Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

ProfessorCirno posted:

ROLEPLAYING, NOT ROLLPLAYING.

Basically starting in the 90's you had games increasingly try to distance themselves from D&D, the most successful being Vampire: the Masquerade. Nerds being nerds, this almost immediately turned into bickering as to which game was the one for mature, intelligent, sophisticated roleplayers. White Wolf, despite like 90% of their rules still being about combat, played of their stereotype as being all about stories and drama and being your character as opposed to D&D's brute hack and slash. D&D in turn got on it's own metagame train and started to vomit out settings like there was no tomorrow and push novels harder then D&D has ever pushed before or since. So even before the whole GNS thing everyone was screaming that only they were the true roleplayers not like those other storygamers or rollplayers or what have you. By 2000 you had 3e trying to step away from all of this by advertising itself BACK TO THE DUNGEON and COOL PRECISE FIGHTING RULES and AWESOME CHARACTER BUILDING METAGAME, but then the Forge hit the internet and threw out the GNS theory which labeled D&D exactly what it had been labeling itself as only for D&D fans to get insulted and begin backtracking immediately and screaming about how D&D isn't just dungeon crawls and fighting rules and character building.
Not just the 1990s - back in the 1980s there were lots of efforts to come up with a version of D&D that was both more "realistic" and had rules for things other than moving down dungeon corridors and having fights. Skill systems, ads/disads, personality mechanics, economic and crafting systems, non-adventuring character types, and all the rest of the stuff that came from GURPS and Hero and BRP/RuneQuest and Rolemaster and on and on - not to mention the sort of things people bolted onto their D&D games to make them more complicated and realistic or at least cover more territory (a lot of D&D games I played then in used BRP's D100% skill system to handle non-combat things). Hell, Gygax's AD&D comes across in a lot of ways as an effort to improve D&D by include a wider range of stuff and broadening its scope compared to its OD&D roots.

Smug nerds (like, uh, me at the time) looked down on D&D as the sort of simple-minded (yet also overly-complicated!) game that you played until you were ready for a real roleplaying game that wasn't just mindless combat and powering up, and pitied the people who stuck with it despite the presence of so many obviously better choices.

And the 1990s took that strain and ran with it, both with WW/WoD's alleged emphasis on story and mood and theme and political maneuvering and the explosion in super-detailed metaplotted settings (which included a lot of AD&D worlds, where you had to read a stream of tie-in novels if you wanted to keep up with the ongoing changes) and eventually culminating in things like 7th Sea and Brave New World and Trinity, where critical setting details about what was really going on were withheld from the GM until more than a dozen supplement books were published.

D&D 3E was (as you point out) a clear break from this progression, with its original emphasis on straight-up Dungeoneering and its detailed tactical combat rules and its original emphasis on toolkit-style design (for the GM to build his world from) instead of hyper-detailed pre-made settings. And this drove a number of people completely bugfuck, because it wrecked their notion of the hobby inexorably evolving from its base, vulgar, crude Gygaxian roots towards a more refined story/narrative gaming thing. Wick in particular is furious because his preferred style of play (GM tells an intricate story full of important NPCs that PCs flit around in) was being deprecated in favor of a kill things/take stuff/level up/gently caress yeah throwback approach.

It's particularly funny because by the time 4E came out, 3E had evolved (in many nerd minds) into this intricately detailed and infinitely customizable game engine that WotC unforgivably pitched aside in favor of a tabletop WoW emulator boardgame for babbies that wasn't even a real RPG. This, depsite the fact that 3E was full of range templates and facing rules and flanking effects and grappling rules that were like a zen koan to decipher and, oh yeah, Attacks Of Opportunity. Which just goes to prove your point that...

quote:

Nerds being insufferable and exclusionary is maybe just an inherent thing.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
As we all know, John Tarnowski's latest project was an OSR retroclone based on Indian mythology titled Arrows of Indra. He's always denied that there was any relationship with or influence from the classic old-school Indian mythology derived Empire of the Petal Throne RPG. Well, someone at YDIS ran some side-by-side comparisons of the magic systems of the two games, and um...

