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Mors Rattus posted:Please stop defending the doors that force you to do sex acts. Yes, absolutely.
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Oct 11, 2020 20:17
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Given that the opening text explicitly tells the GM not to exploit Hannah sexually but then has her do a strip tease that "her brother taught her" to open a mirror makes it sound like she's the author's personal waifu. However, the desire to sexualize her in the module contrasts with his jealousy at the thought of other gamers stroking one off to what happens to her in the very module he wrote.
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Oct 11, 2020 21:31
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Night10194 posted:It is a pleasure to write it so I'm happy a few people enjoy it. I do feel slightly called out by the Manfred Von Carstein description mark you. But thanks, it is a great read, and I am glad you are having fun writing it!
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Oct 11, 2020 21:42
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Libertad! posted:Given that the opening text explicitly tells the GM not to exploit Hannah sexually but then has her do a strip tease that "her brother taught her" to open a mirror makes it sound like she's the author's personal waifu. However, the desire to sexualize her in the module contrasts with his jealousy at the thought of other gamers stroking one off to what happens to her in the very module he wrote. “The only moral NPC sexualization is my NPC sexualization.”
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Oct 11, 2020 22:01
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I thought that Cam had told Heather about the door, not how to strip. Also, her striptease stuff reminds me of the tone of old perv comics like Druuna: she's not fondling her breasts because it's fun, she's doing it for the cause. The sex doors awful for one other reason: indestructible dungeon troops are a dead giveaway that the writer who is pulling A CUNNING RUSE is just a lazy, boring hack. It's even worse than a smug description of all the ways a trap is immune to damage or being affected by anything, as it's loving boring and lazy, gently caress.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:04
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Mors Rattus posted:Please stop defending the doors that force you to do sex acts. I'm not defending them. I'm attacking them as being stupidly repetitive nonsense that takes any possibility of this situation (the PCs have to do something morally objective to achieve a necessary goal) being tense or interesting and throws it down the shitter. I remember a situation similar to this in Pinnacle's Hell on Earth Classic wrap-up adventure: The Unity. In order to fly the Unity to their destination, the PCs are required to murder someone among themselves. It can be an NPC who comes onboard for that eventual purpose, but the idea is that the PCs, who have been adventuring together as friends for years, have to kill one of their own to get where they need to be. And it has to be a murder. They can't just draws straws and the short straw kills himself. Nope, one of his friends has to bear the guilt and pain of murdering one of his best friends. So, yeah, on one level I can see the possibilities for a fraught moral decision. However, like pretty much everything else in this thing, a potentially good idea is wrecked by utterly piss-poor execution. Much like Hannah isn't there to be sexually exploited by anyone except the author. And on a completely different subject, Night, what's the address of your Warhammer blog? I completely forgot about it. I loved the poo poo out of your WH reviews and I really want some more of that.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:36
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See the thing is, by suggesting better ways for the doors that force you to do sex acts could force you to do sex acts, you are in fact defending the doors that force you to do sex acts. Because, like, it doesn’t matter how well they’re implemented, they’re doors that force you to do sex acts. you can’t fix them, the concept is inherently bad.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:48
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It's a conceit to potentially drive non-consensual sex into a game. It's not a deep moral dilemma. It may as well just be a dick-shaped keyhole.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:58
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The closest thing I can get to making the mirror doors good if you make it about their just needing to be entertained, not necessarily sexually. Maybe this door needs the players to get DRAMATIC, maybe this one likes ROMANCE(whether that's a smooch or a declaration of love between two PC's, etc.) and this other one will let the players through if they just give it a show of some good old-fashioned violence. The danger of the mirrors in the village could be that they show people a better, more interesting world than their own, and that some of them completely start losing interest in their real lives to start watching the fictional lives instead. The Snuff Artist Rogue could just be replaced by a wannabe-rogue who has his artist henchmen do up big portraits of him being a daring villain, inflating his legend and selling them to galleries. A few merchants that he's actually tried knocking over have fallen for his false fame and surrendered their stuff rather than face him. If the players actually go after him, they realize he's just a big idiot ham who's never harmed anyone, but if they play along and let him go, they'll have a friend for life(especially if they tell everyone what a dangerous, cool badass he was). Ugh, look, it's loving simple. How can they be so incompetent.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Ugh, look, it's loving simple. How can they be so incompetent. Because what they think is wrong with the internet isn't what's actually wrong with it. They don't have any sense of the actual damage that can be done to people by those 'magic mirrors' and can only imagine it in terms of impurity and the collapse of boundaries.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:17
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Also they want to write about forcing people to do weird sex poo poo.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:18
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Night10194 posted:Also they want to write about forcing people to do weird sex poo poo. This. This is why. It's the same principle behind flashers and groping waitstaff - it's for the power trip of forcing an unwilling participant in their bullshit. There is no way you can do sex mirrors in a way that isn't creepy, gross or pushing comfort levels beyond acceptance.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:Because what they think is wrong with the internet isn't what's actually wrong with it. They don't have any sense of the actual damage that can be done to people by those 'magic mirrors' and can only imagine it in terms of impurity and the collapse of boundaries. Oh loving hell it's not that level of metaphor is it?
