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JcDent posted:Unlike ducks, Kenders are technically sentient beings that one should be able to reason with. Except that ducks can be reasoned with, or at least trained in some ways. Kender can't. thatbastardken posted:the real problem with kender is the kind of people who play them think they're funny Kender are funny. In the same way that painful things are funny. Somebody getting kicked in the balls or falling down stairs is hilarious. Unless it happens to you. Then it sucks. As long as kender happen to other people they're comedy gold.
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Jan 13, 2020 15:24
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Everyone posted:Except that ducks can be reasoned with, or at least trained in some ways. Kender can't. Kender procreation is probably somehow worse than ducks'. And that's aside from it leading to more Kender
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Jan 13, 2020 15:42
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Kender are a single, really annoying joke told over and over.
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Jan 13, 2020 17:31
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Night10194 posted:Kender are a single, really annoying joke told over and over. Reminder that they're an invention of a Mormon author who wanted a thief character for their books but thinks actual stealing and whatnot is sinful so they created kender so they could have a thief character who's not evil by their definitions.
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Jan 13, 2020 18:23
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Which is exceedingly weird to me. We have all kinds of stories that justify killing someone; why is theft while knowing it's theft the big red line that requires making up an insufferable character type for, just so they don't realize what they're doing is wrong? It's not like you can't say 'I'm a thief, but I steal from villains and wealthy targets or slip into places to find macguffins and information without needing to kill sixty people because I think that's better than, you know, killing sixty people'.
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Jan 13, 2020 19:36
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Cythereal posted:Reminder that they're an invention of a Mormon author who wanted a thief character for their books but thinks actual stealing and whatnot is sinful so they created kender so they could have a thief character who's not evil by their definitions. That's a mischaracterization. The problem, in Hickman's mind, wasn't a character that's a thief, but the idea of an entire race of thieves. After all, Tracy has no problem with Tas' use of lethal violence or other genre-staple sins. Basically in a brief moment of awareness that D&D's racial essentialism is a bit gross, and recognizing the troubling similarities to real world characterization of Roma, Tracy went "what if we just make them all naive kleptomaniacs instead?" which is probably the most D&D response possible.
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Jan 13, 2020 20:06
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Just imagine the kind of person who believes that the Vietnam War was justified but shoplifting food is wrong.
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Jan 13, 2020 20:06
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The even bigger weirdness is why make a race of thieves. You can make a people who are physically very adept and agile or good at sneaking without saying 'well then I guess they'd all be burglars'. Someone can be a good fit for a class or character type without their entire species being 'man we loving love robbing'.
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Jan 13, 2020 20:08
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Halloween Jack posted:Just imagine the kind of person who believes that the Vietnam War was justified but shoplifting food is wrong. Did Weis or Hickman weigh in on the Vietnam War in a public manner? I Google searched both of their names and I couldn't find anything direct than Hickman writing a Batman book set in the 1950s and 1960s which touched on said war but little beyond that. As for Weis, her college professor told her certain subject matter to avoid in poetry which included the Vietnam War but nothing else on this. While there's a huge host of problems with Mormon religious teachings, there are times when it seems that people are too quick to default to "the Dragonlance creators are Mormons* therefore this is why this thing in Dragonlance is bad." I think we're at the point where if we're going to make leaps of faith about game design decisions we should at least source claims. If we're going to hatejerk about Dragonlance, we should do so responsibly. *Hickman is, I don't know if Weis ever elaborated on her religious beliefs.
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Jan 13, 2020 23:57
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I maintain that it's possible for someone to play a non-terrible Kender in a group with other people who won't hate your guts for your RP. Night10194 posted:The even bigger weirdness is why make a race of thieves. You can make a people who are physically very adept and agile or good at sneaking without saying 'well then I guess they'd all be burglars'. Someone can be a good fit for a class or character type without their entire species being 'man we loving love robbing'.
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Jan 14, 2020 00:08
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Fizban is pretty definitely supposed to be Actually Really Good And Cool And God tho, which can be seen when Death Gate imported him as Zifnab and...well, he's God, and Actually Really Good. Death Gate is significantly more directly Mormon-inspired than Dragonlance, it should be noted.
