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ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

Chaltab posted:

Well yeah but calling it a hate-blog is just :ironicat: as hell given Pundit's ongoing war with eastasia The Forge/Storygamers/Swine.

Even moreso considering his support of the actual hate-blog "The Dongion" before Mearls made Zak S take it down for fear of bad PR.

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Froghammer
Sep 8, 2012

Khajit has wares
if you have coin

SunAndSpring posted:

Maybe if Gone Home was good and told an interesting story people would've liked it.
They did (at least I did). Gone Home is the kind of thing where if I tell you the premise ("You know how you could find a bunch of logs in Bioshock? It's just 'A Bunch Of Logs: The Game'") and you say "I don't think I'd like it", then your not going to like it. Same deal with Depression Quest: if a twenty minute long text-based pamphlet about getting out of bed doesn't sound like it's going to be up your alley, then don't play it.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

quote:

it lead to Dungeon World, which as you know is part of a conspiracy to destroy the OSR.

Is/was Dungeon World ever directly marketed as being an OSR-type game? I mean, I've used that description myself: "it recreates the ~~feeling~~ of playing D&D when you were 8 years old", but I don't think that it ever makes that claim itself, and I don't know how you'd ever mistake it for being a literal OSR game and then claim false advertising when it doesn't actually have descending AC or random encounter tables or whatever.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Is/was Dungeon World ever directly marketed as being an OSR-type game? I mean, I've used that description myself: "it recreates the ~~feeling~~ of playing D&D when you were 8 years old", but I don't think that it ever makes that claim itself, and I don't know how you'd ever mistake it for being a literal OSR game and then claim false advertising when it doesn't actually have descending AC or random encounter tables or whatever.

Dungeon World: A Game with Modern Rules & Old-School Style

Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel posted:

Dungeon World emerged from our love of two things—modern game design and old-school RPG action. We wanted to create a game with the wide-eyed excitement and wonder of your first time playing a fantasy RPG and rules that draw on a long history of innovation and creativity. The best of both worlds!

Monte Cooke featured quote on their kickstarter page posted:


"Dungeon World is fun and innovative take on the oldest kind of roleplaying experiences. It's a wonderful blend of old and new that should make practically any gamer happy."

Yeah, they do say it a little bit, but they never say OSR.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Goodman Games has something to sell you!

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

FMguru posted:

Goodman Games has something to sell you!



Ok...what?

Like, what even?

Why not just sell them as DCC dice or just weird dice? This is terrible marketing.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Covok posted:

Ok...what?

Like, what even?

Why not just sell them as DCC dice or just weird dice? This is terrible marketing.
But these have guaranteed magic negro hoodoo afro power in them!

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.
Oh God, I just noticed the dice are black.

Oh God.

Hollismason
Jun 30, 2007
Feel free to disregard this post.

It is guaranteed to be lazy, ignorant, and/or uninformed.
Those are actually kind of awesome.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

FMguru posted:

The guy posted it to RPGsite and the last brave honest truthteller in all of RPGland immediately started banning people and deleting posts and wildly lashing out at strawmen. It's amazing.

I went to an OSR thing at a convention recently and they all to a person vocally hate the poo poo out of Pundit.

Pundit, regarding the blog Your Dungeon is Suck posted:

No, its a hate-blog created by an SA-Goon, usually filled with 4chan-levels of profanity and adolescent dirty-jokes, that attacks OSR games and game designers. They have for a long time had a hate-on for Zak, Raggi, and myself in roughly that order (but they often branch out to attack other OSR designers).

YDIS is undoubtedly an OSR guy. Nobody hates nerds as much as other nerds, especially other nerds who like the same thing.

Covok posted:

Yeah, they do say it a little bit, but they never say OSR.