Arrows of Indra priest spell list posted:

Tier 1(hosed up the order)
1. Light*
2. Calm water/wind/people*
3. Protection from evil/good*
4. Dispel Magic spell*
5. Bless/Curse*
6. Charm monster*
7. Send field of warped perceptions that blind*
8. Find object*
9. Cause insanity(Gaze)*
10. Create food and water*
11. Heal wounds(minor
12. Levitate*
13. Open Portal*
14. Dispel illusion*
15. Cause disease*
16. Hold Portal*
17. Summon Monster*
18. Cause Fear*
19. True vision*
20. Blind Gaze

EPT priest spell list posted:

1. Calm water/wind/people*
2. Create food/water*
3. Summon monsters*
4. Curse/Bless*
5. Dispel illusion*
6. Dispel Evil/good Spell*
7. Hold portal/open portal*
8. Cause fear*
9. Heal wounds(minor)*
10. Levitate*
11. Light*
12. Locate gold/gems
13. Locate objects*
14. Cause madness*
15. Cause disease*
16. Protection from evil/good*
17. Send wave of shadows that blind*
18. Detect other planar/invisible poo poo/True vision*
94% overlap (marked with asterisks), and that's just one example of how much of AoI is taken from EPT, despite Tarnowski's vehement denials and general poo poo-talking of Tekumel and Barker.

The guy posted it to RPGsite and the last brave honest truthteller in all of RPGland immediately started banning people and deleting posts and wildly lashing out at strawmen. It's amazing.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Chaltab posted:

The thread's still there in their Reviews subforum.
To be fair, YDIS is a terrible website.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Goodman Games has something to sell you!

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Covok posted:

Ok...what?

Like, what even?

Why not just sell them as DCC dice or just weird dice? This is terrible marketing.
But these have guaranteed magic negro hoodoo afro power in them!

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

inklesspen posted:

I googled their two names, though, and I couldn't find anything apart from Ken having also been credited in D&D 5. So that was another example of "apparently a thing happened but I can't find any evidence of it". Not saying it didn't happen. Just saying I can't find poo poo and it bugs me to hear about stuff that I can't substantiate.
Ken's twitter feed sees him regularly engaging in friendly banter with Zak.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Gamers using "milieu" are just parroting Grognard Prime himself, whose writing tended to use unnecessary ten-dollar words

Gary Motherfucking Gygax posted:

As has been often pointed out, AD&D is a game wherein participants create personae and operate them in the milieu created and designed, in whole or in part, by the Dungeon Master and shared by all, including the DM, in imagination and enthusiasm. The central theme of this game is the interaction of these personae, whether those of the players or those of the DM, with the milieu, including that part represented by the characters and creatures personified by the DM.
wherein personae milieu personified

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
The RPGnet Far West thread continues to deliver. Where did all the money go? A random poster suggests a possibility.

quote:

If you read the early (I mean first couple of months) updates you will see that GMS went to Hollywood to show far west around...I think most of our money went there.
Hey remember those movies with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson? Well this is pretty much the same, but different! *waits for seven-figure check to arrive*

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Ahahahaha, Desborough is bent about Munchkin going on to make a zillion dollars for SJG while he never saw a cent of it. He was one of the authors of The Munchkin's Guide To Powergaming book that SJG published in the mid-1990s, which was sold well enough to make Jackson think there was a market for gamer-self-mocking "Munchkin" products and games and well the rest is history. No wonder he keeps trying to fart out hastily-thrown-together card games based on some passing nerd culture meme - he saw SJG do it and make millions, so he figures he's due. Yeah, good luck with that.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Also, it seems "Freedom" now means forcing other private companies to carry your game and do business with you whether you want to or not (so long as it's not illegal). SJG and DTRPG should have no ability to decide what they should or should not carry. Good to know.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Pundit's belief that storygame swine are just hipster poseurs next to True Raw Edgy Original Talent Zak S (of whom they are terribly, terribly jealous) cracks me up.

Also, that guy at YDIS compared the magic item lists between Arrows of Indra and Empire of the Petal Throne and welp big shock it turns out the former is an item-for-item copy of the latter.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
My understanding is that Steve Jackson is pretty much a libertarian, with a libertarian's dim view of state power (If the Secret Service had pulled the poo poo on me that they did on him, I'd be one too) and a small businessman's loathing of taxes and regulation.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Rulebook Heavily posted:

He uses it to feel superior to other people who play RPGs, which is the relevant/funny part.
In entirely predictable Tarnowski fashion, he's not only a Prackticing Magickian, but he'll gladly tell you that only he really understand the Thelamic Golden Rosicrucian Secret Egyptian Tradition while everyone else is a poseur barking up the wrong true, because he's just that awesome.