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Oct 11, 2020 23:26
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Josef bugman posted:Oh loving hell it's not that level of metaphor is it? Haha yeah I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who wanted to experience the descent into bad ideas, but... yes, it's literally supposed to be a direct analogue to the internet.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:28
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It's not really incompetent (I mean, okay, it is also that) it's being intentionally creepy to inject coerced and non-consensual sex into the game. Like, you can put the words 'porn' and 'bandit' together and come up with an acceptable idea or 'mirror sex' or whatever. The author is just doing it this way to be a poo poo and knows that and is playing it off as some kind of commentary when it's really just juvenile, hackney, and creepy. Like, there's erotic or heavily sexualized pen-and-paper roleplaying stuff and some people enjoy that - I'm not really a fan, but to each their own - and then there's 'Welcome to my Magical Realm' and this is definitely more like that. Or maybe it really is incompetence because the author thinks they're the next John Waters or something. edit: okay, let me rephrase this, it's incompetence, but in the sense that the author thinks they're making a point, but is really bad at art. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Oct 11, 2020 |
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Oct 11, 2020 23:30
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Joe Slowboat posted:Haha yeah I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who wanted to experience the descent into bad ideas, but... yes, it's literally supposed to be a direct analogue to the internet. I want to scream till my throat bursts. Flipping heck.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:34
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PurpleXVI posted:The closest thing I can get to making the mirror doors good if you make it about their just needing to be entertained, not necessarily sexually. Maybe this door needs the players to get DRAMATIC, maybe this one likes ROMANCE(whether that's a smooch or a declaration of love between two PC's, etc.) and this other one will let the players through if they just give it a show of some good old-fashioned violence. The danger of the mirrors in the village could be that they show people a better, more interesting world than their own, and that some of them completely start losing interest in their real lives to start watching the fictional lives instead. FLYNN RIDER!
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Oct 11, 2020 23:40
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PurpleXVI posted:The closest thing I can get to making the mirror doors good if you make it about their just needing to be entertained, not necessarily sexually. Maybe this door needs the players to get DRAMATIC, maybe this one likes ROMANCE(whether that's a smooch or a declaration of love between two PC's, etc.) and this other one will let the players through if they just give it a show of some good old-fashioned violence. The danger of the mirrors in the village could be that they show people a better, more interesting world than their own, and that some of them completely start losing interest in their real lives to start watching the fictional lives instead. This is exactly where my brain went as well. If the whole point is that you have to come up with something to entertain the weird mirror rubes then it turns into a weird farce and not disgustingly porny trash. Also if the spoilers are to be believed this is going to get even worse than I could've possibly imagined going into "the magical realm adventure where you have to give mirrors a striptease". Though I guess the initial paragraph of warning might have hinted at where this was going to go…
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Oct 11, 2020 23:53
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Everyone posted:Honestly, I think the smarter move would have been to give players who express emotions and react to the scenes a temporary penalty to reflect that the characters really are feeling this but that if they do this, they accumulate less Stress. Meanwhile the ones who act like jaded sybarites accumulate Stress and that Stress can be used to inflicted greater difficulties and even influence their action. Build up enough and you join the bad guys. Legends of the Wulin does this the other way around. If your character gets a Condition (like a broken leg, or being really really angry, having too much blood, etc) and you play that up and incorporate it into your RP then the Condition is being fulfilled and you have no mechanical penalty. If you suppress it and ignore it then you can do that but get a mechanical penalty instead (or lose out on the bonus for positive conditions).