There's an interview with Latorra and Koebel (it's on comics gossip site Bleeding Cool, oddly enough) where Koebel talks about how one of the games he's playing is Dungeon Crawl Classics. He calls out Harley Stroh as a cool designer and mentions the very awesome third party product Transylvanian Adventures. While they don't out and out say "Our game is OSR", they are obviously cool with games like that. Oh yeah and half the people at the OSR thing when we talked about newer games, mentioned Dungeon World by name. I think that brief period of "White Box or death", which was mostly a reaction to a very, very small number of people shittalking old D&D based on anecdotes about Tomb of Horrors, is pretty much over. People in general are starting to become more aware that stuff like BECMI is neat, and it wasn't just evil 13 year olds maliciously torturing their friends' characters.

Covok posted:

Ok...what?

Like, what even?

Why not just sell them as DCC dice or just weird dice? This is terrible marketing.

Goodman's line of dice are all based on DCC's iconic characters. They're all basically 70s film and blaxploitation characters in a fantasy setting. Like, the main guy is a blond barbarian named Hugh wearing candy-striped bell bottoms. I dunno, while I won't argue that it isn't culturally insensitive, I don't think Shanna Dahaka is any worse than say, Luke Cage and Misty Knight.

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!
Your Dungeon Is Suck's salient points end up mired by the extreme pettiness he heaps upon other designers.

For every post calling out genuinely bad stuff, there's another one making fun of people like Monte Cook for getting upset at a guy on Kickstarter acting like a jackass to him.

And that's not to mention the comments section which smacks of wannabe edgy 14 year old boy humor. They also hate you guys as much as they hate Pundit and the OSR, viewing Trad Games and RPGnet as full of overly sensitive LGBT hippies waxing on about unreal oppression.

So yeah, there are better places to use for criticizing OSR folks than YDIS.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Libertad! posted:

Your Dungeon Is Suck's salient points end up mired by the extreme pettiness he heaps upon other designers.

For every post calling out genuinely bad stuff, there's another one making fun of people like Monte Cook for getting upset at a guy on Kickstarter acting like a jackass to him.

And that's not to mention the comments section which smacks of wannabe edgy 14 year old boy humor. They also hate you guys as much as they hate Pundit and the OSR, viewing Trad Games and RPGnet as full of overly sensitive LGBT hippies waxing on about unreal oppression.

So yeah, there are better places to use for criticizing OSR folks than YDIS.

Aside from the pettiness and the "edgy" humor of being homophobic and using slurs for no reason, it's also deeply baroque and in-jokey. If you're not very plugged into the OSR, it makes no sense.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 6 hours!

gradenko_2000 posted:

Is/was Dungeon World ever directly marketed as being an OSR-type game?
Sage LaTorra actually did a Q&A on the RPGsite, in which he was unfailingly polite. He explicitly said that he doesn't think his game is an OSR game, and was subjected to a bunch of paranoid wackos asking, basically "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Tarnowski had never even read the game, but kept going on about how he was sure it was part of a conspiracy.

So, the "theoretical" rationalization for why "roleplaying games" and "story games" are two totally different things goes like this: TheGamingDen (Frank Trollman's forum) argues that absolutely everything has to be codified in the rules, or else the PCs will have no idea how to interact with the world and what to expect from it. (They define "player agency" as total metagame knowledge as well as the PCs having power defined by the rules). Tarnowski's argument is that the narrative control has to rest 100% with the GM and 0% with the players, or else "immersion" is broken. (For example, he says he's run Fate, but he doesn't allow players to spend a Fate Point to make Declarations about the game world, even about petty poo poo like "I dropped my sword but I've found a lead pipe.")

Of course, everything we know about game design points to immersion as an insidious fallacy.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Halloween Jack posted:

Sage LaTorra actually did a Q&A on the RPGsite, in which he was unfailingly polite. He explicitly said that he doesn't think his game is an OSR game, and was subjected to a bunch of paranoid wackos asking, basically "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Tarnowski had never even read the game, but kept going on about how he was sure it was part of a conspiracy.

