Azran posted:

At the same time, isn't Pathfinder the game where pretty much every classic monster (ogres, orcs, etc) reproduce through rape first and foremost?

Libertad! posted:

Not every one, only a few come to mind. Although that was in their earlier works, and when people pointed out various problems through the years Paizo took a different direction on things in later works.

On a topic named "My attributes... too many?" posted:

14? Probably a few too many for practical reasons. Though my current game i'm working on has over a hundred, but I stopped checking. Only about 3-6 matter at any given time or character and many just overlap.

Pulsedragon posted:

Except for This thing. It's pretty recent.

Error 404 posted:

Grognards.TXT: Neo-Stalinist Groupthink

Also, noted cargo cult pseudo-designer and plagiarist RPGPundit continues to be almost as funny on G+ as he is on his own blog/forums.

Pundowski posted:

for gently caress's sake stop trying to make my threads about your causes. They aren't my causes, they're not the point of what I'm talking about, and all you do is feed ammunition to the assholes to they can conveniently ignore my point and focus on the desborough-sideshow.

If you say you don't get what the problems are with GG or MRAs, then you're either lying or stupidly naive.

Jimmy-Dead the Sausage King posted:

Sorry, but you see nonsense like the above and it needs stamping on. Like it or not this is your cause as well as part of a wider culture war. Whether you recognise it or not.

Pundowski posted:

I know about the culture war. I also know that MRAs don't represent me, neither do the extreme elements of GG. Your absolute failure to self-criticize is a serious but far from unique problem. Your inability to call out the bad poo poo people do in GG or MRA's name is exactly the same as self-styled 'activists' failure to condemn their own side for pulling poo poo like censorship or making up outright lies about you (or me).

To me, one of the big problems in the culture war is Tribalism. Because the REAL culture war is between Individualists and Collectivists. Now, you expect groupthink from Collectivists, obviously, but when you see rampant tribalism among groups that claim to be individualist you run into a problem.

I don't want a world where there are No Girls Allowed in videogames, or where women go back to the kitchens, or any of that bullshit. Some of these people do. If you claim you "don't see the problem" or "don't understand why anyone would be against" the movement while totally failing to condemn those elements, then you become part of the problem.

Slimnoid posted:

Of course, he still takes time in his mini-rants to rail against THE PSUEDO-ACTIVISTS but it's kind of funny how even Desborough is running out of other toxic elements to hang out with.

FMguru posted:

Desborough can always count on his big big patreon earnings.

SunAndSpring posted:

I like that the Wikipedia page for the guy who made Glorantha (which is a great setting) has this as its first sentence:

Mormon Star Wars posted:

He's actually super famous for that outside of RPG circles - IIRC, he was the editor of "Shaman's Drum" for a long time. I actually have an academic book on the history of how the pop culture understanding of shamanism was created ("The Beauty of the Primitive" by Andrei Znamenski, a Russian historian who specialized in Siberian history and comparative religion) and he references Stafford towards the end of the book.

I was like, "Wait a sec - that's an RPG person!"

Plague of Hats posted:

Nothing worth quoting directly, but now Des is finding people laughing at his Twitter fight with a bot, and then tweeting at them "Cool story bro" with a screenshot of him when he figured it out.

Guilty Spork posted:

His response was basically "Well if a bot can convincingly imitate anti-GG then clearly THEY'RE the stupid ones! "

Coming from a GGer that's pretty hilarious, considering how unbelievably repetitive GG is.

quote:

It's worth noting that there are some other parts of Steve's post that seem disingenuous. For example, his comparison to "satirizes police killings of minorities" is suspiciously similar to a a similar statement from Evil Hat's Fred Hicks, where he <a href="https://archive.org/download/fredhickstweetfergusonobs/fredhickstweetfergusonobs.JPG">compared</a> the GamerGate card game to the events in Ferguson directly.


Moreover, Steve mentions that GamerGate is "too related to violence to be an appropriate subject for satire." That's nonsense, since there's been no actual violence with regards to GamerGate whatsoever. Even if he means harassment, then the majority of that is coming from people that are opposed to GamerGate.


I should also mention that, while Desborough's description of his game does seem oddly slanted against the "Social Justice Warriors" in his game, the cards themselves do satirize both sides of the issue with a relatively equal hand.

quote:

No the card game is about people arguing over the internet. The only unbiased thing about the Gamergate Card game is that James made gamergate the good guy and the anti-gamergate the bad guy. Beyond that both sides are made fun of.

quote:

quote:

When the character levels (and in my mind this would happen all the frickin' time, possibly every session), they press a button, the little Rails app works its magic, and BOOM.

They are presented with a random list of three or four feats.

The feats are randomly chosen from ones available to them. No (long term) min-maxing, no planning, no respeccing: each player makes a decision based on the feat option in front of them. I realize you really wanted that polearm maneuver feat to go with your shadowform step feat, but it's just not on the menu today.

Extra fun: feats have rarity. The Iron Fist and Thousand Palm styles are common, but Drunken Monkey is uncommon, and Dragon Strike is rare.

Personally, I think that sounds awesome.