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Oct 11, 2020 23:59
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Mors Rattus posted:See the thing is, by suggesting better ways for the doors that force you to do sex acts could force you to do sex acts, you are in fact defending the doors that force you to do sex acts. Except I wasn't doing anything like that. My suggestion was about the Stress tracker. PurpleXVI posted:The closest thing I can get to making the mirror doors good if you make it about their just needing to be entertained, not necessarily sexually. Maybe this door needs the players to get DRAMATIC, maybe this one likes ROMANCE(whether that's a smooch or a declaration of love between two PC's, etc.) and this other one will let the players through if they just give it a show of some good old-fashioned violence. The danger of the mirrors in the village could be that they show people a better, more interesting world than their own, and that some of them completely start losing interest in their real lives to start watching the fictional lives instead. Those are valid, even excellent ideas. But the writer wants to do bullshit edgelord coercive sex exploitation crap because he thinks that's "serious and important."
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Oct 12, 2020 00:25
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Mors Rattus posted:Please stop defending the doors that force you to do sex acts. Ithle01 posted:edit: okay, let me rephrase this, it's incompetence, but in the sense that the author thinks they're making a point, but is really bad at art. This does actually raise a difficult question, This module is the real deal in terms of repugnant, repulsive Magical Realm bullshit and people are understandably freaked out. How do you comment on this? Taking something to a logical and absurd extreme is a staple of geeky humour. What can you actually say to a module that amounts to sexual abuse of its own playerbase when it is presented to you? I'm just assuming everyone is mentally appending "Okay first we burn every copy of this horseshit and feed the ashes to the author. Then, once that is done..." to the start of every post.
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Oct 12, 2020 00:42
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Loxbourne posted:This does actually raise a difficult question, This module is the real deal in terms of repugnant, repulsive Magical Realm bullshit and people are understandably freaked out. How do you comment on this? Taking something to a logical and absurd extreme is a staple of geeky humour. What can you actually say to a module that amounts to sexual abuse of its own playerbase when it is presented to you? "There's art, there's kitsch, there's porn, there's sleeze, there's trash, and then there's this." I don't know anything about the art and cinema communities, but I assume they deal with poo poo like this all the time so I would suggest finding people who have already found a solution and then copying what they do. edit: 'Steal something from someone else' is like play one in the DM handbook
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Oct 12, 2020 00:56
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Loxbourne posted:This does actually raise a difficult question, This module is the real deal in terms of repugnant, repulsive Magical Realm bullshit and people are understandably freaked out. How do you comment on this? Taking something to a logical and absurd extreme is a staple of geeky humour. What can you actually say to a module that amounts to sexual abuse of its own playerbase when it is presented to you? I disagree on the order of feeding and burning.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:08
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 Part 3: The Inverted Church of Sex Mirrors Will Continue Until Morale Improves Today we're going into Map 2! I'll try and speed things up now that we're going to start getting Boring Dungeon poo poo. The next room you come to is a Banquet Hall. There's a big Mirror dining table, and food which is diseased and if you eat it you violently vomit and lose 1hp per 10 minutes until cured from poison. In the Banquet Hall is Inverted Diana and a Copper Chalice. The Chalice is just a key for a puzzle later in the dungeon so whatever.  Next is Map 3. Down a hallway you find a Confession Room, there's some desecrated statues of "saints" and several confession booths. Each booth has a table. Booth 1 has, I'm not kidding, a table of traps that lead to romantic tension.  Booth 2 has Regular Traps that don't trigger the GMPC Hot Girl to dote on you. Booth 3 has a stupid loving puzzle. You gotta go in, because the floor is a pressure plate. While the plate is depressed a secret combination lock slides out of the wall. If nobody is in the booth it's hidden. If your PC's just open the door but don't go inside you as written cannot find this puzzle. At the lock you have to...  