It's also funny because it's so at odds with his usual self-appointed role of clear-eyed scalpel-sharp truthteller looking down at all the silly, unthinking, irrational sheeple who fall for all kinds of nonsense - throwing an "oh, by the way, I (and I alone) command the Eye Of Thoth and comprehend the True Inner Mysteries" into that mix is such a wonderful, self-negating touch.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

inklesspen posted:

It's his new book, the one which Zak claimed (in the Google Plus posting I screenshotted earlier) was the true reason Kemper was down on Ken Hite. The DTRPG description says it is perfect for your "first, second, third, fourth or fifth edition game". Because the only game in existence is D&D.
We already have a pair of old-school AD&D modules adapting the Alice books to the game (EX1 Dungeonland and EX2 The Land Beyond The Magic Mirror) written by Gary Gygax, and they are strange as gently caress. What does Zak bring to the table? Goth "edginess" like from American McGee's Alice?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Desborough managed to finally make a good showing in an online argument!

...with a Markov script bot


FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

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.
Desborough can always count on his big big patreon earnings.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

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.
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?

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.
Like the young nerds who think Warhammer:40K just ripped off Starcraft.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Chaltab posted:

Don't you people know that d20 is a perfect world-simulator that has physics/rules* that can be used to run literally anything?
Ryan Dancey parachute account spotted.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Saving Dwarfs From Forlorn Encystment
:pusheen:

How long have you been sitting on this?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
From our very own D&D Next thread:

Gerdalti posted:

I may be a bit more technical than the average person (seasoned IT person), and I love RPG video games and MMO's, so I have some experience with the subject matter. Until this week I had literally never even heard of most of these other systems (Fate, Dungeon World, etc).

I'm sure the barrier for entry when you have little cognitive thinking skills or only a 5th grade reading level is complicated. Most people trying to play a tabletop RPG will be of that ilk though. This is a nerdy hobby, for nerds right? We pride ourselves on being smart right?

Gerdalti posted:

I mean hell, I learned and implemented site-to-site ipsec vpn on a totally unfamiliar system in 3 hours this morning. I am clearly not the average scenario, nor am I even close to bordering on the nerd-curious.
I don't see why you guys keep saying 5E is hard to pick up from scratch - I mean I figured it out. Of course, I also have a giant IT genius space brain, so you could say I have an advantage over all those "other" people with their 5th grade reading levels or little in the way of cognitive skills...

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
From an article at Deadspin, of all places, on what people in prison do fill up their endless, endless days:

quote:

Unfashionable games from the past, abandoned by the free world in favor of the digital, have survived in prison. Men still like cribbage (which requires pegs), horseshoes, and Dungeons and Dragons. Although some prisons actually forbid the latter out of a belief that it spurs nerds to violence, inmates own the books, draw the fields of play, and hold elaborate campaigns. It's like the '80s all over again: What flourishes as a nostalgic novelty in the free world serves as a present-day necessity inside.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Bendigeidfran posted:

Their lore apparently involves an exodus of Extreme Sports Club members who fight off Gargantuan WerePenguins and eventually find a friendly starship to take them to their homeland. There is also a cannibalistic wizard tournament to determine who gets the right to eat the others and be the last remaining Blacklore elf in their starving colony. This poo poo is goddamn brilliant.
Aaron Allston was kind of a genius.

( :rip: )

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Asimo posted:

It's not "just" a nerd thing, no, but the older I get and the more time I spend online, the one thing that really, really seems to define a nerd is the utter and complete inability to understand even the most rudimentary and basic subtlety and themes in a work of media. It's like a screaming unintentional shibboleth once you realize it.
The things I think most define nerds are 1) a belief that they possess greatly above-average intelligence (and cite their engagement in their nerd hobbies as proof) and 2) an inability to critically engage anything at any level beyond criticizing its realism/verisimilitude/adherence to canon and continuity.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

gently caress, somewhere out there there's a grog defending their position with "it's a fantasy game, and in MY fantasy, women are weaker", right?
not quite that but something similar:

lizard posted:

As a side note, there seems to be a common assumption in this thread that female players play female characters, and thus, anything which affects women in the setting is inflicted on the players themselves, by constraining their PCs actions. A DM who insisted that players limit themselves to their own gender is probably not one I'd choose to game with. Assuming there is a freedom to choose your character's gender in the game, what is the difference between "This nation is strongly patriarchal; female PCs will probably get some grief from NPCs" and "This nation is run by dwarves; elf PCs will probably get some grief from NPCs"? If you're told, going in, "This character type faces some form of discrimination", and you are free to play something else, but decide not to, that's your choice. (Before someone says, "Well, prejudice against women is real, and prejudice against elves is not.", I shall point you to umpty-zillion and two threads on why classic fantasy depictions of orcs, etc, are questionable because the same concepts applied to fictional entities in games have also been applied to real entities in history.)