This type of reaction reminds me of when a mainstream novelist writes a sci-fi novel or a comic or something. Like there was a minor freakout over Jonathan Lethem writing an Omega the Unknown series (with Farel Dalrymple drawing) that because Lethem is a MacArthur Fellow he was going to be condescending or something but it was a giant love letter to Steve Gerber. The point that the only reason someone would bother to get involved with these sort of things is because they like them and see value there. Why the hell would someone make their own twist on D&D unless they actually like D&D?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 6 hours!

Lightning Lord posted:

This type of reaction reminds me of when a mainstream novelist writes a sci-fi novel or a comic or something. Like there was a minor freakout over Jonathan Lethem writing an Omega the Unknown series (with Farel Dalrymple drawing) that because Lethem is a MacArthur Fellow he was going to be condescending or something but it was a giant love letter to Steve Gerber. The point that the only reason someone would bother to get involved with these sort of things is because they like them and see value there. Why the hell would someone make their own twist on D&D unless they actually like D&D?
Tarnowski's answer to your question is "Because they're trying to infiltrate True Gaming so they can subvert it into a tool for Cultural Marxist indoctrination." Because he's bugfuck crazy.

Torchbearer got the same reaction, that it was "D&D for people who have always hated D&D." Because you can't like something but want to improve it. I've spent just enough time on RPGsite to know that whenever they work themselves into a frothing rage over something and spend a hundred pages of discussion on it, they rationalize it by saying "Oh, we're not mad, bro, we think it's funny."

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Halloween Jack posted:

So, the "theoretical" rationalization for why "roleplaying games" and "story games" are two totally different things goes like this: TheGamingDen (Frank Trollman's forum) argues that absolutely everything has to be codified in the rules, or else the PCs will have no idea how to interact with the world and what to expect from it. (They define "player agency" as total metagame knowledge as well as the PCs having power defined by the rules). Tarnowski's argument is that the narrative control has to rest 100% with the GM and 0% with the players, or else "immersion" is broken. (For example, he says he's run Fate, but he doesn't allow players to spend a Fate Point to make Declarations about the game world, even about petty poo poo like "I dropped my sword but I've found a lead pipe.")

Some games labeled as "story-games" or "indie" have explicitly divided narrative control in ways that conforms to "traditional" expectations. Apocalypse World is one of them. The players are the only ones who get to say what their characters think or do, and whatever narrative control they can exert on the world in general is limited to that implied by their actions. I agree with those who earlier stated that any arguments based on this kind of reasoning basically boils down to "well, we don't like it, so it's different because we say it is".

thotsky fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 8, 2014

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 6 hours!
OTOH, I'm playing Monsterhearts in PBP right now, and not only have I never had more narrative control as a play than I've ever had, I've also never been as immersed is a character.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
That's cool. I've not read the monsterhearts rulebook, but the Apocalypse World rulebook spells this out very clearly:

quote:

Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and
pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their
characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say
what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively;
and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and
surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything
about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned
world says and does except the players’ characters.

edit: Of course, people do fail to adhere to it quite a bit, usually because people have a really hard time reading Vincents books for some reason. John Harper touches upon it in this blog post: http://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2010/10/apocalypse-world-crossing-line.html

thotsky fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Dec 8, 2014

inklesspen
Oct 17, 2007

Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.
Buglord
Yeah, I think Monsterhearts (like other PBTA games) hits a nice sweet spot in abstraction. Fate makes you think about "am I creating an advantage or overcoming an obstacle", D&D makes you have to figure out what skill something would fall under. PBTA games just have moves that are things you are likely to do in-fiction and I like that a lot.

This is only semi-grog-related, but I think this is the most relevant thread for it right now. I'm in the industry at a hobby level, and that largely on less popular/indie games. Every so often I hear about a horrible thing which has occurred (the consultants thing, the DTRPG gamergate thing, now apparently some thing involving Ken Hite and Zak S) after it's happened. For whatever reasons (largely self-protection, I think?) people rarely post links to the things that have happened; they just talk about them. So from my point of view, following largely folks who (I think) are upstanding people, I hear about horrible things for which I have no proof whatsoever. This makes it hard for me to decide what, if anything, I should do about them. (For instance, I didn't purchase D&D 5 when otherwise I might have, because the books look pretty.)

