grognards.txt

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > grognards.txt

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

greatn posted:

I don't see wy some people get upset about the idea of the Earth plane or Fire plane or Salt plane just because you can't reasonably adventure in it. You don't really need to. It's just an explanation to say "Oh, that's where salt elementals come from. Oh, that's where I summon Earth elementals from", and the peri-elemental plane of lightning is something you can imagine your spellcaster opening a gate to whenever he's casting call lightning.

You know what, the Moon is completely lifeless and would be a lovely place to adventure, why the hell did God put it there? Because when I cast create food and water, that's where the cheese comes from.

I remember me and my buds back in the day, grumbling about the lack of verisimilitude in D&D books because they didn't spend several paragraphs describing where salt mephits came from.

If owlbears can be explained away with "these things were probably created by some mad wizard who got into his druid buddy's shrooms" in their monster manual entry, we definitely don't need a nuanced cosmology of demiplanes laid out geometrically on a chart in order to explain some spell or monster's origin. Really, if the DM tells me "Oh, elementals are summoned from other planes of reality that are full of raw elemental energy and inhospitable to humans" that's enough for me.

Revelation: I know that someone ruined it by explaining it somewhere in an old AD&D manual, but I want to believe that the invisible stalkers we summon are so happy to help because they're glad to take a vacation from a demiplane where everything is invisible and everyone just bumps into each other all the time, occasionally reproducing by accident.

bezel posted:

Well, there goes my 3.5 rock-throwing Fighter concept

There was that Hulking Hurler class which, if you munchkini--sorry, optimized it right, could literally pull hills out of the ground and throw them for like 13000 damage or something. Ahh, 3.5, what a mess you were by the end.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jun 9, 2010

# ¿ Jun 9, 2010 07:29

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Ashenai posted:

I think this sort of character provides significant roleplay opportunities. In the Dragonlance novels, Tanis Half-Elven had a unique perspective on both the elven and human cultures: similarly, a skilled player could come up with some interesting insights about what it might have been like to be raised as a Symbiotic Paragon Savage Vampire Ankholian Ravenous Nether Hound Fleshvigor Evolved Favored Spawn of Kyuss Cauldron Spawn Bodak Gravetouched Web Mummy Mummified Living Wall Juju Zombie Shadowslain Scion of Kyuss enlarged Corpse Bone Ghoulish Ghastly Dry Lich Greenbound Half-Lemorian Fiend Half-Air Elemental Half-Earth Elemental Half-Fire Elemental Half-Water Elemental Half-Celestial Epic Pseudonatural Half-Farspawn Wood Element Gelatinous Blightspawned Thomil Demonically Fused Magma Element Spellwarped Corrupted by the Abyss Half-Illithid Woodling minute form Half-Machine Twenty-nine-Headed enlarged Half-Dragon (Adamantine) Half-Dragon (Amethyst) Half-Dragon (Arboreal) Half-Dragon (Battle) Half-Dragon (Beast) Half-Dragon (Black) Half-Dragon (Blue) Half-Dragon (Brass) Half-Dragon (Bronze) Half-Dragon (Brown) Half-Dragon (Chaos) Half-Dragon (Copper) Half-Dragon (Chromium) Half-Dragon (Cobalt) Half-Dragon (Concordant) Half-Dragon (Crystal) Half-Dragon (Deep) Half-Dragon (Emerald) Half-Dragon (Ethereal) Half-Dragon (Fang) Half-Dragon (Force) Half-Dragon (Gold) Half-Dragon (Green) Half-Dragon (Howling) Half-Dragon (Iron) Half-Dragon (Nickel) Half-Dragon (Oceanus) Half-Dragon (Prismatic) Half-Dragon (Pyroclastic) Half-Dragon (Radiant) Half-Dragon (Red) Half-Dragon (Rust) Half-Dragon (Sapphire) Half-Dragon (Shadow) Half-Dragon (Silver) Half-Dragon (Song) Half-Dragon (Steel) Half-Dragon (Styx) Half-Dragon (Tarterian) Half-Dragon (Topaz) Half-Dragon (Tungsten) Half-Dragon (White) Half-Dragon (Chiang Lung) Half-Dragon (Li Lung) Half-Dragon (Lung Wang) Half-Dragon (Pan Lung) Half-Dragon (Shen Lung) Half-Dragon (T�ien Lung) Half-Dragon (Tun Mi Lung) Half-Dragon (Yu Lung) Were-Forestmaster awakened Paragon Savage Mineral Warrior Stonebone Remade Lolth-touched Half-Iron Golem Warbeast Dungeonbred Titanic Blood Ghoul Squid Ka-Tainted Madborn Reptilian Dark Thrall of Onysablet Hooded Pupil Katane Ghul Genden Fetch Half-Satyr Half-Ogre Half-Minotaur reduced Dragon Vassal (Yellow) Half-Scrag Skorenoi Taint-blood Wendigo Lost Tarterian (Shator) Proto Draconic Corrupted Beast of Xvim Voidmind Chimeric (Black) Bloodrager Quorbound Kaiju Forestmaster Dungeonbred Spirit of the Woods Warbeast Titanic Savage Mineral Warrior Stonebone Remade Blood Ghoul Lolth-touched Magebred Half-Brass Golem Squid Half-Ogre Tauric Maenad enlarged Blightspawned Forestmaster Paragon Stonebone Remade Half-Machine Voidmind Tarterian (Shator) Draconic Woodling, Savage Lost Proto Mineral Warrior Half-Brass Golem Bloodrager Corrupted Lolth-Touched Blood Ghoul Cave Troodon.