Yeah. And yes, Altered Boys are Demonic Altar Boys. Thankfully they are not sexualized and just have black robes and shards of stained glass in their empty eye sockets. Solve the lock, open a hidden door. Through the door is Map 4, with more confession booths and some killer frogs. Booth 1 is a mirror that triggers stress because it shows you porn, booth 2 requires the Copper Chalice from earlier to go in a slot like a Resident Evil puzzle to open a secret door that leads to a Stained Salt Sword, and booth 3 is an arrow trap. So, why do we need the Chalice? It doesn't lead to anything, it just gives you a Stained Salt Sword, which while a nice magical weapon (2d6, +1d4 per 3 rolled, plus if you stab it through a mirror it can come out any other mirror you see to stab someone long distance) but it isn't... essential. You'll get more Stained Salt gear. Hannah will not carry the Stained Salt Sword if you get it. OK next is Map 5! This is the last one for this update because it will cause a lot of debate. So inside Map 5 you see Inverted Master Seaford, who is a man crying in front of a mirror. Hannah says "We need to save him" and says she'll grab him as soon as a PC smashes the mirror. If you do this, which is easy, he reverts to his old self and leaves the dungeon automatically on the path the PC's have cleared, they do not need to escort him. He gives the PC's a Stained Salt Knife, Hannah will not take it. Going forward you enter a room with a mirrorDoor, the ground is covered in broken glass, and there's sconces made of human hands with black candles in their palms. Hannah will walk ahead automatically triggering a trap: A box falls on her, with mirrors on all four sides. You cannot lift, break, tip over, disable, or in any way mess with the trap. This is a cutscene. Hannah will panic, but realize the only thing she can do: Strip naked before she's taken into the Invert. You can hear her crying while she strips naked, but you can't listen for too long because out of the hole the box trap fell from GIANT LEECHES ATTACK!!! For some reason the number is keyed to the highest INT among the PC's? I don't know why, they don't do anything special they just... are big leeches. Oh they can succ you tho and if you can't cut them off before your next turn your limb falls the gently caress off. As written, if you go after a leech, it can bite you, you take 1d4 damage, your turn comes, and you automatically lose a random limb to blood-loss. Anyway, Hannah screams as she's pulled into the Invert. The trap raises and you see all her gear and a severed finger wearing a ring: She forgot to take it off so it chopped her finger off when she went through the mirrors. In the loot is nothing notable except for her ring (it's sentimental) the key to Hannah's house, and some cure poison potions. Deeper in this room you meet Meredith the UnNephilim.   That's right it's an unavoidable boss fight where one PC will be forced to at least one turn be mind controlled! Anyway, she's half human half demon and likes looking at "sexual atrocities". She can kiss you to randomly paralyze a body part and make you move toward her, draining HP for each increment you move.  If you notice this "adventure" has a lot of cut scenes and "But Thou Must" moments, that's not changing any time soon. So once you get Cara back you also get a Stained Salt Robe, which works like Mithril Chain (whatever that is, not a standard OSR armor type.) but the book flat out says "PC's should give this to Hannah". So yeah anyway in the boss room is a big rear end full-wall mirror where Hannah is on the other side naked. You can't talk to her, but you can give her Stained Salt stuff through the mirror. You can find a Stained Salt Buckler too behind a mirrorDoor that leads to a treasure chest. That's it. For those people who thought that "Oh Hannah is the Real PC" sorry she's literally gone until the Epilogue. No I'm not kidding, oh she'll make an "appearance" here and there but she's literally trapped in the Invert unrescueable until the end of the entire module. Hope you liked her! Next Time: I'll actually show you the tables that tell you what you see in the mirrors when you look at them! Oh and also Map 6 and on.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:51
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Can we leave this dungeon and go to the Tomb of Horrors instead? It seems less unpleasant.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:58
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Addendum: I will not be showing the Mirror Tables because they aren't in the loving book. See the book repeatedly tells you to check the Mirror Table to see what players see... in the mirrors. But... they also say it's on Page 70-71. That's the middle of the dungeon we're IN, and just is more room descriptions. Searching for the text "mirror table" doesn't work because it gives me just references to the tables. They loving forgot the mirror tables in the goddamn book. They don't exist in the text. They Forgot Them.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:59
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Wapole Languray posted:Addendum: 
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Oct 12, 2020 02:00
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Wapole Languray posted:Addendum: Maybe try in the Creepy Sex Beasts part after the module? I don't know. Maybe the twits left off a number and it's 471 or 571. You did say that this loving thing was 600 pages long, right?
