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Absurd Alhazred posted:Then I'm having a hard time understanding how people get invested in this world and in this narrative. They like the game so they read about it  Most people aren't super invested in it if by that you mean care about the setting more than the game mechanics
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Jun 5, 2020 19:40
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Back when I played Magic (I quit like 20 years ago now, and even then no-one was playing for ante) you got a vague idea of what was going on and who the characters were in the metanarrative from the titles, art and flavour text on cards ("Urza is a dude who makes lots of artifacts.") but if you wanted to know the actual narrative you had to read the novels. And even people who read star wars novels looked down on people who read M:tg novels. Basically you either cared enough about the story to read the books (almost no one) or you didnt care at all (pretty much everyone). There were CCGs which made more of an effort to incorporate narrative into the game one way or another. Doomtown and 7th sea for example. But both of those were based on RPG settings. Doomtown was pretty good for giving the overall story from the cards and their interactions (they had a card type called "events" which typically were a big story beat with an associated effect, so you knew for example when the sheriff faction had ambushed the outlaw faction) but it could go kind of wrong. They had a tournament at some convention to determine the outcome of the storyline, and it resulted in one faction being literally destroyed so they were no longer tournament legal and wouldnt get any more cards. People who layed that faction were obviously not impressed. My memory is a little hazy but I believe the reason the winners of the tournament picked that faction to go was because a very nasty broken deck was based around a couple of cards from that faction. So to put it in M:tg terms, imagine if people got so annoyed at control decks they managed to win tournaments and Wizards of the Coast agreed that they wouldnt produce any more blue cards, ever. I think they had assumed that whoever won the tournement would choose to spare all the factions, but...
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Jun 5, 2020 20:02
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SiKboy posted:Back when I played Magic (I quit like 20 years ago now, and even then no-one was playing for ante) you got a vague idea of what was going on and who the characters were in the metanarrative from the titles, art and flavour text on cards ("Urza is a dude who makes lots of artifacts.") but if you wanted to know the actual narrative you had to read the novels. And even people who read star wars novels looked down on people who read M:tg novels. Basically you either cared enough about the story to read the books (almost no one) or you didnt care at all (pretty much everyone). Out of curiosity I read the Ice Age tie in novel, it was very bad. Ice Age was the first full expansion, and it was probably the first time they had a cohesive set of flavor texts on the cards. In all likelihood they probably had a few notes and then just wrote things that sounded cool on the cards. The novel was really just an excuse to tie as much of it all together into a book, and there were many, many embarrassing passages that were only describing the art on some of the cards. I don't have any answers to any questions about this as this was probably around 2003.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:07
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Then I'm having a hard time understanding how people get invested in this world and in this narrative. Holy poo poo, I was just in the US politics thread and thought this was a post there, and I was like, yeah, I hear you
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Jun 5, 2020 20:14
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Iron Crowned posted:Out of curiosity I read the Ice Age tie in novel, it was very bad. Ice Age was the first full expansion, and it was probably the first time they had a cohesive set of flavor texts on the cards. In all likelihood they probably had a few notes and then just wrote things that sounded cool on the cards. The book sounds as bad as that set was lol I mean there may have been worse ones, and there were some cool ideas, but Ice Age was pretty bad
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Jun 5, 2020 20:15
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Maybe it's a discussion that would make more sense in the RPG theory thread or the TG industry thread.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:16
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The Bloop posted:The book sounds as bad as that set was lol Wow, I don't think I can respect your wrong opinions anymore.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:17
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Iron Crowned posted:Wow, I don't think I can respect your wrong opinions anymore. some of the art was good and some of the cards were neat. Hell I started playing when The Dark was new and I still build decks using cards from revised to present Not many ice age cards make their way in. I do have a few glacial chasms for yuks. And an aurochs deck but that mostly came from coldsnap or something later
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Jun 5, 2020 20:22
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I read the onslaught and mirrodin books in highschool and they were pretty solid reads. I will not revisit them in 2020 to find out otherwise One of the newer ones was apparently incredibly bad. Karn the pacifist became a Dynasty Warriors character and just murdered dudes by the hundreds and apparently in the lore Chanda was being written as at least bisexual possibly a lesbian and the guy wrote her as 100% straight
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Jun 5, 2020 20:37
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TV episodes that did not age well: Magic The Gathering Online Exchange
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Jun 5, 2020 20:38
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Didn't hone of the first M:tG books also come with a SUPER SPECIAL PROMO CARD that could only be gotten from buying the book, so it increased sales because people wanted th card...but also the card sucked and no one used it anyway? Fake edit: Yup...even better, TWO free unique cards: 
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Jun 5, 2020 21:22