I recently went back and read the Monster Manuals. If a creature controlled by a brainworm is called an Enslaved One and one controlled by a vampire is called a Vampire Thrall, can't they come up with some universal standard like "(Creature) Thrall?" I remember incidents like "Oh, a Controlled One. Yeah, that's a normal creature mutated by a necromancer. No, wait, it's permanently mind-enslaved by a mind flayer. Or was that a Neoghi? No, it's brain is taken over by--poo poo, I'll look it up."

# ¿ Jun 9, 2010 19:03

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Sad Mammal posted:

If they ever free him/save him, he was guilty and will immediately exact a terrible vengeance on the peasants. If they let him hang, he was innocent and his family is pretty keen on finding what happened to him.

This is terrible

Ansob. posted:

There's plenty of things 4E is not so good at doing and plenty of things that other systems are better at than 4E, and there's plenty of good reasons why you would dislike 4E and like other systems better - it's just that 95% of the 4E criticism is people claiming that it's like an MMORPG because there aren't any restrictions on what you can do outside of combat and the classes have been grouped along broad lines to make it easier for new players to understand party dynamics, which are not good reasons.

You forgot all the people who just secretly hate that their cleric/wizard isn't the only class worth playing anymore

# ¿ Jun 10, 2010 20:29

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Ansob. posted:

I wanted to do 3.x the courtesy of not just going CASTER EDITION at it but yes, if anything, the people who rag on 4E because "OH NO NOW THE FIGHTERS CAN DO MAGIC GET THIS WEEABOO poo poo OUT OF MAH D&D" are worse than the 4E = WoW crowd.

The people who genuinely believe that Fighters being competent = weeaboo astound me. Nonmagical characters in D&D where capable of wuxia-level athletics long before the designers admitted that by the rules a rogue or fighter can surpass an Olympic athlete. It's almost as if these characters were meant to be epic heroes or something. Crazy.

Also the people who think that fighter maneuvers = Asian martial arts. Yeah, Europe had a land war going on somewhere pretty much constantly all the way up until WWI, and the entire medieval economy was pretty much based on it, but they never actually practiced their fencing or anything. Only Asians did that.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2010 22:19

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Ansob. posted:

People always laugh when you see sci-fi or fantasy races that are the "proud warrior race guy" where combat is the most noble pursuit and the entire economy is geared towards war, but that's pretty much what Europe's historically been.

"Proud Warrior Races" in fantasy/sci-fi media are usually a society composed entirely of warriors with no explanation of how they feed themselves and handle logistics; that's what made them lame. Whereas a little reading on European history and you begin to realize why soldiers would take their wives and kids with them on a campaign and that "camp follower" really isn't just a euphemism for prostitute.

rantmo posted:

Actually there were a number of martial arts from Europe but not ones that had a lot of staying power, probably because at a certain point ranged weapons made them fairly obsolete (though that's pure conjecture on my part). Some friends of mine are stage violence designers and years ago were helping a guy translate Italian illustrations of a martial art, figuring out how those poses worked into actual combat in the like.

Warfare in Europe was constantly evolving. Ranged weapons shot from a defensive position surpassed heavy cavalry, and honestly, it led to the end of the well-trained, expensively outfitted mounted knight as a military and political force. By the end of the war, longbowmen were in turn surpassed by artillery and superior armor. After that, the Swiss pike square reigned supreme until the ascendancy of firearms. So it's not just a straight line of advancement where cavalry beat infantry, bowmen beat cavalry, then firearms beat bows.