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Jan 14, 2020 00:09
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Mors Rattus posted:Fizban is pretty definitely supposed to be Actually Really Good And Cool And God tho, which can be seen when Death Gate imported him as Zifnab and...well, he's God, and Actually Really Good. Death Gate was a bit more direct about the religious parts and there Zifnab wasn't a deity. He was very clearly subordinate to the good dragons, who were essentially angels with scaly wings, and had more the role of a prophetic figure, sheltered by god and driven mad by revelations that no mortal mind should have seen. It made his weird-rear end useless behavior a bit more tolerable because it wasn't the MONKEYSPORKCHEESE actions of someone who could fix everything, but the defensive measures of a thoroughly broken mind that had lived through some extremely harrowing poo poo. God in Death Gate is entirely unapproachable and very hands-off about... basically everything, more or less just making sure molecules move around right and that's it, but humans trying to master the world to any extent greater than their station will still totally gently caress them over and beyond a certain point they should trust in his non-interference to bring about a safe world rather than try to alter it greatly.
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Jan 14, 2020 00:22
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The thing I find kind of funny about Kender is, the thing D&D parties actually NEED from a Thief, is done pretty well by a tinker gnome stereotype. They are usually sneaky and tricky, and fix traps. How often is pickpocketing useful to murderhobos?
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Jan 14, 2020 00:35
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Tylana posted:The thing I find kind of funny about Kender is, the thing D&D parties actually NEED from a Thief, is done pretty well by a tinker gnome stereotype. They are usually sneaky and tricky, and fix traps. How often is pickpocketing useful to murderhobos? It kind of depends on the edition of the Tinker Gnome. The 1st edition version from Dragonlance Adventure would be with the party and they'd find a chest and ask him to open it. So, three months later his steam-powered 20' tall contraption would fail to open the chest and then explode, killing everyone present. A little later a Kender would come along disarm the trapped chest, open it and ignore the gems and jewelry to grab honking clown nose. That would somehow turn out to be an artifact.
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Jan 14, 2020 02:47
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Wot's Death Gate and how short does it fall of its metal title?
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Jan 14, 2020 06:56
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Night10194 posted:The even bigger weirdness is why make a race of thieves. I mean, that just cuts to a lot of basic assumption of D&D. Libertad! posted:If we're going to hatejerk about Dragonlance, we should do so responsibly. For real, a decent amount of the stuff that people have pointed out as being Mormon weirdness is really just crap unexamined biases that's endemic to western fantasy in general and D&D in specific.
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Jan 14, 2020 07:36
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Nessus posted:I guess if you had literally only read The Hobbit and not any of the other LOTR things, you might assume that hobbits are a race of Thief Class People, but even in the context here Bilbo was completely legally justified - he signed a contract to be specialist labor for dwarves who (by dwarf law) were out to reclaim their own from a thief.  If the REST of dungeon-delving isn't an issue, why would bringing a locksmith and trap specialist along be?
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Jan 14, 2020 07:54
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Why does DnD even has such a hard-on for traps and locks? They were never a major part of western fantastic tradition.
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Jan 14, 2020 09:45
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FoldableHuman posted:I mean, that just cuts to a lot of basic assumption of D&D. Yeah, I generally dislike that the game has both race and class options... but OOPs, some combos are traps! gently caress you!
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Jan 14, 2020 09:46
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By popular demand posted:Why does DnD even has such a hard-on for traps and locks? They were never a major part of western fantastic tradition.
