares on the battlemap (because they're off the ground) and having advantages to rain arrows down on anyone on the ground. But somebody can do a props thing to change the plot. Like make a Might roll against some difficulty to push the tower over. That's going to cause some prop changes from it, but it's also a change in the plot -- there's now the wreckage of a tower on the ground and anyone can hang the plot on it. If you, say, play Monopoly "in character", all you've got is still props rules. There is nothing to tie the game to what you believe about how "your character" should be acting, and nothing that will tie you to expressing it in gameplay. If you play an RPG you get all the rules. If you play a storytelling game, you get the rules... except for the part that goes from the plot to the props. If it's not gone entirely it's very weak. You look to the props to determine how the story goes, and generally storytelling games don't factor in anything about the plot as it's already happened. They just give you a twist to work with further. Glazius fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Mar 18, 2015 |
# ? Mar 18, 2015 04:55 |
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Earlier in the D&D thread I sperged out about what you call pieces that comprise an RPG system. The result of that was that I owe you this link to Vincent Baker's blog: http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/23 which I had been thinking of but actually doesn't answer the question at all. OtspIII posted:I really need a better term for this than "stuff happens" gameplay. Yeah, I agree that's a pretty poor term. Think o,f for instance, AW where one of the main MC principles is effectively 'Play to find out what stuff happens', and I know you weren't thinking of AW when you used that term. In the chat thread I tried to describe this by saying, a game where the primary motivators are exploration and strategic challenge, but I don't feel like that really cuts to the heart of it and besides it's way too wordy. Effectronica posted:So there's that, one pretty important example of D&D falling into the "storygame" quadrant. It's also the most important one. "Failure driving the story forward", if it is distinct from more-or-less consensual railroading, is encapsulated in this as well. Can you clarify your earlier chat thread comment about not liking 'fail forward'? Do you think it is poor when taken outside the context of consensual railroading, or do you dislike it altogether regardless of play mode?
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 05:09 |
DalaranJ posted:Can you clarify your earlier chat thread comment about not liking 'fail forward'? Do you think it is poor when taken outside the context of consensual railroading, or do you dislike it altogether regardless of play mode? There's a thing called "fail-forward" which is just "Don't have a failed roll stall things", which is a good principle. There's another thing called "fail-forward" which seems to involve draining failure of meaning, (what I meant by railroading) which I consider bad. I feel that the first has enabled the second because it's "forward", and it really should be called "fail-sideways", if anything.
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 13:19 |
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Mormon Star Wars posted:At RPGNet, a well-meaning (but ignorant) man started a thread about a not-RPG, a storygame, by the name of Fiasco. This is not a proper tabletop RPG. This is a product that takes the process of writing a movie by committee and formalizes it into a playable cooperative tabletop game. My other post today, which summarizes what a proper tabletop RPG is, is from this same thread. The man was wrong. I corrected the man, and I included that I appreciated Fiasco for what it truly is. (If a formalized writing committee exercise is what you want, then that is a good game for the job.) source you're quotes
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# ? Mar 18, 2015 22:15 |
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Endorph posted:i think it's just a bunch of people posting a lot of words about nothing where do you think you are
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# ? Mar 19, 2015 00:17 |
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Captain Foo posted:source you're quotes I want to say that's Bradford Walker.
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# ? Mar 19, 2015 00:29 |
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So because we met our Patreon goal for our podcast, I've been roped into running a game of Dread live on stream Saturday. Of course, before we met the goal, I promised that it would be JURASSIC DREAD, with dinosaurs. Any advice or ideas on how exactly to integrate dino-horror? Obv I'll be cribbing from Jurassic Park and friends, but I have no idea how to actually pick a setting. Some ideas
Also, is Dread okay if it goes kinda gonzo, rather than totally straight? It's entirely possible the goofyness of the scenario may not lead to the most spine-tingling role play. Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jul 10, 2015 |
# ? Jul 10, 2015 04:36 |
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I'd go with a variation on Jurassic World. The PCs were on vacation at the park when poo poo went down, and they missed the evac, so now they have to cross the island (now almost empty of humans) to an emergency escape boat or something. Definitely crib some structure from the Left 4 Dead games if you've tried them; it has a basic "act" structure that will work well here, especially when whatever task the PCs have to do to make the escape boat get launched and work also draws the dinosaurs' attention.
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# ? Jul 10, 2015 04:40 |
Everblight posted:So because we met our Patreon goal for our podcast, I've been roped into running a game of Dread live on stream Saturday. Of course, before we met the goal, I promised that it would be JURASSIC DREAD, with dinosaurs. Dread actually works better when it's somewhat gonzo. It's designed to emulate the structure of a bodycount horror film more than anything, and it's rare to see one of those that isn't a little goofy or campy.
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# ? Jul 10, 2015 04:43 |
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The variation of Jurassic World I have in my head would be instead of vacationers, you (all start off as) bored, disaffected teenagers working the booths in the park as summer jobs when it all falls down.
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# ? Jul 10, 2015 05:53 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:22 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:The variation of Jurassic World I have in my head would be instead of vacationers, you (all start off as) bored, disaffected teenagers working the booths in the park as summer jobs when it all falls down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppm37YVNC7U
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# ? Jul 19, 2015 19:53 |