But yeah, in one era a sword might be an infantryman's weapon, and a few decades later the spear is the primary weapon and the sword is the sidearm, and later on it's the primary weapon in conjunction with a shield and armor, and later the sword was really only for self-defense and dueling in the civilian environment, and on and on, so the way swordsmanship was taught would vary from period to period. But in between, there would be transitional stages where you have people fencing for one purpose but using an outdated type of sword and outdated techniques, and that's what all the fencing masters had to grumble at each other about. We think of the rapier as an elegant gentleman's dueling weapon, but George Silver thought it was a thug's weapon; he said its length and weight was great for a murderous thrust, but it wasn't great for defensive parrying.

quote:

That said, Europe was also the birthplace of the first mixed-martial art; Edward William Barton-Wright's Bartitsu, which is the martial art that Sherlock Holmes practiced. It's also badass and awesome.

Bartitsu is most definitely a derivative reworking of jiu-jitsu, though. The Pankration predated it by literally millennia. Of course, a whole lot of prominent Greeks didn't think much of Pankration. In a resource-poor society like ancient Peloponnesian Greece, guys who ate an expensive protein-heavy diet and spent hours a day training for a sport that didn't do much to make them better soldiers was seen as a wasteful luxury. (A combination of kickboxing and grappling may be the superior fighting method in an abstract competition, but it's useless to a hoplite. Whereas boxing, which requires keeping to your feet while beating the other guy with a cestus, is a lot more applicable.)

# ¿ Jun 11, 2010 07:44

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

I have to admit, I always thought games that had rules for establishing some kind of domain and then being able to buy "upgrades" for it are fun, as long as they're not too complicated. Shadowrun had a strong "pimp my whatever" element and I liked being able to customize my safehouses with the Sprawl Survival Guide.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2010 22:52

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

No, but you could save money on your rent by having an eco-conscious hydroponic garden. Shadowrun, the StuffWhitePeopleLike.com edition.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2010 23:45

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Super Waffle posted:

Since we've been talking about Nazis, how offensive is it to take real-world events and gussy them up with fantasy trimming?

If, say, I wanted to slather the world in a 4e fantasy pastiche and replace modern era technology with Eberron-style magic, would it be offensive for Hitler to be a warlock whose ultimate plan is to use an ancient Roman ritual to siphon the souls of innocent Jews to fuel his apotheosis?

I thought about doing an alternate-history WWII game where Germany remained impoverished and France rose to become a fascist state under the influence of the Yellow Sign and calling it Inglourious Hasturds, so you're in the clear.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2010 05:42

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Tolervi posted:

That post is such an obvious troll that it makes even the people who make fun of it (i.e., lots of people ^^^^^ there) look like idiots. It is truly a masterstroke.

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

I love how the katana folding technique is held up like some standard of superiority. It was a technique designed to make an alright sword with limited resources and terrible steel.

As a historian, this poo poo always fills me with rage. I realize this is a normal reaction in most sane people but after you've read a good deal of books on this stuff, the bullshit that gets tossed around kicks it to a new level.

There was a documentary I saw where a professor was going on about the samurai sword and how the folding process made it so that each katana was actually like a thousand tiny katanas. This is why you don't let history professors talk about metallurgy.

moths posted:

I don't understand why you'd buy an unrelated company to kill it, or why anyone would think that's going on.

If you saw the forum's grasp of trademark law in the Palladium lawsuit thread, you'd understand.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 16:26

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

If you own an auto body shop called Marty's Garage, Wal-Mart can sue you for infringing on their copyright, and winning the lawsuit means they now own your garage. That is what trademark law is and how it works.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 21:20

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Dominion posted:

It's not quite that ridiculous. Palladium has a copyright on Rifts as the title of a game involving planeshopping. They are totally within their rights to challenge another company making a game involving planeshopping called Rift. Especially if Palladium has any intention of making or licensing a Rifts video game.

This isn't Marty's Garage vs Wal-mart. It's Walsmart vs Wal-mart.

No, no. I mean the thread is people who have at least a basic understanding of trademark law arguing with people who don't read the thread and post replies like what I typed above. And then all the people who want Palladium to lose because of bad karma or something regardless of the law. Which, yeah, Siembieda certainly deserves.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2010 21:35

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Evil Mastermind posted:

Kev actually did lose, the court ruled against him.

The court denied their request for a pre-E3 restraining order, but that doesn't mean the legal battle is over.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 04:31

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

counterspin posted:

<grognard>
Over here, in Normal RPG Land, a GM has to know what his PC's powers and resources are, so that he can craft challenges for them that are suitable to them, generally without making it impossible for them to survive but also so that they can't just quickly run roughshod over the challenges you present.
</grognard>

So this guy assumes that a "Normal RPG" is one where you're challenging the player skill and not the PC skill, a player is supposed to have to know how to game the system in order to create a character who's good at anything, the GM is against the players, and being a good GM means memorizing everything.