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DrBouvenstein posted:Didn't hone of the first M:tG books also come with a SUPER SPECIAL PROMO CARD that could only be gotten from buying the book, so it increased sales because people wanted th card...but also the card sucked and no one used it anyway? Arena was actually good, the other one sucked. Arena eventually got reprinted years later as a special timeshifted card in Time Spiral, aka the world is going crazy the set.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:26
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DrBouvenstein posted:Didn't hone of the first M:tG books also come with a SUPER SPECIAL PROMO CARD that could only be gotten from buying the book, so it increased sales because people wanted th card...but also the card sucked and no one used it anyway? I have two copies of the Arena card from that promo (never read the book) It's fine. Decades later it basically became the Fight mechanic
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Jun 5, 2020 21:27
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DrBouvenstein posted:Didn't hone of the first M:tG books also come with a SUPER SPECIAL PROMO CARD that could only be gotten from buying the book, so it increased sales because people wanted th card...but also the card sucked and no one used it anyway? I read a couple of those books back when. The only thing I really remember is the protagonist being super thirsty about a centaur lady's "thumb sized nipples"
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Jun 5, 2020 22:02
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I read a few of the Magic short story collections as a kid and I remember most of the stories being mostly awful with one or two fun ones. The one I remember most is about a camp aide who gets captured by goblins and wins over the tribe with his lead miniatures of little goblin dudes, becomes their chief and teaches them tactics with miniature wargaming. Ends with the goblins defeating the human army and the aide getting his come uppance on the jock knight who made fun of him. Incredibly stupid but also kind of charming because it was unashamedly camp.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:05
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shaddup nerds
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Jun 5, 2020 22:08
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Lmao magic the gathering has characters and storylines and stuff? Hahaha
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Jun 5, 2020 22:15
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I guess it could count as a tv show if you slotted the cards into a zoetrope and span it.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:21
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How about you ‘magically’ ‘gather’ your cards and go home, losers.
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Jun 5, 2020 23:49
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Magic: The Gathering is a 27 year old franchise with 74 full novels, at least a dozen comic series, hundreds of web-only short stories, 2 video games, and over 20,000 unique cards. IIRC, it also has some sort of video content on youtube. Asking how a monolithic media franchise generates an entrenched fanbase is
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Jun 6, 2020 00:05
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Every trading card game has stories, the only one that really doesn’t is like Pokémon but that’s because the story is it’s own thing completely independent of the card game
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Jun 6, 2020 00:13
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Toshimo posted:Magic: The Gathering is a 27 year old franchise with 74 full novels, at least a dozen comic series, hundreds of web-only short stories, 2 video games, and over 20,000 unique cards. IIRC, it also has some sort of video content on youtube. I'm not talking about the very fact that there's a fanbase, I'm talking about people engaging with a narrative using an inherently non-narrative game. Just like I don't get why people care about the backstory of individual characters in Overwatch, a team-based arena shooter where you are at best engaging with a randomly generated stage with archetypes which multiple players can pick simultaneously and show no growth you have personal engagement in.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:15
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Hell there was even a TV show, although it wasn't about the lore, it was literally two guys playing Magic for 20 minutes. I think it was called Spellslingers.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:33
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Most people at work play magic. They talk about it constantly but they're not talking about the dang story
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Jun 6, 2020 00:54
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collectible cards are a good medium to tell bits of a narrative, and then some people go and enjoy that narrative for its own sake. i don't personally, but it's the same principle behind enjoying literally any piece of non-interactive media and acting like it's impossible to understand is bizarre
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Jun 6, 2020 00:58
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I lived with people who ran a Magic shop, held multiple WotC sponsored events, and were high-level tournament judges or whatever. Caveat: I don't play and don't give a gently caress about it, but I am a nerd. The story literally never came up. There'd be some random mention of something like, "Holy poo poo, I'm so hype to see what new cards they have for Ravinica!" or whatever when a release was coming up, but for a bunch of lore dorks, these two never even remotely hinted that there was a worthwhile story in the card game they based their livelihood off of.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:58
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The story's like the art. At base level neither add to the game, but they add to the experience. It makes it a little more interesting outside of the mechanics and gameplay.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:01
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Nerdgames developing a metanarrative goes at least as far back as Dragonlance, which was an AD&D campaign setting AND a trilogy of novels and a set of modules that let you play through the action of the novels as the characters, and it was this whole multimedia approach that was very successful and so every other game line tried it. Magic had some hints of an overall setting in the beginning, a few sets developed it further (Antiquities introduces Urza and Mishra and so on), Ice Age had this storyline of a world getting covered in perpetual winter, and Weatherlight kicked off this very direct cycle of stories of a specific group of heroes going on an epic adventure and that went on for a few years.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:01