The issues of game buy-in, comfort zones, etc, are VERY important, and should be discussed, but a simple litany of "no isms" isn't actually useful for that, because everyone has different buttons and different experiences and reactions. It's a highly individual thing and the only rules/guidelines that can be offered are "find out what the actual, individual, people at your table want and are comfortable with"[1] (I actually covered some aspects of this in Tales Of The Solar Patrol (discussing sexism in a culturally 1950s sci-fi setting) and Free Mars (discussing the even more complex issue of terrorism and its justification or lack thereof.)) My DM loves pushing player buttons on various issues, and I described a recent session to my wife as "We got stuck in another of his morality traps... save vs. conscience at -5."

[1]More complexly, different players at the same table have different comfort levels; one player may want to explore some aspects of a setting or world that another is uncomfortable with. Even if the second player is not directly involved, they can be disturbed simply by seeing it happen to another PC, or even an NPC as part of world background.
Don't like how women are treated as third-class citizens in a fantasy setting? Well, just play a male character! What's the problem here?

It's always telling where the dividing point between "geez its a fantasy game lighten up" and "my versimilitude!!1!" lays. How does this isolated city in the mountains feed itself? Why are all the traps in this ancient tomb perfectly functional after being buried for 2000 years? If the graveyard outside of town is full of ghouls why haven't they overrun the town's level 1 guards and eaten everyone already? Eh, shut up, it's just fantasy, don't worry too much abou - wait, does your amazon PC have an 18 strength?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
I've decided the most reliable tic that signals that you're about to read some bullshit from an old school grognard is when they make a point to mention (brag, really) when and with what version they started playing D&D. You just know that as soon as someone tells you about how they cut their teeth on Moldvay B/X or Holmes Basic back in 1981 or whenever that you're about to get hit with a tsunami of whiny grog nonsense.

Case in point:

quote:

Where did *my* D&D go?

I almost got Sting to sing "I want my D&D"

I have been playing D&D since at least 1977. As well as a lot of other RPGs.

5e like 4e before is not a game I even recognize as D&D. I looked in a couple of the 5 threads and it is like reading a foreign language!

The last edition I bought was 3.0 and I didn't really like it. The d20 boom was, to me, a step in the direction of needless complexity that didn't add much to the sort of game I wanted to play. Feats and prestige classes and all that.
...and on and on.

Seriously, it's like a perfect tell. It reminds me of old viking or ancient greek warriors who made a point of boasting their heritage and feats every time they were formally recognized at a meeting or before engaging in single combat.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

MalcolmSheppard posted:

What does this mean? It means Gary Gygax took Mordenkainen with him to his grave.
The 1980 AD&D product "Rogues Gallery" (a mostly-useless collection of pre-made characters, almost certainly generated by a BASIC program on someone's Apple ][) had stats and writeups of the key characters from Gyagx's house campaign in the back, including Mordenkainen and Tenser and Bigby.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
It also included this fun bit of Gygaxgrog

quote:

Second, these personalities allow the DM (and player, if the DM shows these to the player) to see the wide variety that different campaigns allow. Many things are non-standard, such as a lizard man and a centaur, and some new magic items are detailed. Although this does not mean that these things are recommended for AD&D, they do show the variety of individual campaigns.
Gary Gygax is allowed to include new character races and magic items in his campaign but you are not, peon.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Happy new year from GMS!



Why does this site that I openly wish for the death of keep saying mean things about me?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

ManMythLegend posted:

Holy poo poo, this stuff is almost as old as I am.