Epicurus posted:

Also you CAN make better adventures for the PCs in 4th ed if you know their powers - you can position the enemies so that the PCs have a chance to use their best stuff, or make sure the enemies use Save ends effects if the party has characters who shut down save ends, etc.

Honestly, whatever game I'm playing, I prefer generating a challenge appropriate to the PCs level, and letting the PCs surprise me (and themselves) with how well their powers are or aren't suited to this pack of foes. I tell my players "Play your characters like real people; you can always run away." I haven't DMed 4e yet, but I'll bet it facilitates this a lot better than 3.5, where an unbalanced power can make an encounter trivial, or characters can be gimped because of abilities that either work really well or not at all (like sneak attack).

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 18:55

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

I have discovered the RPGpundit's blog and I love it. He's a hardheaded jerk who takes silly things seriously, pretending to be an irreverent jester, pretending to be a hardheaded jerk who takes silly things seriously. That and the whole cigar-smoking-from-an-overstuffed-chair-calling-women-wenches thing. People with a gimmick instead of an actual personality are a lot of fun as long as you can keep the Internet between the two of you.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 19:45

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Woah! He's the guy who wrote Gnomemurdered and then reviewed it himself, arguing that there's no reason you can't write an unbiased review of your own work!

This is one of those guys who does a lot of stupid things very seriously, but when cornered, claims he was taking the piss.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 20:05

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

OtspIII posted:

Once people are locked in they're really going to have to do something clever or take an AoO, but once you're being chased there are lots of ways to throw off pursuers, like throwing food at monsters or a few gold pieces at goblins. The players just have to know you're not the type of 'nardy DM who is going to just smugly tell them that they're going to chase you down, kill you, and THEN pick up the items you're trying to distract you with.

Well, that style of play requires everyone at the table understanding that creatures and PCs are there for reasons, not just because they're characters in an FPS who have to fight each other because it's the only purpose of their existence.

quote:

Hell, you could even just have some merchant try to sell them some item explicitly made to be used to help you run away, like caltrops or magic smoke pods or something, to get them used to the idea.

That's actuall a really good idea. I know Philotomy Jurament has a "musing" on how he likes letting players use flaming oil to cover their tracks.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 20:42

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Dominion posted:

Yeah, one of my friends is adamant that every game system should have a "can he kick my rear end" skill that lets you size up combatants that would not otherwise be obvious in their level of danger.

Like, a huge red dragon is clearly dangerous, and there's a skill you can roll to tell you exactly HOW dangerous, in terms of CR or level or hit dice or whatever. But D&D has no skill to roll to tell you how deadly the elf over there is.

One definite good thing about 3.x is that a hobgoblin is not necessarily a minion soldier with 1 HD. He may be a 10th level fighter, or warblade, or wizard for that matter.

Another reason to love the Tome of Battle: The Martial Lore skill makes a good stand-in for "how good a soldier do you think that guy is."

I'll let any character try to assess the strength of a creature they should be able to assess with a relevant class skill. Another reason I want to make a "No skills, but you get a skill bonus that can be used for any task your class reasonably should have expertise in" game.

TheAnomaly posted:

Get rid of raise dead. Throw it out of your game, let them know that there won't be any raising of the dead and you won't fudge rolls right from the beginning and running away is an acceptable tactic. That should get the point across.

What I don't like about resurrection spells is that sometimes when my character dies, I want to play a different character. Also, it raises weird in-setting moral quandaries like why a handful of high-level clerics can't take a few weeks to revive all the victims of a serious dragon attack or something.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 15, 2010

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 21:15

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

I like occasionally showing the PCs that there's always a bigger fish, in a way that isn't cruel or just screwing with them. "I am Archanon Xaltaros, master of evil. I am gathering mushrooms. What? No, to put in capons, you fool. gently caress off."

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 21:21

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Well, really, D&D as originally designed wasn't exactly about a small group of heroes defeating armies of evil, it was about "adventurers" slipping into dangerous enemy territory to rob the enemy blind or reach an objective and then get the hell out. Which is why originally you only got XP from gold and/or got little or no XP and gold from wandering monsters; killing every monster on the map wasn't the goal.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 21:27

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Mikan posted:

That's...not really any different from 4e? The only difference is that you don't have to stat up a bunch of pointless PC class bullshit in 4e.

I meant as an innovation over what came before. Did they already have monsters with class levels in the 2e Monster Manual? Or any sequels?

# ¿ Jun 16, 2010 00:43

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Mikan posted:

Yeah AD&D had monsters with class levels but handled in the most pointless, asinine method possible.

