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Plague of Hats posted:He writes obtuse blogs about monsters and his city adventure book was pretty popular. That's super great! I'm sorry you can't stop name-searching and jumping into others' threads to bring up this old poo poo no one's talking about constantly. Ho ho ho ho ho.
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# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 05:20 |
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# ¿ May 10, 2024 11:02 |
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Yeah, I have to agree. When you have to resort to buzzwords like "illuminati" and "facism" I think you may have hosed up. Do I have to be the one to remind the thread that Pundit literally believes he is a wizard who knows real magic?
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# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 06:23 |
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Night10194 posted:You can't say this and not elaborate. quote:“Real” Magic in RPGs, Redux Libertad! posted:This might sound dismissive, but why should we care? He uses it to feel superior to other people who play RPGs, which is the relevant/funny part.
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# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 06:29 |
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Guilty Spork posted:The big, legitimate issue with Zak is that there are some pretty serious allegations of harassment and such. They're plausible but hard to prove, and if they're true he's diligent at taking the relatively easy steps necessary to make them hard to prove. Aside from that it's mostly just that he seems to have a bag of angry cats inside his brain and can't properly handle people disagreeing with him or saying anything even vaguely critical of him. Oh, and the way he posts online one has to assume that goes through keyboards quickly as he wears F5 keys down to nothing refreshing and replying over and over. Even if we were to set aside the harassment stuff, he's just an insanely unpleasant person. They're hard to prove, but when he does poo poo like go out of his way to track down an SA poster's real name and post it awkwardly six times to call them out the tactics tell their own story. He wants his sycophants and hangers-on to go attack people for him all the time, and he does it by essentially doxxing them over the tiniest poo poo. e: oh yeah and he has secret hideouts where he more overtly tells people to attack others for him. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 14, 2014 |
# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 19:04 |
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I'm sure the trans women he's stalked for months or years at a time will feel better.
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 22:24 |
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Lightning Lord posted:To me, Zak's apparent progressiveness just makes things worse. How is someone supposed to feel when someone who'd likely be an ally otherwise decides to harass and out them based entirely on elfgame drama? Here's an ever better question: since when does being not-lovely in one area excuse literally harassing people out of the industry, threatening people with loss of jobs or opportunity, or - and this is a life-threatening act that can carry deadly consequences - outing trans people repeatedly and publicly? Since when does "being an rear end in a top hat to everyone" excuse "being such an rear end in a top hat that he will threaten certain specific people's lives"? One day the industry will learn that having a position on something and publicly posting it is less important than the actual people under actual, literal threat.
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 22:36 |
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Mors Rattus posted:When your behavior is indistinguishable from transphobia, why isn't it called transphobia? Absolutely this. Also, to be clear, Cam can have his position. I don't like it, but it's his. I don't ask him or anyone else to act as a forum-hopping go-between just because Zak has decided to burn every bridge in his quest to be an "ally" who outs trans people, stalks them for months/years and calls them mentally ill or "shams" or "fakers" for the crime of disagreeing with him on the internet while giving their personal information to his rabid followers.
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 22:55 |
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It's a game Zak plays where he tries to get industry people or notables to post in places where he's been banned for him. And it stinks if you don't play along, for months and months afterwards. Also aaa why d20 for Fire Emblem of all things?
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 23:13 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Bear in mind that from the earliest days of D&D, there were guys like Rob Kuntz (who is practically Gygax's creative heir) who basically thought that good design and clear writing was dumbing down the game. It's especially telling because Basic is essentially just OD&D as run past an editor with creative leeway, but that still made it part of the TSR Satan because something something nerds are afraid of success and popularity.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 17:58 |
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It doesn't do customization after the game's started much, but Basic has you covered on some weird goddamn poo poo.
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# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 05:07 |
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rkajdi posted:Funnily enough, the group I played AD&D with last (well into 3E's run, all the way to the 3.5 revision in fact) were all about modding the game to fit their needs. IME, this whole "play the games out of the book exactly" idea didn't really exist until the internet forums started standardizing play. I'm sort of surprised that grogs push this, since they remember when standardization was not a major thing. AD&D was published with the express intent of standardizing play across groups for tournaments, and modules like Tomb of Horrors were tournament modules. Yeah, that's kind of an alien mindset today isn't it.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 16:04 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:That kind of sounds like an analog version of an MMO raid and being able to swap stories about "oh man, remember how hard Vaelastrasz was?" with anyone who's ever played WoW at that stage. Online and computer play turned out to be really good for a lot of this kind of gameplay style. Hex-and-counter wargames embraced it, and certain kinds of quite mainstream, supported and popular RPG styles did too! But remember, tabletop quote:
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing someone derogatorily referring to AD&D 2e as pen and paper Nethack on Usenet. Turtles all the way down.