Grog. Grog never changes.
The first time I ever saw "ROLEplaying not ROLLplaying" was in a letter to The Dragon back in like 1981 or so.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
More like osirisisdumb

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
Unusual Exalted grog from rpgnet

quote:

What if I want to play a character that has no useful skills at all? Every edition of the core book has rules for creating a non-heroic mortal. I want to play one of them. I will have, at most, 1 dot in anything., and exactly one attribute at 3, and all the others at 2, and basically no virtues. I will also not be able to double 10s.
What if I want to play someone completely useless and unpowered in this game of world-changing demigods? What then, smart guy?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

unseenlibrarian posted:

Pavis is great because it's basically Glorantha-as-Microcosm. You've got a pocket of Sun worshipers, you've got Sartarite clans, , you've got ducks, you've got the lunar occupying forces, you've got Dragonewts and Trolls, you've got aldryami, the animal nomads, heretic dwarves worshiping one of their own, and etc all in one convenient location, so you can focus on whatever bits you like. Hell, I think one of the Runequest 3rd adventure lines was about how everyone reacts to a Western sorcerer moving into town.
It's the equivalent of Mos Eisley or one of those wide-open Wild West towns, and probably the most perfect place in Glorantha to have a tradition PC Adventuring Party of various mismatched characters. Lots of drifters and exiles and wanderers end up there (so you can literally play any Gloranthan character imaginable and have them fit into the setting), it's built adjacent to a giant ancient ruin, occupied by various elder races, and full of powerful magical leftovers from a previous Age. You can run any level of adventure there, from guttersnipe street gangs fighting over blocks of turf to going into a sewer to beat up oversized rats, to unearthing buried God Plane artifacts and fighting the mile-tall giants who arrive to get them back.

Pavis is great, is what I'm saying.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
The problem with making a "realistic" combat system is that there's no agreement as to what actually happened during bronze age or medieval or modern combat. Even questions like "how heavy and strong were swords" have no definitive answer (there's a strong suspicion that most of the surviving armor and weapons that we have from Ye Olden Days were created as fancy display pieces that were never meant to be used in combat). There's no scholarly consensus about any of this. There's no better documented organization from the classical world than the Roman army, and there's still zero agreement about how it actually fought. Hell, several armor types specified in AD&D may not actually have ever existed.

The whole thing is only a half-step more "realistic" than making huge charts showing which Veritech VF-1 missile loadouts will do the most damage to different kinds of Zentradi energy shields.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Guilty Spork posted:

I was thinking more of the comments, which feature Pundit and Zak being how they are.
There's more than a touch of Zak S in Ron's intro, with its preconditions about the circumstances under which he will and won't engage in conversation. All that's missing is a "Do you agree y/n?"

Plague of Hats posted:

Ron said some stuff that might've had a fine intended message, but he said it in a really loving dumb way. I really don't feel any sympathy for him on this one. poo poo was loving dumb and he's trying to act like it wasn't.
I used language calculated to provoke a strong reaction, and a bunch of people were provoked and reacted strongly! It's so unfair. Some of them even responded in an exaggerated and hyperbolic fashion and made sweeping claims about what I believe, can you believe that?

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
That whole G+ thread is great :munch: watching. Tarnowski, Zak, and Ron Edwards all trying to pwn each other in an endless ourobouros. Can you guess how many posts it takes before they start arguing over matters of pure semantics and the definition of words? It's almost certainly less than you think.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
That whole G+ thread continues to be amazing, just three giant black holes swirling around each other and sucking everything in sight down into their lightless abyss and giving off blasts of disorganized radiation

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Biomute posted:

Why would anyone have an issue with a way of looking at recurring themes/cliches/motifs/literary devices. As long as you're not being annoying about it, what's not to like?
The problem is when certain subclasses of nerds interpret all of literature/cinema/whatever as nothing more than a clicked-together collection of pre-existing lego pieces. It's the old saying about trying to understand humor by dissecting jokes like a frog - in the end, all you end up with a dead frog.

Trope tunnel vision is hilarious, especially when they try to hammer square pegs into round holes (the four protagonists actually make a classic five-person team, because one of the characters fulfills two roles if you squint hard enough! The seven-person protagonist team is actually a subversion of the classic five-person team!). Plus, most of the tropes themselves have terrible inside joke names (it's a classic Squick Squee situation that inverts the traditional Hilarious Badass of Doom trope!)

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
And yeah, one of the defining characteristics of nerdery is an inability to critically engage any work of art except by nitpicking plot holes or "unrealistic" details or continuity glitches or fidelity to the source material.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Bendigeidfran posted:

is it going to end up like model trains someday?
Someday?

  • Locked thread