That's basically my opinion of everything AD&D

# ¿ Jun 16, 2010 02:44

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

He does, actually. If you're willing to roll with insane stuff happening from one page to the next because everything is either something Moorcock saw while drunk or a metaphor for something in his life that got ruined because he was drunk, it's a wild ride.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2010 23:09

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Etherwind posted:

It's fun to examine your own reading list, and that of your friends, in light of what it talks about. Then you show it to your friends, and if you've read them right, you can pretty much tell which ones are going to complain about how the essay is awful (usually in some vaguely undefined and poorly elaborated away) by the books they have on their shelf.

Bonus points if you spot a corollary between their reading list and their socio-political views. That essay is scarily prescient.

The Tolkien on my shelves isn't indicative of my political views because I read it as a child, and yes, it was comforting and full of paternalistic trustworthy authority figures like all children's literature. What's the point of getting bent out of shape about it?

I also liked Harry Potter and The Dark Knight without thinking they were advocating the War on Terror, so

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 00:41

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Red_Mage posted:

The Fear of Unfun
October 11th, 2008 in RPG theorySkip to comments (15) ↓

There has been a bit of chatter about the Tyranny of Fun1 that has come to dominate the design of D&D. I have some sympathy for those on both sides of the argument. Chatty points out that it injects more incendiary material into the edition wars. I agree that demonising fun is stupid.

On the other hand, I do see a problem with thinking of fun as most important (it creates an false dichotomy between fun and whatever is supposedly sacrificed in its name), and I do think that because 4e tries to make everyone awesome2 it ends up making awesomeness meaningless.

However, I think that the people arguing that a Tyranny of Fun exists are missing the real crux of this issue.

A commenter on a Paizo forums thread about Gygaxian Naturalism said this:

3e rejected a lot of Gygaxian crap, and boy am I glad it did. Some people might like the idea that a 2nd level party might wander into an ancient red dragon�s lair, but I wouldn�t want to waste my valuable gaming time with such stupidity.3

What makes me cringe when I read that is the idea that our time is so scarce and precious that we cannot afford to make any mistakes on the way to Maximum Fun. This idea is of a particular structure that, in leisure pursuits or love, promotes a race to the bottom.

The unfortunate reality is that safe, guaranteed fun does not exist. Seeking it leads to the rejection of anything that might be only perceived as a threat to that guarantee, regardless of the actual value of a new idea. The irony is that we, as humans, are not maximally entertained by the predictable and the routine, so standardising and formalising the elements that make play fun encourages finding a lowest common denominator. Seeking Maximum Fun forces us to aim squarely at mediocrity.

How does this relate to Gygaxian Naturalism in that quote above? Much of the success of D&D is that you can do anything. You can do anything in one sense, in that the DM can theoretically allow anything to happen; but the real impact of that feature of roleplaying games is that you can try to do anything, and see what happens. If you can�t choose to walk blindly into that ancient red wyrm�s lair at second level, there are hundreds of other things that you can�t choose either that might end up being fun in ways that nobody at the table could have predicted. Constraining action to only what will predictably result in fun tears the entire foundation of D&D�s fun out of the game.

It�s not a Tyranny of Fun, really. It�s a Fear of Unfun.

I picked that post because it excerpts the core bits of Melan�s larger post at the RPGsite, which you can read here: The Tyranny of Fun: status report. ↩
RPGpundit has more in The Tyranny of Fun pt. 2. ↩
pres man, Sun, Oct 5, 2008, 11:41 AM, in 4e�s Rejection of Gygaxian Naturalism

Oh God, I am so sick of this Tyranny of Fun crap. It's a stupid phase for a stupid argument based around a stupid concept; the very repetition of the phrase "tyranny of fun" is so stupefyingly inane I feel my brain slowly numbing the more I think it.

That being said, I really wish Melan would translate his homebrew system (Sword & Magic). From his description of its basic elements it's close to exactly what I've been looking for in terms of base mechanics, but it's in Hungarian.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Jun 17, 2010

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 08:18

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Honestly, I was just looking for a game with a pre-3e design philosophy but which used the d20 for standard rolls, ascending AC and BAB instead of to-hit charts for each class or THAC0 and decreasing AC, etcetera etcetera. I swear I read on a forum somewhere that he said he essentially relied on the core of the d20 system for the base mechanics, so I was intrigued. I've liked some of what I saw in retroclones like S&W and Labyrinth Lord, but I can't stand to-hit charts, descending AC, and using a different dice mechanic for random arbitrary crap.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Jun 17, 2010

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 08:54

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

You have translated me Hungarian, and my profit on 't is disappointment.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 09:06

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

RPGPundit posted:

The Swine are any people for whom RPGs have, as their primary purpose, the conveyance of some kind of sense of personal self-worth. This need for gaining self-esteem out of RPGs manifests itself in creating and aggresively promoting the concept that RPGs are either "art" or "intellectual pursuit" rather than a mere game, and usually implying that someone who participates (to them it would not just be "playing") in an RPG is doing something of inherent value with their lives. In order to create this illusion, the value of "art" or "intellectual" has to totally superimpose itself over "fun" and "play".