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# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 16:46 |
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Libertad! posted:Found it back in 2012 on Grognards.txt, quoted by Dr. Nick. This has to be the strangest posting gimmick I have ever seen.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2014 08:54 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:Gygax let one of his group play a balrog, so long as he started at 1 HD. Which segues into the best play story I've heard relating to playing monsters in OD&D. It doesn't even belong here but I'm posting it anyway. quote:UP IN THE AIR, JUNIOR BIRDMEN!
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 21:39 |
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Error 404 posted:So, Ettin wrote a thing, and one of our favorite people wrote an even longer thing. Oh no, it's even stranger than that. Ettin's article came second, and no one noticed the first until then.
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 19:33 |
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Guilty Spork posted:"Someone showed concern that having a porn star represent D&D in Maxim was bad for women." He. He's mad. He made it.
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# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 00:17 |
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Why is the "harem anime is creepy" line from wundergeek underlined in red, as if it represents a particularly damning instance of harassing Zak?
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# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 06:50 |
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And yet he presented it as evidence of direct harassment, of which a publishing company is presented as complicit. Zak S, capable of leaping the tallest logic in one bound!
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# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 07:20 |
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osirisisdead posted:Making any in-character decisions based on dice probability is a prime example of meta-gaming. It should be avoided. It's really not so far from a person thinking about whether they'll make a jump in real life, just nerdier. "How likely am I to succeed" is a very natural human factor.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 22:20 |
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Being basically a living homegrown post.
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2015 11:53 |
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OtspIII posted:That and the three people in this conversation are all more prominent for being theorists and bloggers than for being major industry players (to varying degrees). There aren't a shortage of toxic video game personalities, and tabletop thankfully hasn't hit gamergate levels of harassment yet. Two of the three have credit in the current D&D edition! Y'know, for perspective.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 02:59 |
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Cirno is 100% correct about the nature of the industry and y'all are just glossing over it because you don't want or care to see it.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 17:19 |
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It is read as "glossing over" by way of "now, we are COMPARATIVELY not so bad..." when the comparison is loving comic books.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:03 |
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Well. Put it another way, think of that stupid chart of nerds looking down on other nerds (trekkies, furries, etc) and imagine I just substituted entertainment industries. Videogames are pretty universally "above" RPGs, which are proud to remain on the bottom of the heap. And it's not like the videogame industry lacks problems, but the people in it look at what happened with D&D's consultants and shudder and are glad they got out of this mess. Track some down and ask them, I guess.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:21 |
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"Critical thought as applied to books we read is a Marxist Plot" being an actual conspiracy theory never ceases to amaze me.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 04:04 |
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I mean if we accept that the first theory of literary analysis came from the Frankfurt School (it didn't), and we accept that it's a marxist plot (lol), we have to follow the logic that got us there and also somehow consider Sigmund Freud's entire body of work to be part of a marxist plot because of how his ideas were incorporated into it. We then have to confuse critical theory with literary theory (the latter borrowing elements of the former because literary theory is a beast that devours ideas), trace a line through Feminist literary theory because why the hell not, that's the de rigeur bullshit among insecure morons, trace it backwards in time to Max Weber because his ideas are foundational to critical theory (and sociology itself) along with the ideas of Marx, and from there launch into a massive conspiracy theory about how all social sciences are secretly Communist and have been since before Marx wrote Das Kapital. I mean, it only makes sense.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 04:37 |
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# ¿ May 10, 2024 11:02 |
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This is all design talk rather than grogtalk but yeah, thinking about what dice rolls result in beyond binary [yes]/[no] results can lead to very interesting places. Dungeon World has at minimum three possible dice results (each often with lists of possible interpretations), there's Fail Forward, there's adding conditions like "No, But" or "Yes, But", and the most common one is "critical" success or failure. This is all really neat stuff, you can really consider what you want your game to do and what your dice rolls accomplish within a game's fiction or just in the flow of gameplay. And there will always be someone out there calling the very idea of thinking about this on a design level bad and wrong.
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 21:57 |