Any advice for somehow keeping more abreast of this poo poo? If someone asks me why I'm not playing D&D (again, for instance) I'd like to be able to speak more authoritatively than "Someone on the internet said they did a bad thing, and I believe that someone because we hang out on the same forum".

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
What's the deal with retrocloning/OSRs anyway? I read the the retroclone thread OP, but I still don't get it.

And narrative control: does it mean anything about how railroaded a character is or what? Are those guys on RPGnet just whiny bad GMs?

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

Lightning Lord posted:

Goodman's line of dice are all based on DCC's iconic characters. They're all basically 70s film and blaxploitation characters in a fantasy setting. Like, the main guy is a blond barbarian named Hugh wearing candy-striped bell bottoms. I dunno, while I won't argue that it isn't culturally insensitive, I don't think Shanna Dahaka is any worse than say, Luke Cage and Misty Knight.

... okay, so what exactly is magic about the "magic Afro"? I'm thinking of that old Super Globetrotters cartoon where the guy could pull anything he needed out of his Afro ...

Tulul
Oct 23, 2013

THAT SOUND WILL FOLLOW ME TO HELL.
I'm pretty sure the root cause of the OSR is a nostalgia thing. If you were a teenager when original D&D was released, you would have been in your mid-40s when the OSR got swinging. Prime market for that sort of thing.

Selachian posted:

... okay, so what exactly is magic about the "magic Afro"? I'm thinking of that old Super Globetrotters cartoon where the guy could pull anything he needed out of his Afro ...

There's a super-racist old-timey folk belief that rubbing a black person's head is good luck.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

JcDent posted:

What's the deal with retrocloning/OSRs anyway? I read the the retroclone thread OP, but I still don't get it.

Retrocloning, as I understand it, is one part rewriting the older D&D games so they're more comprehensible, another part rewriting the older D&D games so you can actually play them (because they weren't always as available as they are today) and another part rewriting the older D&D games to include that really good houserule you thought up that you think people will really benefit from (and sometimes this is actually true)

OSR is playing the older D&D games and their retroclones coupled with a certain mindset (?) to playing RPGs in the context of the older D&D not literally spelling everything out for you and so giving the players a more open-ended experience.

quote:

What is “Old School” Play?
There are two major styles of roleplaying games. The first (and older) style says “Here is the situation. Pretend you are there as your character, what do you want to do?” This style has been superseded over the years with a style that says “Here is the situation. Based on your character's stats, abilities, skills, etc. as listed on his character sheet and your knowledge of the many detailed rules of the game, what is the best way to use your character’s skills and abilities and the rules to solve the situation?” Old school play strongly favors the first style and frowns on too much of the second.

Here are some major points where old school play is different:
Heroic, not Superheroic
Achievement, not Advancement
No Skills
Limited Magic Items
No Assumption of "Game Balance"
It's Not All About Combat
Reality/Common Sense Trumps Rules
Forget "Rules Mastery"
No Script Immunity
Not Mentioned Does Not Mean Prohibited

On reflection, most of these points seem to be a reaction to 3rd Edition D&D trying to be its own physics engine (and being pretty bad at it). There's some elements of reactions to 4th Edition there as well, but I'm not sure of the timing.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 6 hours!

Biomute posted:

That's cool. I've not read the monsterhearts rulebook, but the Apocalypse World rulebook spells this out very clearly:
Monsterhearts isn't as explicit about giving the MC total control over the environment, but it does quote AW directly with the "roleplaying is a conversation...Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each other’s ideas, monopolize. All fine." Thing is, I find that PBP games of both games tend to give the PCs a lot of narrative control because otherwise, you're waiting for the MC's feedback every time you try to do something that you think might stand a chance of failure.