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I lived with people who ran a Magic shop, held multiple WotC sponsored events, and were high-level tournament judges or whatever. Caveat: I don't play and don't give a gently caress about it, but I am a nerd. Yeah, the D&D group I'm running for used to play Magic if some of them got there early or if there weren't enough people to play an actual session, and one of them lent me the Ravnica book just because they wanted a character option from there, but they never actually talked about the lore, just about deck types and stuff.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:02
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Iron Crowned posted:Hell there was even a TV show, although it wasn't about the lore, it was literally two guys playing Magic for 20 minutes. I think it was called Spellslingers. Netflix is working on a TV show Toshimo posted:Magic: The Gathering is a 27 year old franchise with 74 full novels, at least a dozen comic series, hundreds of web-only short stories, 2 video games, and over 20,000 unique cards. IIRC, it also has some sort of video content on youtube. Way more than 2 videogames
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Jun 6, 2020 01:08
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Len posted:Way more than 2 videogames I don't recall any other ones than Shandalar and DotP having any story to them, but I could have miscounted.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:18
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Battlegrounds on Xbox had a story too, iirc.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:28
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edit: Screw it. Like all threads this has descended into Magic the Gathering.
Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 01:50 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 01:34
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Toshimo posted:I don't recall any other ones than Shandalar and DotP having any story to them, but I could have miscounted. There's a Diablo-like Magic game currently in development, but how much of a story it will have isn't clear yet.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:37
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M:tG is weird to me, in that I really like the overarching story of the early sets but dislike most of the books. Like, I still think that the Brother's War could make for an interesting movie because both Urza and Mishra were awful people and that could be interesting to watch. But the books were mostly crap.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:38
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Maxwell Lord posted:Nerdgames developing a metanarrative goes at least as far back as Dragonlance, which was an AD&D campaign setting AND a trilogy of novels and a set of modules that let you play through the action of the novels as the characters, and it was this whole multimedia approach that was very successful and so every other game line tried it. Yeah Ursa and Mishra were the original two wizards battling in the OG magic set. The battle you reenact in OG Magic brought about the ice age. I was casual enough that I kinda enjoyed the story elements, didn't effect my lovely decks, but it was fun to think about.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:44
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are works that regressed socially with time? As in the early parts have aged well but the later stuff feels small-minded? i don't think the early parts aged particularly well, but pierce from the community pretty much underwent a gradual metamorphosis into caricature where he became a yellow-face wearing, out-and-out racist whereas, iirc, the original concept for the character was that he was a kind of time capsule: an old man set in ways the world left behind long ago going to college in his later years who, thanks to new college experiences, can actually learn from mistakes the new setting exposes in him and maybe he'll come around? i guess you could think of it as a flanderization of turning someone who's more insulated and out-of-touch into someone more like richard spencer hard counter has a new favorite as of 02:02 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 01:58
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are works that regressed socially with time? As in the early parts have aged well but the later stuff feels small-minded? Trailer Park Boys. it's weird, because it's not a gradual thing; the show's original run and the first Netflix season are honestly really, really LGBTQ-positive, with multiple gay or bisexual characters who don't really ever have that aspect of their lives directly played as a joke. hell, the first Netflix season expands it to being openly trans-positive, with a genderqueer character who's overall handled really pleasantly. then immediately after that Netflix season, they just swing incredibly hard in the opposite direction. firstly, they change the genderqueer character into a binary trans woman, which is more annoying to me than actively angering me but is still a problem because even halfway-decent NB representation is hard to find and they more or less nuked theirs from orbit. the bigger issue is that they then make Donna into a serial rapist who repeatedly assaults Randy. i probably really shouldn't have to explain why doing that with a trans character is staggeringly awful. I dropped the series at that point, but from what I understand this doesn't get better and they're still being nasty as gently caress to LGBTQ people out of nowhere.
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Jun 6, 2020 01:58
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Iron Crowned posted:Hell there was even a TV show, although it wasn't about the lore, it was literally two guys playing Magic for 20 minutes. I think it was called Spellslingers. I saw this on ESPN6 once yeah
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Jun 6, 2020 04:45
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WeedlordGoku69 posted:Trailer Park Boys. Are there clear reasons this happens? Like some creator went from studio/network oversight to free reign and loving went balls deep into alt-right lol trans people humor?
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Jun 6, 2020 07:06
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