First Bass posted:

It's a really dumb comic though because it failed to convey how the sea lion was arguing in bad faith? I mean I read D&D (the subforum, not the game, but that too) all the time, and I get the terminology, by if you replaced the sea lion with a minority I don't think as twee a phrase as "sealioning" would be getting thrown around.

Ningyou posted:

does nerds being weird and terrible on roll20 but not specifically about a particular elfgame count as grog, bc drat

I was looking through the roll20 LFG forum because i've got some kind of awful nerd stockholm syndrome and GUESS WHAT I STUMBLED INTO, SANDWICHED BETWEEN M&M AND PATHFINDER RECRUITS

Idiot posted:

And that's why it's a flaw. You can get a flaw for being short, being discriminated against is a disadvantage. People often offset those by learning other skills and social merits.
Not everything in a role playing game is an exalted gift. The world of darkness just recognizes there are problems. I think just out right ignoring it or just letting it be something not brought up in polite conversation is much worse.
I get you don't want the veil to be lifted or some other bigoted bull poo poo. The fact of the matter is it's in the game as a social aspect that can get you into trouble. Just like being an openly gay person in Alabama at the moment trying to get a marriage liscense since it was OK'd at a federal level is bringing some people true hell at a social level.
WoD explores that in a game.
If you think all games are children's toys and taboo subjects need to be left out .. You know there's D&D communities and what not out there.

Fucker posted:

I take offense to the fact that you think people are trying to interject intolerance into Werewolf. Werewolf is ALREADY intolerant. It's an intolerant setting. I know there has been this massive, massive push the last ten years for things like trans*, LGBT rights, etc but as I said in the other thread... garou are not humans and they do not give a flying gently caress about those kinds of human notions. All they know is that while their cubs are dying some rear end in a top hat is on the Ellen show crying about how unfair life has treated him, that his name is now Susan and he/she wants you to respect his/her life choices.

Garou do not care, outside of a small handful minority in the tribes closest to humanity. And that has nothing to do with player bigotry.

A Pile of poo poo That Only Vaguely Resembles a Person posted:

I don't really give a rat's rear end about privilege. Again, if I wanted to hear pissing and moaning from SJW's about the unfairness of the universe, I'd go... let's see.... yeah, just about anywhere else but a page for a game based on homicidal rampaging Werewolves. I'd like to go one week on these pages where I see more threads like "What sorts of places would you put a caern of Stamina?" than "What sort of progressive direction do modern garou have on transgender roles?"

Captain Rufus posted:

The OSR are basically all full of poo poo with a couple nice ideas here and there when they aren't trying to put their heads up their own rear end and try to out oldschool other people and declare what is TRUE WORDS.
(Also notice the OSR is 90% people jacking off to versions of D&D to the exclusion of almost any other RPG? Hmmm.... There was even a discussion about this on an old school gaming Facebook page recently. Nobody disagreed with this statement.)

LORD OF BUTT posted:

Isn't Dark Dungeons/Darker Dungeons an AD&D retroclone with a decent amount of support?

Plague of Hats posted:

Serf posted:

I'll never understand how people can argue that RPGs aren't a device for telling stories. You literally make up characters and the story emerges from the interaction between those characters and the world set up by the GM. When you tell people about it later or reminisce, you're telling a story about what happened.

Plague of Hats posted:

Happy to oblige!


I'm not sure if this is about the philosophy of "system matters", or a typo regarding our resident Elric philistines System Mastery. Either way, I am sad it is gone.

Plague of Hats posted:

Many of these people think "when you're playing, it's not a story; telling someone about it later is when it's a story" is a very important distinction. Which, y'know, kind of also implies storygames function the same, but since they are not RPGs I guess they're now a third thing. And then they start splitting the finest of hairs talking about how prominent control of or creation of a narrative is in the game, or whether you play multiple characters, which are specific enough ideas that they remove huge swaths of beloved old games from RPG history. Often by these metrics it turns out the original editions of D&D are cast out into the land of storygames but no wait let me explain how that was different...

Serf posted:

I don't get why this is such a big deal. Who cares if RPGs are about telling stories or making stories or whatever? Why have people written hundreds of thousands of words over it?