However, the 4X game Fallen Enchantress did something very similar with its heroes - when they leveled up, they got (IIRC) 4 randomly-selected "feat" options for you to choose from. I loved it. The FE community hated. The forum was a constant stream of "How am I supposed to plan my build when I don't know what I'll be able to take at each level?" and "My heroes aren't optimal because I only had sucky powers to choose three levels ago!" And, so, in the game's first major expansion (Legendary Heroes), hero advancement was rewritten from scratch to show you a complete tree of every feat available to the hero's class, so that you can make every assassin with the exact same "optimized" set of abilities as every other assassin.

Also noteworthy is that, over the last 40 years, both tabletop RPGs and CRPG have largely moved away from randomized character creation, going from "3d6 down the line" to "4d6, drop one, arrange to taste" to "point-buy" to "standard array", in an ongoing quest to give players control of their characters and ensure blandness balance between them.

So there definitely is an audience for what you're suggesting, but I'm pretty sure the large majority of gamers aren't a part of that audience.

quote:

the 4X game Fallen Enchantress

Plague of Hats posted:

quote:

Recently I downloaded the pathfinder masterwork tools app to look for content to adapt into 5e. I noticed that several systems are very similar. The level number, the archetype system, the skill system, these are all very similar. Did wotc rip paizo off? Are these systems done better in 5e?

Slimnoid posted:

I leave this without comment.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DriveThruRPG/posts/RjNqnw6yn8q

quote:

Note too that this is a card game, not a roleplaying game. Some may feel that if we were to ban an RPG from our marketplaces, that action would levy a significant economic penalty on that title since we have a long reach in the overall RPG market. This is not true of card games, where OneBookShelf is currently a tiny corner of the card game market. Our not carrying a card game should have minimal impact on that card game’s economic viability...

..While we also considered the customer complaints on both sides of this issue (we are a business, after all, and we cannot ignore customer complaints and survive), these were not a major factor in our decision...

...Some publishers also complained about this title, and a few publishers let us know they would not be interested in continuing to work with us if we carried it on our store. We will not allow any publisher to dictate content policy onto any other publisher, explicitly or implicitly...

Halloween Jack posted:

I will comment to point out that grognards tend to be laissez-faire South Park Republicans until it negatively affects them in the slightest way, at which point, business owners having control over their own business becomes censorship.

gradenko_2000 posted:

There you go. In fairness he's not really a grog, probably just a new player that isn't familiar with the history.

FMguru posted:

Grimace has responded: http://www.donotlink.com/framed?600633

Will you be surprised to learn that it's a stirring cry to battle, to fight at the barricades against the dawning of a new intellectual dark ages, and the very soul of civilization itself?

donotlink posted:

Most people think this page is nonsense

NGDBSS posted:

I wonder how much longer he can stay solvent in the business while alienating more and more people in the name of his own self-serving "outrage".

Halloween Jack posted:

I will comment to point out that grognards tend to be laissez-faire South Park Republicans until it negatively affects them in the slightest way, at which point, business owners having control over their own business becomes censorship.

ProfessorCirno posted:

...So they're South Park Republicans?

Error 404 posted:

Libertarians that pay lip service to social causes.

ProfessorCirno posted:

No no, I'm saying, "pledging yourself incessantly to the free market right up until the market decides against your favor and then demanding the government force business owners to do what you want" is basically a clear description of most South Park Republicans.

Error 404 posted:

Ask Gareth Skarka.

quote:

http://i.imgur.com/vz481VT.jpg
^Sad story about this one. He's a character model based off a friend's RP character. I spent a total of over 24 hours working on him and him alone, including a 6-hour all-nighter painting session. I finally take some decent photos of the model, show them to said friend, and I get the following response: "Neat." To say I was devastated does not fully encompass the depth of the emotions involved. Over the span of 10 seconds, I went from being excited to know what he'd think of all that effort and expecting excitement and praise, to everything having gone black (no, the power didn't fail) while I felt like I never wanted to touch the hobby ever again and just as I was beginning to contemplate throwing out every one of my miniatures and never replacing them, I snapped out of it.

Slimnoid posted:

I leave this without comment.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DriveThruRPG/posts/RjNqnw6yn8q

Pundowski posted:

So I'm really looking forward to all of you people who say "this was a card game, not an rpg" and "there is no plan to engage in blacklisting" to stand behind me in five or six months when one of Zak Smith or James Raggi (or my own) products is attacked through pressure to get OBS to ban it, and not to be proving that all the stuff you're saying right now is just so much loving hypocritical bullshit (like how much all of you suddenly love the Free Market and the rights of Business Owners, an affection I've never seen any of you professing earlier and which I suspect will vanish into dust again the moment its not opportunistically useful for you anymore).

Slimnoid posted:

The part in parenthesis is pure

Chaltab posted:

What does he even care what "all we people" say about him in the first place, geez. You say crazy poo poo on the internet, someone's going to point out that it's crazy. As funny as this is I wonder if the paywall on TradGames should go back up for Pundowski's ease of mind.

Not sure how it's ironic. It's stupid as hell, but entirely consistent with his belief that everyone against him is him is really a socialist commie hippie marxist collectivist porcine pseudo-activist who just PRETENDS to like tabletop games.

FMguru posted:

Grimace has responded: http://www.donotlink.com/framed?600633

Antivehicular posted:

The best part of the outrage at DriveThru is that you know none of these people screaming about fascism are going to actually stop using the site. It's like how the one line that GamerGaters refuse to cross is the one where they have to stop consuming video games.

Xelkelvos posted:

Don't you mean the Anti-GGers?