Likewise, and here's the insidious part, in order for the Swine to be able to gain this sense of self-worth from what any sane person would consider a meaningless game (meaningless good fun, but still utterly meaningless and certainly not self-validating) the Swine must attempt to utterly destroy the concept that RPGs should be played for fun as a mere game, and must promote the concept that they (the Swine) are the special elite who truly understand RPGs, and actively work against the popularity of RPGs.

So the Swine have it as part of their make-up, conscious of the fact or not, the destruction of the RPG industry, and indeed of the hobby as a hobby or as play. All this for their own selfish, low, contemptible ends.

quote:

*hundreds of posts about how my way of playing is superior to yours, enjoying your game makes you an idiot, small-press niche RPGs are crap, and the new editions of D&D are ruining my game*

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 20:16

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Really Pants posted:

Is this the same guy that came up with "Tyranny of Fun?"

No, that guy is Melan.

Mikan posted:

I hit him with my fist and he goes spinning away. There.

The system is the only thing you can objectively quantify. It's the only thing that matters in a discussion like this. Everything else relies on the group, not the game.

Still doesn't mean you have to be creative.

This same argument comes up a lot in terms of OD&D vs. newer editions where you have defined powers, which the old-school advocates arguing that more abstract, simplified combat encourages players and DMs to be descriptive. In reality, most people say "I attack with my sword" rolls dice, and the DM says "It takes 4 damage."

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 20:48

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

That's the thing about "Gygaxian naturalism," so much of the early published D&D stuff was completely arbitrary and made no naturalistic sense at all. Hell, modules like the Tomb of Horrors even contrived stories about a lich who had nothing better to do than design a dungeon full of ridiculously expensive, pointless, maintenance-heavy traps for the sole purpose of luring people in so he could have a chuckle at people jumping into a teleport gate that emptied into a sphere of annihilation.

DMing, at least the way I prefer to do it, is a weird paradoxical balancing act--on the one hand, as the DM it's obvious that you're designing and running the world for the PCs to adventure in. On the other hand, the trick is to make them feel like adventurers adrift in a world that works on its own terms, would go on without them, and reacts plausibly to how they behave in it, and not like the center of a solipsistic universe where they all have "Main Character" signs hovering over their heads.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 21:37

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Dominion posted:

What I hate most about that sort of old D&D description is how oddly specific it is. The door can be chopped down by 3 blows from an axe or mace. What about a greatsword? Or a bec de corbin or whatever stupid-rear end polearm I have?

Or a character in platemail can knock it down, falling over in the process. What about a guy in splint mail? Or chain mail? Can I kick it down and not fall over? No, apparently this is a game of Dragon's Lair and these are the only options.

And of course the response is "well a good GM knows to just wing it on stuff like that" which is true, but he shoudln't have to wrestle with the text being weirdly specific and fighting against him.

Even better approach: If DMs and players in your game are actually expected to give a gently caress about how a door gets knocked open, devote a few words in the DMG to saying that forcing or smashing doors requires a Strength check, heavy armor or two-handed weapons add a +2 bonus, specialized tools (like a fireman's axe or battering ram) add +4 or +6, and here are some standard check modifiers for an old creaky door, standard door, reinforced door, sturdy gate, etc.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 21:51

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Benjamin Black posted:

I like to believe there's some sort of D&D game designer's pact to never include solid rules for such things ever again, after the first time their dungeon was completely power attacked through by a barbarian going through five cubic feet of stone per round.

One thing that I do like (with some major exceptions regarding the way it's implemented) is the Dungeon as Underworld approach, so I don't have a problem telling players "It's solid dungeon bedrock. You can't break through it with a standard Strength check."

# ¿ Jun 17, 2010 22:15

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

LGD posted:

Rokugan Is Not Historical Japan (despite being culturally identical except when it is pointed out that it is an incredibly shallow, nonsensical and absurd/offensive/racist clone of a particularly western interpretation of a period of Japanese culture with magic and fantasy elements added in)

Racist, really? I mean, are "Record of Lodoss War" and "Berserk" racist manga because they're Japanese people writing a really distorted version of European history? L5R definitely isn't historically accurate, but I don't think the designers are claiming otherwise. (Yeah, animu, ha ha, but I can't think of any Western-style fantasy Japanese tabletops, though I know they exist.)