Plague of Hats posted:

I even would really like some industry-wide formalized language to emerge around these subjects, but the weird hatred for "narrative" means the well may be hopelessly poisoned.

Kai Tave posted:

I think the issue people have is less with GM fiat (which many "true RPG" advocates enshrine as a noble and healthy aspect of the hobby) but that "storygames" give players too much narrative currency or that they remove the ability for GM fiat to manifest in appropriate ways.

I mean there is no hard-and-fast analysis here, on the one hand you have people mad at Fate because it lets players spend fate points to declare things or how they can roll to apply aspects to scenes, on the other hand you have people mad at *World because it lets GMs manifest bears where there weren't any before and it's all very confusing after a while to try and keep track of what it is that's pissing people off about not!RPGs this week.

Kai Tave posted:

Well yeah no poo poo, 90% of the stuff that gets reposted here is disingenuous, BearWorld is no exception to that.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Without getting into the topic of when they started getting better (or if there was ever a significant tipping point at all, games have been telling players and GMs to go with whatever's cooler since forever), yes, I do agree with you that games have been getting better at encouraging agency and narrative control.

Like, friggin' GURPS has a metacurrency rule and the authors of GURPS for Dummies describes the game as being about shared storytelling, so we can come full circle and conclude that it's really more about how shittily someone decides to run their game regardless of what the rules actually do or don't encourage.

Serf posted:

Which is why most books I've seen include a Rule 0 type thing where they just say "do whatever works best at your table. Don't like a rule, change it." On that one clause alone you can basically argue for any interpretation of the rules you like or run the game however you like.

El Estrago Bonito posted:

I do love how this brand of Grog is basically as old as the hobby itself. Buried in the back pages of the original Arduin books are Hargrave's rants about things like DM's being sissies about not wanting to slaughter characters wholesale and about how dumb people who don't want to mix sci-fi into their fantasy games are.

Actually I'm surprised Hargrave isn't held in more esteem by these guys. His original trilogy of books was basically just him trying to grog up oD&D with rear end loads of classes and useless poo poo.

I also wonder what the opinion of some of these "bring back the good ol days, burn all storygames to the ground" -grogs are on stuff like T&T, Elfquest or BRP. Because I was reading some stuff about the T&T things Stackpole worked on and some of the people were describing their Amber based RP system they had basically invented in the late 70's and it seemed to mostly involve them standing around in a basement acting out scenes with almost 0 dice rolling mechanics what so ever.

El Estrago Bonito posted:

Hargrave

Wikipedia posted:

While David Hargrave was considered one of the "best of the best" of game masters, he was also known for having a somewhat volatile personality. The original role-playing community at large was split between love and mere tolerance of Hargrave's passions, and his infamous falling-out with Greg Stafford, which resulted in Hargrave naming an Arduin spell after him as revenge, is one such example. The spell was called Stafford's Star Bridge (The Arduin Grimoire, Volume 1, Page 41):

"Stafford's Star Bridge is a 9th Level Mage (Magic-User) spell. It produces a rainbow-hued bridge of coruscating light that is 5 ft (1.5 m) wide and 20 ft (6.1 m) long per level of the caster over the level needed for use. The bridge will carry any weight, and it cannot be hit by non-magical things. The bridge can also be "keyed" to support any single type (or more), letting all others fall through selectively. "

Hargrave felt that Stafford had betrayed him over a Chaosium publishing deal, thus "falling through selectively". According to Stafford, Hargrave was later very upset with himself for having created this spell and for his behavior in the situation.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Were you being sarcastic? Because I don't see how that could be offensive. I wouldn't mind having a rainbow bridge spell named after me.

Greg Stafford posted:

Dave was a local guy, so I knew him through the early D&D circle here. Just about all the RPGers knew each other in those days (Perrin, Pimper, Henderson, Hargrave. Not me, really...)
When Chaosium began began publishing rpg material I asked Dave about Arduin (in which I had played a bit) and he assured me it was a "complete game system." I said I'd publish it then, but when I got the manuscript it clearly was not a complete game system. I went ahead and had someone start to lay it out (which, in those days, meant using a selectric typewriter), but the typist found it to be impossible, what with all the tables, his horrid spelling and the general awkwardness of a non-gamer trying to write not just game but Arduin stuff. He kept promising to turn in the rest of the complete system. It never came, and coupled with the typist's problems, I told him I wasn't going to publish it. He was pretty angry about me "backing out." He stopped talking ot me and pretty much badmouthed me afterwards for years. People--you know the troublemaking sort of gossipers--would tell me about it. I just let it slide. Oh yea, look in one of his spell lists too, for somethign about "Staffor'd Selective Rainbow" or somethign, which drops people out of the sky when they least expect it.