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Oct 12, 2020 02:10
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Clearly, putting the tables in the book would have required both hands.
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Oct 12, 2020 02:29
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Wapole Languray posted:Addendum: Ooh, ooh! This is like that lovely RPG about demons on a starship, and since they forgot to give the demons hit points, we don't have to actually deal with them. ...right?
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Oct 12, 2020 02:29
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Thinking about it, I think 'stress points if the players seem upset' is more grooming. If anyone says "this is gross, Mike" you penalise them in-game (it's not me, it's the rules!), trying to get everyone to sit calmly without protesting so anyone who thinks "how about we just walk out" lioks around the table sees everyone else sitting around calmly and thinks it must be just them.
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Oct 12, 2020 02:38
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Bieeanshee posted:Ooh, ooh! This is like that lovely RPG about demons on a starship, and since they forgot to give the demons hit points, we don't have to actually deal with them. I was just thinking that, Abandon All Hope was the game,
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Oct 12, 2020 03:03
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Do the rules say to give stress if the characters express dismay, or if the players do because the distinction seems important here. also what are you guys talking about, this is a perfect metaphor for the internet! why just the other i day i wanted to purchase the new Paper Mario game and i had to jack off on camera to log into amazon! 
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Oct 12, 2020 03:15
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Epicurius posted:Can we leave this dungeon and go to the Tomb of Horrors instead? It seems less unpleasant. It's definitely less repulsive. In the Tomb of Horror you just get killed.
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Oct 12, 2020 03:32
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Everyone posted:I'm not defending them. I'm attacking them as being stupidly repetitive nonsense that takes any possibility of this situation (the PCs have to do something morally objective to achieve a necessary goal) being tense or interesting and throws it down the shitter. On what Earth did you think is was a good post. There are like 43 levels of what the gently caress.
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Oct 12, 2020 04:00
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It's a bad GM to force their players into Either Or Morally Repulsive or extremely uncomfortable situations where the result of refusing is Not Being Able to Progress At All. Because if the players rightfully refuse to play along with the writer's Magical Realm, there's no alternatives presented in the book - because the entire set up revolves around forcing characters to degrade themselves to open some loving doors or die.
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Oct 12, 2020 04:13
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Omnicrom posted:It's definitely less repulsive. In the Tomb of Horror you just get killed. It is also more honest about what is going on.
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Oct 12, 2020 04:27
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Robindaybird posted:It's a bad GM to force their players into Either Or Morally Repulsive or extremely uncomfortable situations where the result of refusing is Not Being Able to Progress At All. By definition only bad GMs would run Beneath because the entire "point" of it is to force PCs into degrading Magical Realm bullshit.
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Oct 12, 2020 04:35
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Everyone posted:By definition only bad GMs would run Beneath because the entire "point" of it is to force PCs into degrading Magical Realm bullshit. Thats basically it. Its piss wizard, the module. I mean, im not going to say there aren't people who want to play this module, as disgusting and in bad taste as it is, and if they want to, its their business. The concern i have is that there are bound to be some GMs who won't care if their players are upset or not into this sort if thing, and that there are players who will go along with it out of social pressure or nervousness about speaking up. This is something that I think, in general, the RPG community has gotten better with lately, with more and more companies talking about consent in gaming and advising GMs to be aware of triggering content and how comfortable their players are with sensitive subjects and doing things to make sure that everybody has a good time together and feels included. This module, though, doesn't help that.
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Oct 12, 2020 04:59
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Ok, I loving laughed at the Porn Bandit table.
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Oct 12, 2020 05:45
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