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Jan 14, 2020 10:08
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JcDent posted:Wot's Death Gate and how short does it fall of its metal title? Alright, ahem. So we start with Normal Earth, get a nuclear war, then from the smoking ashes arise humans, elves, dwarves and two types of SUPER WIZARD humans with different magic specialties(basically one is the LIGHT WIZARDS who're good at cooperative magic and subtle stuff, the other is the DARK WIZARDS who're covered in protective magic runes, work alone and tend to blow stuff up real hard when they do things.). Obviously the Wizard Races are immediately at war, while everyone else rebuilds, and often manipulate the lesser-creature(elf, human, dwarf, collectively the "Mensch") courts and societies, trying to swing them one way or the other. This lasts until the Light Wizards, the Sartan, have had enough(plus they're getting their asses kicked) and unite for one huge SUPER RITUAL SPELL where they're literally gonna rework the world into a better and more perfect universe where they are, coincidentally, in charge. They split reality into seven worlds(or six, until you reach the last couple of books and this GRANDE REVELATIONE is given to you): Four elemental worlds for themselves and the Mensch to hang out in, the Nexus, the Labyrinth and the Vortex. The Vortex is a temporary shelter while the fires from the literal annihilation of the universe die down, the Labyrinth is a horrible sentient hellscape prison for the Dark Wizards, the Patryns, intended to "civilize" them and the Nexus is the nice city outside of the Labyrinth that the Patryns can get to live in once they've learned to be Good People. The Seventh World is the Seventh Gate which is a magic force amplifier(it supposedly taps into God's own might) which the Sartan used to accomplish it all. Surprisingly, this all works out to plan... for about five minutes. Because God is real and he is, subtly, pissed, that the Sartan have usurped his place(a small faction of Sartan got themselves sent to the Labyrinth for going "hoo boy, guys, I don't think God's gonna be happy about us loving around with his Creation like this"), and start destroying all their plans. Of course the Sartan also do a good bit of that themselves, because a bunch of them start practicing Necromancy, which works on a vague and ironic life-for-a-life principle. Sometimes you resurrect someone and someone else just dies, other times you resurrect someone and that person you resurrect then kills someone else, etc. so when the Earth World Sartan are resurrecting all their dead for slave labour, the other Sartan are keeling over dead more or less at random. All the four worlds are also imperfect and also only really work if they can trade resources between each other(the Air world is intended as a factory, the Water world as a waste recycling zone, the Fire world as a giant agricultural hothouse and the Earth world as a supply of raw materials), and once a couple of the worlds, like Air and Earth, drop off the grid from their residents dying or being under siege, the whole cooperative comes crashing down. Eventually the DARK WIZARDS(the Patryn), break out of the Labyrinth, and rather than having been mellowed out by constant, harrowing torture day in and day out, it has in fact just given them a grim resolve to see every Sartan head on a pike, and they start infiltrating the elemental worlds to track down the Sartan, topple the Mensch societies and conquer the universe. The Sartan are at this point almost completely gone from all four worlds, and clinging on by a fingernail where they aren't, so it should be a slam dunk for the Patryn to conquer the four worlds, except that the Serpents(demons in giant snake disguise) and Dragons(angels in scaly fursuits) have also been woken up by the Sartan meddling and are loving things up for everyone(the dragons balk the Sartan plans to rule everything, the serpents just gently caress up everyone's day with casual betrayal and dickery, making the Patryns start losing trust in each other). So the premier Patryn agent figures out that the only way for Patryns and Sartan both to not get murdered and/or locked up in the Labyrinth forever is for them to abandon the four elemental worlds, allowing the Mensch to govern themselves rather than manipulating them(after setting up the magic interlocks that allow all four worlds to be habitable) and focus on keeping the serpents fought to a standstill so they can't escape the Nexus/Labyrinth/Vortex and ruin the now-Mensch worlds. This puts him at odds with his king who wants to return the world to how it used to be, so he ends up as a denounced traitor to his own people, working with a similarly-minded Sartan to try and bring the world to a less-hosed equilibrium. Zifnab's role as this is that he actually stayed on Earth while it was disassembled by magic, trying to save as many innocents as possible(oh yeah the Sartan only saved like 0.1% of all the world's population and the rest just got to die) and went insane from the horrors he saw, so the Dragons picked him up and locked away the worst trauma, and now use him as their babbling, inscrutable prophetic agent. Thank you for coming to my bad taste in fantasy novels.