But the virtue of any PbtA game is that it's built for that kind of freedom, whereas in a lot of traditional games it would be inconceivable to say "I pick the lock and go in through the window" without waiting for the GM to tell you if you have to roll for that.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

gradenko_2000 posted:

Retrocloning, as I understand it, is one part rewriting the older D&D games so they're more comprehensible, another part rewriting the older D&D games so you can actually play them (because they weren't always as available as they are today) and another part rewriting the older D&D games to include that really good houserule you thought up that you think people will really benefit from (and sometimes this is actually true)

OSR is playing the older D&D games and their retroclones coupled with a certain mindset (?) to playing RPGs in the context of the older D&D not literally spelling everything out for you and so giving the players a more open-ended experience.


On reflection, most of these points seem to be a reaction to 3rd Edition D&D trying to be its own physics engine (and being pretty bad at it). There's some elements of reactions to 4th Edition there as well, but I'm not sure of the timing.

I read that PDF!

It's all seems nice and dandy (and stops halfling rogue from sliding up your butt), but I guess it needs a mindset more than a rule set. Tho I always imagined old RPG games being chockefull of strange rules and random rolls.

Also, how is OSR's "crafty players, craftier GMs" supposed to work witk RPGPundint's (perceived) hate of player agency?

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Halloween Jack posted:

Thing is, I find that PBP games of both games tend to give the PCs a lot of narrative control because otherwise, you're waiting for the MC's feedback every time you try to do something that you think might stand a chance of failure.

But the virtue of any PbtA game is that it's built for that kind of freedom, whereas in a lot of traditional games it would be inconceivable to say "I pick the lock and go in through the window" without waiting for the GM to tell you if you have to roll for that.

It's equally inconceivable to say that in Apocalypse World. The rule is to do it, do it, and what you are describing is acting under fire. I'd be going "cool, so you're acting under fire, right?" and they would have to roll.

Chaltab
Feb 16, 2011

So shocked someone got me an avatar!

gradenko_2000 posted:

What is “Old School” Play?
There are two major styles of roleplaying games. The first (and older) style says “Here is the situation. Pretend you are there as your character, what do you want to do?” This style has been superseded over the years with a style that says “Here is the situation. Based on your character's stats, abilities, skills, etc. as listed on his character sheet and your knowledge of the many detailed rules of the game, what is the best way to use your character’s skills and abilities and the rules to solve the situation?” Old school play strongly favors the first style and frowns on too much of the second.

Here are some major points where old school play is different:
Heroic, not Superheroic
Achievement, not Advancement
No Skills
Limited Magic Items
No Assumption of "Game Balance"
It's Not All About Combat
Reality/Common Sense Trumps Rules
Forget "Rules Mastery"
No Script Immunity
The thing is, a lot of that is blatantly disingenuous. Old school games have fewer defined skills, but they still have rolls to succede or fail skill-based challenges. The games may not be very well-balanced, but it's blatantly false to assert that Gygax and Co weren't *trying* to make them so. And it's easy to assert that you don't have to worry about 'rules mastery' in a game whose rules you've been using for years. I don't even know what they mean by 'Script Immunity'.

That's not to say that OSR is wrong or bad, just that Old School and New School is not a clear cut distinction and nothing to be snobby about.

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos

Chaltab posted:

I don't even know what they mean by 'Script Immunity'.

'The story says this guy can't die yet, so he makes a clean getaway regardless of how well you roll against him'.

inklesspen
Oct 17, 2007

Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.
Buglord

Biomute posted:

It's equally inconceivable to say that in Apocalypse World. The rule is to do it, do it, and what you are describing is acting under fire. I'd be going "cool, so you're acting under fire, right?" and they would have to roll.

If it's a tense situation, yeah. But it it's just an ordinary lock and there's nobody coming round the corner to catch you in the action, I don't see how the move triggers.