Red_Mage posted:

Not-Africa

Not-Asia

Not-America

Warhammer has not-Asia (full of shifty mysterious types), not-America (full of lizard wizards), not-Spain (full of romantic vivacious dueling dandy drunkards), and not-Africa (full of mummies), but not-Britain, not-Scandinavia, and not-the-Holy-Roman-Empire-of-German-States are just as overblown.

Fire posted:

Holy crap, I thought you guys were just joking around about the Random Harlot table. They seriously put this in a book. Christ

I forgot to pick up Fig Newtons from the store, and I could really go for a few saucy tarts.

Dominion posted:

One of my gaming friends goes on a lot about how becoming a dungeon-building wizard must do something retarded to your brain, because the design decisions they all make show a serious lack of forethought.

Why would you protect the door to your inner sanctum with a puzzle? Why not just a very powerful magic ward or a lock? And if you MUST use a puzzle, why make it logical and solvable such that the correct answer opens the door? If I were such a wizard, I would have a complex puzzle lock. The correct answer to the puzzle would be, say, "an elephant", but entering that (or anything else, really) would teleport the user into a sealed room full of black puddings.

In the universe in which Resident Evil is set, being a janitor is a unionized, masters-level position requiring advanced courses in cryptology, literature, and art history.

Liesmith posted:

Honestly if I was an immortal wizard I'd do poo poo like that. and I'd spend a lot of time standing ominously/majestically on unreachable places like rocks in the middle of the ocean or unscalable cliffs. Being seen by travelers would be welcome but not required

wizardry is one of those make your own entertainment jobs.

Yeah, but there are only so many of those mighty wizards to go around, and most of them have better sense. If I were an immortal wizard, I'd live it up like Rhialto the Marvellous.

Liesmith posted:

I really like the use of the "underworld" in this sense, simply because there isn't enough real Jungian/Campbellian poo poo in games that aren't set in Glorantha

I don't really get into applying mythopoeic hermeneutics or psychoanalysis to my tabletop games, I'm just saying it conveniently does away with realistic questions like "Why doesn't this monster eat that monster," "How did all the monsters get in here," "How could anybody actually dig a ten-story-deep basement into the side of a mountain," "Where do the monsters get food," "how could there be arrow traps here without hitting the monsters," etcetera.

I like the idea that when an abandoned ruin or lair or whatever becomes full of monsters, at some point it shifts and becomes part of a sort of alternate dimension that sustains itself and takes care of its own. One dungeon can be magically linked to another dungeon, a really formidable dungeon could literally go on without end, traps might reset themselves when the party leaves, secret doors can exist without having some system of levers and pulleys behind them, and monsters can periodically spawn from nowhere. Evil NPCs can become part of the dungeonverse and learn to manipulate the way it works, and it acknowledges them as its own and takes care of them. Basically, it's a fantasy version of Silent Hill.

I take some exception to the way Philotomy Jurament says he runs it, though. I don't like having things like doors automatically opening for monsters and traps magically ignoring them, all doors being automatically locked to PCs until they bust them, etcetera, for two reasons. One, if you want players to act intelligently and reasonably and use logic, their environment can't be completely anti-logical. Two, depending on how you implement it, dungeonverse logic can take away some of the things that make a tabletop more rewarding than an old video game. Remember when your mage had a Fireball spell, but you can't open this magically invincible wooden door until you find the special key with the special symbol that matches the door?

If players are willing to dodge their way down a hall of blade traps to get away from a pack of orcs, the orcs shouldn't just follow them down the hall, completely ignoring the traps--unless there's a reason this specific pack of orcs has a way to deactivate the traps. Likewise, I'll never send players on a pointless goose chase to find the green key to open the green wooden door.

Liesmith posted:

so yeah, if you are a wizard, remember that somewhere out there is the guy who is going to gently caress you up bigtime and it could be anybody and there's nothing you can do about it so have fun building towers and breeding owlbears and standing on crags

The best wizards of the Dying Earth solve this problem by basically hanging around sitting in comfortable chairs in the Gentleman Wizard's Club all day, getting drunk on ancient booze looted from long-dead civilizations in other galaxies and scoring with astral projections of babes from a harem that died in suspended animation 30,000 years ago.

Gomi posted:

drat, Campbell on Joyce? All that needs is a foreword by Dawkins and it would become an rear end in a top hat wholly up itself, an actual Klein rectum.

This is the best thing I've read all day. And I've been reading Herbert and Eco and Ramsey Campbell today.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 05:36

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Liesmith posted:

Here's the thing though, the adventurer has stepped into the underworld, and therefore it takes care of him as well. In the story of Baba Yaga, Sasha, a nice romanian/slavic/whatever girl, is kidnapped by Baba Yaga. She is brought to a forbidding landscape but is really nice, and wins it over +gets magic stuff from various no-longer-threatening figures. For example, she gets a magic comb from somebody, I forget who. Baba Yaga's dog? Anyway Sasha is aided by her magic comb when she flees from the witch (she drops it behind her and it shields her with an impenetrable fence).

so too is the adventurer aided by his relationship with traps in a dungeon. In a magical thinking sense, the trap the players run through is won over by their bravery, and turns against its former masters, the orcs. so while before it would have let the orcs through no problem, now it is on the adventurer's side.