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Jan 14, 2020 10:08
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JcDent posted:Wot's Death Gate and how short does it fall of its metal title? It's a really long series about a bunch of Elon Musk Galaxy Brain rear end in a top hat wizards who try to "fix" the world and make everything worse for everyone by splitting Earth into component fantasy elements. So you have your air world and your earth world and fire world and water world, and there's big devices in each world that transport that world's resource into the other worlds, but right after splitting everything up the wizards went "cool beans, see you in a couple hundred years when you've learned to stop being mean" and put themselves in stasis for thousands of years. The machines then all promptly broke, for the most part. The peak of the book is #3, Fire Sea, which actually takes place on the earth world which is just a cave complex. The wizards who decided to hang behind to guard a macguffin that isn't important until, like, the sixth book, all promptly started to die off to the sulphur dioxide atmosphere that comes with setting up shop inside an active volcano. Since the machines that were supposed to send them water and power all broke right away after the people who were supposed to be running them choked and died on poison gas, the survivors decide it's time for some good old necromancy. Since the universe has a Raise 1 Zombie : Kill 1 Person rule they inadvertently massacre 99% of their people on the other worlds. Someone towards the end accidentally creates a lich, who gets to keep her magic instead of just being a zombie but constantly experiences the moment of her own death, she goes on a rampage, and the book ends with a full blown zombie apocalypse. As a whole the series gets pretty disjointed and is a flood of Proper Nouns, and it's hard to recommend because it's like 3000 pages. Your literary soul is probably better off using that amount of effort to get through Gravity's Rainbow or House of Leaves, but if you just want a lot of pages of elves and wizards with some actually okay fantasy political thriller cropping up from time to time, boy does Death's Gate have a lot of pages!
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Jan 14, 2020 10:09
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The summaries are loving great, lol. Thanks!
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Jan 14, 2020 11:15
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There was a Death Gate adventure game and it's a good way to experience the best bits of the books (namely the runic magic system) without reading all that dross. E: it's probably take less than an hour with a walkthrough (90's adventure games died for a reason) By popular demand fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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Jan 14, 2020 11:44
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By popular demand posted:There was a Death Gate adventure game and it's a good way to experience the best bits of the books (namely the runic magic system) without reading all that dross. The adventure game is really well done in general, though it had to invent its own ending because it came out before the series ended. It also cleaned up a lot of the incidental bullshit of the novels.
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Jan 14, 2020 15:15
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I maintain that it's possible for someone to play a non-terrible Kender in a group with other people who won't hate your guts for your RP. We actually had a kender in the group when I ran Dragonlance. But the player ignored the whole "stealing from everyone" aspect and played him as a halfling who just happened to have a lot of random tchotchkes in his pockets.("Wait, why do you have a ball of string?" "Oh ... *shrug* ... must have found it somewhere, I guess.")
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Jan 14, 2020 20:19
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Selachian posted:We actually had a kender in the group when I ran Dragonlance. But the player ignored the whole "stealing from everyone" aspect and played him as a halfling who just happened to have a lot of random tchotchkes in his pockets.("Wait, why do you have a ball of string?" "Oh ... *shrug* ... must have found it somewhere, I guess.") That's like 90% of my theoretical 'being a good Kender' plan, right there. Or, you know, go ahead and rifle through the other players' pockets...but remember that Kender have no sense of material value, so they'd be looking for interesting bits of string or shiny stones or a nice button or something, not, you know, money, or magical items, or even most gems (and if they did, they wouldn't try to hide that they had them, so if someone said 'hey, where's that x I had', they'd immediately pipe up with 'oh, I found that the other day, you must have dropped it, here' and give it back). The problem is that bad kender (again, probably almost all of them in the history of people playing Dragonlance tabletop) get played like they were still tiny annoying humans, out to get rich and rob the good poo poo from their friends like the most poo poo-lordiest of thieves past, so...
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Jan 14, 2020 23:26
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and no sense of private property also should mean they're willing to share what they don't need 'hey, hungry? I got extra bread' since, hey ownership? what's that? Just use what you need, hoarding things is silly. but players and a lot of write ups don't think of this, and go into 'thieving little magpies'.
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Jan 15, 2020 00:17
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Robindaybird posted:but players and a lot of write ups don't think of this, and go into 'thieving little magpies'. I mean, the setting's authors themselves didn't think of this. Rather than portraying the Kender as Anarcho-Communists, they just have them be awful little gremlins.
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Jan 15, 2020 01:45
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, the setting's authors themselves didn't think of this. Rather than portraying the Kender as Anarcho-Communists, they just have them be awful little gremlins.