JDCorley
Jun 28, 2004

Elminster don't surf

gradenko_2000 posted:

Retrocloning, as I understand it, is one part rewriting the older D&D games so they're more comprehensible, another part rewriting the older D&D games so you can actually play them (because they weren't always as available as they are today) and another part rewriting the older D&D games to include that really good houserule you thought up that you think people will really benefit from (and sometimes this is actually true)

There was also an element in early retrocloning (Castles & Crusades, OSRIC) in trying to "keep alive" editions that were being absolutely crushed by d20/D&D3. At the time you couldn't get legal PDFs of past editions of D&D (WOTC abortively had a PDF store, then suddenly closed it without warning) and the theory was that if you wanted to keep using your AD&D stuff and recruited a new player, it would be better for them to just be able to download OSRIC than try to cobble together the books from various used bookstores/amazon (which at the time was also not as ubiquitously over-stocked.)

This is why a certain amount of distrust in WOTC in the retroclone/OSR community is baked in from the very beginning and, frankly, given the insane whiplash regarding digital policies WOTC exhibited through that period, it is somewhat justified.

Very Slightly Justified Grog = Best Grog

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

inklesspen posted:

If it's a tense situation, yeah. But it it's just an ordinary lock and there's nobody coming round the corner to catch you in the action, I don't see how the move triggers.

Unless you have an unnatural aversion to both keys and the use of doors, you're not going to be picking the locks on windows and going through them as a casual activity. Somebody coming around the corner and catching you in the act might very well be the result of a missed roll, which is a good reason for why you would want to do the roll in the first place. In either case, The Apocalypse World moves trigger based on what the characters do or say, not based on whether or not the players or MC think they are dramatically appropriate. They create drama, that is how they are written.

quote:

Always remember the rule for moves: to do it, do it. Also true in reverse: if you do it, you do it, so make with the dice.

Act under fire:

You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. I often say things like “okay, roll to act under fire, and the fire is just how badly that’s going to hurt,” “…and the fire is, can you really get that close to her without her noticing?” or “…and the fire is, if you gently caress it up, they’ll be ON your rear end.”

Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first.

I mean, you guys do whatever you think is fun, that is cool and all, but if we're using Apocalypse World as an example in this kind of discussion let's get it right and actually follow the rules as written.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Dec 8, 2014

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

gradenko_2000 posted:

Retrocloning, as I understand it, is one part rewriting the older D&D games so they're more comprehensible, another part rewriting the older D&D games so you can actually play them (because they weren't always as available as they are today) and another part rewriting the older D&D games to include that really good houserule you thought up that you think people will really benefit from (and sometimes this is actually true)

I think the first few retroclones were actually just done for publishing reasons. People were writing modules for AD&D, but since AD&D is dead from a publisher's viewpoint they decided to release a generic-brand D&D rule set that people could publish material for. Then it struck a chord with a lot of people and all the above reasons started resulting in all the games like LotFP, ACKS, and even to some extent Dungeon World and Torchbearer.

Edit: Christ, I spent too long typing this all up. JDCorley pretty much beat me on all this.

JcDent posted:

It's all seems nice and dandy (and stops halfling rogue from sliding up your butt), but I guess it needs a mindset more than a rule set. Tho I always imagined old RPG games being chockefull of strange rules and random rolls.

I think most OSR types would agree with the idea that it's more of a mindset than anything else. I remember there were even some groups hacking 4e to run more 'old-school' and things like that going on a bit ago.

The chockfull of rules thing is a bit more complicated, and largely runs in two strains. The first is just that there definitely was a line of thought that said 'more rules means more fun' in mid-early RPGs. When AD&D and Basic split the first was marketed as clearly being the better 'more advanced' version because it had a ton of complicated and dumb house-rules baked into it, while Basic was seen as a simplified version of the game for kids to use as training wheels until they were good enough roleplayers to graduate to 'real' D&D. This mindset definitely took a long time to stop being the dominant one in RPGs, despite the fact that Basic was both wildly successful and way better designed than AD&D.

The other answer is that OSR style play is way less into rule for what players can do and way more into rules for what DMs can (should?) do. Player actions should be kept fairly freeform and handled by common sense and relatively simple dice-rolls, but rules related to content generation and how monsters behave and so on can actually get fairly complex. The idea is that if DM Fiat is a major rules resolution method, you really need some guidelines to exist to help use that power well. Also, the need for the DM to be 'fair' is a big thing, and it's really hard to be fair if they're pulling everything out of their rear end.