Plague of Hats posted:

Liz Danforth is an amazing lady BTW.

FMguru posted:

The premiere Call of Cthulhu discussion site on the internet had to institute a blanket ban on "D20 vs. BRP" arguments.

Plague of Hats posted:

I was kind of hoping this guy would flame out on RPGnet, but it looks like he just abandoned it and squatted out a brief foot-stamp on his professional RPG publisher's grown-up Tumblr blog.


I blatantly violated publisher TOU on DriveThru and have not given up on my ~anti-censorship~ crusade for literally years!

Sage Genesis posted:

Jesus H Christ...

You know, I can't understand some of this poo poo. It's usually the same people who on the one hand tell you to stop rollplaying and D&D is about having an imagination, but as soon anything happens which doesn't toe the line they just flip right the gently caress out. This isn't even about the elf pretend game, it's about being a horrible rear end in a top hat to a 12 year old kid. There's grog and then there's... whatever this is.

Plague of Hats posted:

These men are 40-50, and started role playing and in at least one case publishing RPGs in the 80's. But, by GodGygax, these interlopers may as well be entitled WoW-babby Millenials just looking to bank that sweet, sweet OSR cashmoney. Whatever else someone might think of Grabowski and MRH, I don't think they've ever said "Boo" about the OSR, but the high crime of "worked at White Wolf" is enough to get them strung up. Keep your storygamey cooties off my precious THAC0!

Nihilarian posted:

the STI's and pregnancy bits are pretty bad but I think I'd enjoy playing a game where there is a cult dedicated solely to following the party around and making sure none of us get any action.

Sage Genesis posted:

Gygax didn't design RPGs. He designed D&D. (And poo poo like Cyborg Commando but let's not speak ill of the dead.)

I swear, this has got the be the most salient point that grogs seem to always miss. RPGs are not D&D. D&D is not all RPGs. There are valid RPGs that diverge quite strongly from D&D. Just as with music, technology, card games, or what the gently caress ever human endeavor you care to name, the starting point of an ongoing development doesn't have to be the end point.

If I ever had to sum up what a "grog" is, it would be this misunderstanding.

Maxwell Lord posted:

It's a mentality wherein everything has to be neatly compartmentalized and discrete and there can be no overlap whatsoever.

I have actual diagnosed high-functioning autism and I'm more flexible than this. These people are like those computers in 60s SciFi that explode if you ask them to divide by zero.

Effectronica posted:

Also, you know, challenge is a pretty important part of playing the game, and a game where you just get money for nothing is pretty unsatisfying.

paradoxGentleman posted:

Where does RPGnet stands in this weird tribal war of elfgame ideologies?

Capfalcon posted:

So, overall, it could be a lot worse.

Slimnoid posted:

ELFGAMES

Plague of Hats posted:

Not grog, just schadenfreude:

Ratpick posted:

Well, given that Monte Cook in one of his columns as designer for WotC dared refer to GNS theory (a four-letter word among the anti-stroygamer crowd) it should probably be clear that Monte is also an evil storygamer trying to subvert real RPGs.

Except, of course, that the opinion on Monte Cook has pretty much turned around completely in those circles: since the whole debacle surrounding the presentation of Native Americans in his latest game, The Strange, they've basically become Monte's cheerleaders, because Monte is the latest designer to have his writing put under scrutiny for problematic content, and if there's something the RPGSite anti-storygamer crowd loves more than a good conspiracy about storygamers subverting RPGs it's conspiracies of cultural Marxists trying to force people to write politically correct RPGs.

Also, apparently the two agendas go hand in hand. Storygames will apparently turn us into communist feminazis, while political correctness in RPGs will inevitably lead to everyone playing storygames.