This exact situation comes up A LOT in folklore and legends from pretty much all over the world.

It's you. You're the grognard.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 07:50

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Kerison posted:

what exactly is grognardy about having an understanding of literature and comparative mythology

Nothing, but when applied to D&D by many different groups it generally ends in "Oh guys, the answer was here all the time, how could you not figure this out. Oh, wait, you didn't read that one Dragonlance novel? No wonder you didn't get it."

If you choose to run D&D as you always would and interpret it differently, knock yourself out, but if, as in the example given, the PCs actually have to figure out that they're supposed to drop a random widget they found when they're being chased by a monster they can't defeat...ugh. The problem with dungeon riddles is they're usually bad and when you base them on metaphor (as is often done in fantasy novels) there's a good chance no one will get it or they'll have a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the metaphor that doesn't match yours.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 09:16

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

FirstCongoWar posted:

He said literature.

Kerison posted:

idk if you realize this but the story of Baba Yaga isn't a Dragonlance novel

I don't know if he's even seriously talking about running the kind of game I'm talking about but do you guys really want to play a dungeon-crawling D&D game based on fairy tale logic or are you just being contrary

Ansob. posted:

I'm sure someone has made a science-fantasy setting where the dungeons are just normal houses or scientific complexes or whatever and the "monsters" are just the people who work there and have DNA-restricted keycards to open doors and disable security. You could probably even write a Fallout-ish setting where the PCs are mutant tribesmen and spend their time "adventuring" by raiding "dungeons" and killing "monsters" i.e. finding some random still-inhabited complex and killing the inhabitants to take their shinies.

While playing Descent, I got the notion that you could do a version of the game with almost all the same rules, but replace the dungeon full of fantasy monsters with a secret lab full of mutants, and you'd have a Resident Evil sort of game.

It doesn't exactly have a fleshed-out setting, but you're basically talking Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World (or Mutant Future).

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 17:03

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Ansob. posted:

I was advocating replacing the dungeon with a secret lab full of perfectly normal people, but I'm starting to realise it would more or less (or a lot less) be a game of Paranoia where you play mutants ending up in Alpha Complex.

I like that to. You can always run it as the mutant outlanders raiding the Vault full of shiny happy Pure Strain humans who think everything from outside is an evil radioactive mutant to be shot on sight. Bonus points if you really hang a lampshade on it and make the Vault people some combination of impossibly clean conservative '50s suburbanites and jumpsuited armbanded blonde-haired blue-eyed Nazi eugenics experiments.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 18:36

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Maddman posted:

If you want to talk about racism in games, the default setting in D&D is recasting European colonialism with the 'barbarians' being nonhuman so you don't have to feel bad about cutting them down and taking all their stuff. They are categorically evil, and you can tell because their skin is all green and they talk a funny grunty language.

Implied racism in fantasy RPGs is The Worst argument, but until someone in this thread mentioned it, it never really dawned on me that a big part of what I can't stand about Forgotten Realms is that there are dozens of sentient species and it pretty much ends up being perpetual race war except when it's about the gods walking the earth.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 22:55

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Those untrustworthy Berbers, with their matriarchal society and poison weapons and underground cities and giant spiders.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 23:36

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Doug Lombardi posted:

Why would you even play Cthulutech if you, as a player, didn't want to be overwhelmed by cosmic and unknowable evil?

Actually part of the point of Cthulhutech is that you can confront the mythos and bite its balls off, at least the way I ran it.

The Cthulhutech designers are pretty notorious for confronting players on forums (and even including sidebars in their books) that say "You should not fudge the rules to allow psychics who can pilot Engels or rogue Dhohanoids helping the good guys or Tagers joining the NEG army, if you fudge any aspect of the Cthulhutech setting for your game you are no longer playing Cthulhutech. gently caress your badwrongfun."

# ¿ Jun 20, 2010 17:10

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; Can't post for 3 hours!

Stuff like this is usually an introduction to someone selling instructional books and DVDs for the traditional English/Irish/Welsh/Greek/Native American martial arts they learned in secret from their grandfather. It always looks like strip-mall karate plus some moves that any strip-mall karate would invent for use with a shillelagh/tomahawk/whatever, and the guy selling it always has a black belt in strip-mall karate.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2010 13:47

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > grognards.txt

«‹›50 »