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Jan 15, 2020 01:58
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, the setting's authors themselves didn't think of this. Rather than portraying the Kender as Anarcho-Communists, they just have them be awful little gremlins. If they're awful little gremlins why aren't they murdered on sight? I remember playing in a post-war campaign as a Red Robe Transmuter and we had a guy playing a Kender. Before play started he just stated, "I'm going to assume that over a journey of any length of time that Wilikin (the character's name was Wilikin Candleshoe) will borrow examine and replace everything everybody owns. Beyond that he'll find your stuff boring and tend to Handle things from new, NPC people or crowds." At that point the party has a fun character who's a Fighter/Thief that's immune to fear effects and can use that Taunt ability to debuff enemies. The secret to playing a Kender is "don't be an rear end in a top hat to the other players." Once you set that up, why wouldn't you want a Kender in the group? They're great.
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Jan 15, 2020 02:34
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A good way to nullify or downplay friendly-fire party-stealing have every PC when they're drawing a weapon or using an item go "I grab the kender and pull out my spell components." Aka acknowledge that it happens but remove the trust-killing thing it generates by putting it in the hands of the other PCs.
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Jan 15, 2020 06:26
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I feel like any Kender who has spent any time among humans is gonna figure out pretty quickly not to just grab their poo poo. It might still happen but like, it's like learning the local customs. Humans get offended when you Handle their stuff so don't do that. Otherwise it makes no sense anyone would ever associate with them. They can have a loose concept of ownership but they have to be intelligent enough to fit in with people who don't.
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Jan 15, 2020 06:40
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Everyone posted:At that point the party has a fun character who's a Fighter/Thief that's immune to fear effects and can use that Taunt ability to debuff enemies. The secret to playing a Kender is "don't be an rear end in a top hat to the other players." Once you set that up, why wouldn't you want a Kender in the group? They're great. Kender do three things: 1) Say that the way in which you should be playing a Kender is to be a thief who takes things other people care about. If people didn't care, they wouldn't object, and the example Kender wouldn't have to constantly make excuses. 2) Give permission to players who want to steal things from other players. Yes yes, don't play with assholes, etc. but in my experience you often don't have complete control over who you play with and some people are perfectly nice people except when you give them an excuse to be annoying little shits. In any case, the game shouldn't be encouraging bad behaviour in the first place. 3) Say that anyone who objects to having their stuff taken by kleptomaniac compulsive liars is, morally, in the wrong for not liking the kleptomaniac little shits. These are all problems that can be fixed by open communication between players and establishing borders for what is and isn't OK in the game, but that's being an adult and being an adult is difficult, especially if you're actually teenagers - and the Dragonlance doesn't make this easy by saying that annoying kleptomaniacs are a playable part of the setting.
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Jan 15, 2020 06:43
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Glagha posted:I feel like any Kender who has spent any time among humans is gonna figure out pretty quickly not to just grab their poo poo. It might still happen but like, it's like learning the local customs. Humans get offended when you Handle their stuff so don't do that. Otherwise it makes no sense anyone would ever associate with them. They can have a loose concept of ownership but they have to be intelligent enough to fit in with people who don't.
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Jan 15, 2020 07:00
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Nessus posted:Thri-kreen in Dark Sun have a pretty inhuman mindset with a couple of hard rules (though I do not believe they are Mandated for PCs) yet somehow despite literally being Zorak from Space Ghost, they don't have issues. This is in part because one of their things is that they treat the rest of the party like their family, which gives them all sorts of protections from aspects of Thri-Kreen psychology.
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Jan 15, 2020 07:16
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The best Kender archetype is that guy from the all guardsman party 40k stories who always makes black market deals and keeps the group supplied. he's a thieving little poo poo but he's their thieving little poo poo.
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Jan 15, 2020 07:32
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He's a space-halfling, not a space-kender. But I'm the weird rear end in a top hat who thinks that smoll-human fantasy races outside of dwarves are unnecessary. When a game includes halflings AND gnomes, then you're pushing it.
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Jan 15, 2020 08:06
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Part of the joke is that he is 100% genetically pure human by the standards of the imperium but gets mistaken for an abhuman constantly.
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Jan 15, 2020 08:20
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By popular demand posted:Part of the joke is that he is 100% genetically pure human by the standards of the imperium but gets mistaken for an abhuman constantly. He's a straight import of Cpl Nobby Nobbs from Discworld, who was disqualified from the human race for shoving. MinistryofLard fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Jan 15, 2020 08:33
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