Things like using pre-drawn maps for dungeon crawls and tables to handle what happens to you when you spend a night buying drinks for people at the tavern or rules for when a monster's morale breaks, or rules for wandering monsters, or whatever are all rules that run behind the scenes and let the DM run the world in a manner where they aren't constantly just asking themselves 'okay, should I gently caress them over or not'? That's a pretty lovely position to be in, both as a DM and as a player, since it means that you're never taking a calculated risk so much as just petitioning an indifferent god and hoping that this isn't the time they tell you to eat poo poo.

taichara
May 9, 2013

c:\>erase c:\reality.sys copy a:\gigacity\*.* c:

Lightning Lord posted:

Goodman's line of dice are all based on DCC's iconic characters. They're all basically 70s film and blaxploitation characters in a fantasy setting. Like, the main guy is a blond barbarian named Hugh wearing candy-striped bell bottoms. I dunno, while I won't argue that it isn't culturally insensitive, I don't think Shanna Dahaka is any worse than say, Luke Cage and Misty Knight.

I don't have any familiarity with DCC at all, but I have to admit that seeing a black character named Shanna Dahaka who apparently summoned Azi Dahaka, not exactly the most pleasant of figures, in order to enchant her hair seems maybe just a little yeeaaaahhhno just as a general thing.

Darwinism
Jan 6, 2008


Biomute posted:

Unless you have an unnatural aversion to both keys and the use of doors, you're not going to be picking the locks on windows and going through them as a casual activity.

I don't think you understand the murderhobo mindset very well at all.

That said there's plenty of room for situations where there is no real opposition and no real need to roll, and picking some random lock that's not being guarded is one of them.

Slimnoid
Sep 6, 2012

Does that mean I don't get the job?
When even James Raggi won't publish your poo poo, you may want to reevaluate your life.

James Raggi posted:

I didn't touch Dark Albion for the same reason I didn't touch Arrows of Indra - if you're going to give me England, give me England, if you're going to give me India, give me India, don't give me fantasy versions of them.

(Qelong was actually a miscommunication in that regard, but since I was never going to hit southeast Asia myself, I didn't fight about it.)

James Raggi posted:

Settings line up the pins, adventures knock them down.

Adventures can have the historical back drop but it's not about the history. A setting would need to be, and I haven't gotten my poo poo together on that because my bookshelf is already full of dozens of expensive academic press "settings books."

You'll just get to feel all done-upon over there, knowing Vincent Baker's done something for me, knowing that I've tried to get Ron Edwards to do stuff for me, knowing that every so often I check to see if McKinney has any new work I could take a look at, but I am not really interested in publishing anything by you.

Pundowski posted:

The thing is, you have a right not to publish me, obviously. It's a stupid choice on your part, because my work is better than anything the three you named have ever done, but it is your choice; I don't feel "done-upon" about that. I've always found the right publishers for my books, (most importantly) never had to settle for self-publishing, and have been pleased by the increasing critical and financial success of each product. Albion took way longer than most but now it has found a home too, and I think people will be blown away by the final and expanded edition.

But you are kind of missing my point here: you're so desperate to be edgy and hip and cynical that you're underusing your talent. That's why you're relying on cheap shock-tactics (which aptly describes both making 'kill all the pcs' adventures, presenting a purely cynical worldview, and your little cocksucking exercise with vince baker to show just how 'alternative-osr' you really are), instead of actually daring to do something that's much harder, and make actual archetypal fantasy that's good. If I wanted to make some adventure where there's gimmicky weirdo-demons that threaten the PCs and where the PCs have to be awful to survive and where the dungeon is just a gently caress-with-the-players deathtrap, I could drop that in a second. But it's much harder to do something where monsters you've seen a thousand times before are turned menacing again, or where you can present the option of a "good vs. evil" theme and seem epic rather than corny or preachy, or where the dungeon is an interesting environment without having to rely on "screw the players! fantasy loving vietnam! you get punished for even going in!" all the time.

Challenge.

James Raggi posted:

I think I'll go on doing the stuff I want to do, and people will get it if they want it.

People who don't want it have every other publisher out there to get stuff from, and they're welcome to them.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Darwinism posted:

I don't think you understand the murderhobo mindset very well at all.

That said there's plenty of room for situations where there is no real opposition and no real need to roll, and picking some random lock that's not being guarded is one of them.

Sure, there is stuff you don't have to roll for. Unless you're doing a move you don't roll at all, you just say what your character does and it happens. I do understand the general concept of "Say yes, or roll the dice". Baking a cake is not going to be "acting under fire" unless Dog Head has said that unless you bring him a perfect wedding cake for the ceremony he's going to give your nuts to Joe's Girl as a wedding present. However, Lockpicking/B&E implies pressure.

Not that picking an unguarded random lock was what was being proposed though, that's your contribution, and it's one that I have trouble seeing ever coming up in Apocalypse World. If you've worked to set up a situation where you've got ample time with an unguarded lock (probably by using some combination of Read A Sitch and/or Act Under Fire) you've already rolled and there's no need to make the player roll again (give the player what they've worked for). That sort of moment does not just fall into your lap in this game though. There is no status quo in Apocalypse World, and every day is automatically a bad day, so if there's a lock that needs to be picked, there's going to be fun consequences for failure, otherwise what is the point? Many of the moves introduce opposition/conflict in some fashion and it's even an explicit MC move (Announce Future Badness) and therefore a potential result of most missed rolls as well.

Halloween Jacks example is at best just a bad example for whatever point he was making, but it did seem to me like they were making an assumption about Apocalypse Worlds rules that is not true so I've done my best to clarify. Yes, not every action in Apocalypse World results in a move/dice roll, but when they do the player cannot decide to just skip making the move.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Dec 8, 2014

Saguaro PI
Mar 11, 2013

Totally legit tree

quote:

you're so desperate to be edgy and hip and cynical that you're underusing your talent.

*checks watch* Oh hey, broken clock is right on time.

If there's something I learned from 'Better Than Any Man' it's that deep within the ball of manure that is everything Raggi creates there are some actual solid ideas. It's just that he's so obsessed with being the kind of person you'd mention in the same breath as the folks behind stuff like Cannibal Holocaust that he spends more time going "will this be a middle finger to the PC police" than "is this idea actually any good".

Hell, Grimmy Jim Jim is the same. Agents of SWING was a perfectly serviceable FATE game that demonstrates he can produce something worthwhile when he isn't looking for another cause to become a free speech martyr of.

Kemper Boyd
Aug 6, 2007

no kings, no gods, no masters but a comfy chair and no socks

inklesspen posted:

(the consultants thing, the DTRPG gamergate thing, now apparently some thing involving Ken Hite and Zak S)

The Ken Hite thing was pretty much just me. I decided to not buy Kite's stuff in the future because he keeps promoting and associating with Zak.

inklesspen
Oct 17, 2007

Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.
Buglord

Kemper Boyd posted:

The Ken Hite thing was pretty much just me. I decided to not buy Kite's stuff in the future because he keeps promoting and associating with Zak.

I googled their two names, though, and I couldn't find anything apart from Ken having also been credited in D&D 5. So that was another example of "apparently a thing happened but I can't find any evidence of it". Not saying it didn't happen. Just saying I can't find poo poo and it bugs me to hear about stuff that I can't substantiate.

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FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

inklesspen posted:

I googled their two names, though, and I couldn't find anything apart from Ken having also been credited in D&D 5. So that was another example of "apparently a thing happened but I can't find any evidence of it". Not saying it didn't happen. Just saying I can't find poo poo and it bugs me to hear about stuff that I can't substantiate.
Ken's twitter feed sees him regularly engaging in friendly banter with Zak.

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