Quote from: James Gillen;1055649Again, two of these races are not necessarily gendered whereas the kalashtar are often "fluid."

jg

Why would quori even have genders, much less human genders? They originate from the plane of nightmares.

A sexless robot who only adopts gender to fit in with humanoid culture? A shape shifter who changes sex at will? A person who inherits the spirit of a demon from the land of nightmares? I really question how these things would quality as transgender representation. Transhuman representation perhaps, but the transgender community is too diverse for a one-size-fits-all solution. While it might fit those who do not identify clearly as male or female or who identify as the opposite gender to their sex, it does not fit those experiencing full-blown body dysphoria which is a physiological illness and legally classified as a disability in the United States.

It feels to me like the writers have only the most superficial idea of what being transgender really means. Their bias shows when they only ever mention male and female genders, when in a fantasy world those do not necessarily apply. For example, a species with three sexes* might have three distinct genders that evolved from a primordial fight/run/hide response.

*In biology, sex refers to the types of gametes produced (egg = female, sperm = male). A species with three sexes would logically require all three to reproduce. If a species only produces the same type of gamete (as in fungi, some algae and some microorganisms), then sexual compatibility is determined by "mating types" which work on similar (but logically opposite) principles to blood types transfusion.

This right here is a reason why it's best to stick with 1e AD&D and OD&D.  They can't fuck up what they can't touch.  They can't retroactively reach back and ruin my D&D.  Let 'em shit their own nests.

Oh, and for fun, this is straight outta the Fiend Folio:

Quote from: Don TurnbullThe English language has not yet bent to accomodate these alleged requirements of modern society,
and if the products are to be words like "himr" and "hisr" I devoutly hope it never will

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1055826This right here is a reason why it's best to stick with 1e AD&D and OD&D.  They can't fuck up what they can't touch.  They can't retroactively reach back and ruin my D&D.  Let 'em shit their own nests.

   I'd rather stick with 2E, BECMI and 4E (even in that one, the rot hadn't reached nearly so far), but I share the general sentiment.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1055826This right here is a reason why it's best to stick with 1e AD&D and OD&D.  They can't fuck up what they can't touch.  They can't retroactively reach back and ruin my D&D.  Let 'em shit their own nests.

Oh, and for fun, this is straight outta the Fiend Folio:

Hey, don't let the transtrenders give you a bad impression of non-binary as a concept in speculative fiction. I am currently working out the specifics of multiple fictional species with sex/gender norms that do not map to humanity, if only to take back the concept from the transtrenders.

Like, my current favorite idea (I did not invent it, I just read it in a serialized romance novel I am reading) is some aliens/beastfolk with 5~6 different types of male, everyone including females use masculine pronouns, and there was a paradigm shift in their culture so that in the past females were considered the most vicious whereas in the contemporary era the entire female population have been forced into sex slavery to birth more soldiers to feed their numerous galactic wars and the absolute best that unsullied young women can look forward to is becoming the personal sex slave of a high-ranking official. Basically your bog standard The Handmaid's Tale of Gor style of dystopia.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;10558272E, BECMI and 4E

...

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055859Hey, d-

What in the hell are you going on about.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1055901...

Accept that other people have different tastes than you and you'll be happier.

Also, different games work better for different things. I wouldn't use AD&D to run giant robot combat (and every d20-based giant robot game abjectly sucked) and I wouldn't use Battletech or Mekton Zeta (depending on your preferred flavor of giant robot combat) to run a fantasy dungeon delve.

4E is exceptional for a Big Damned Heroes type campaign, people who enjoy tactical combat scenarios (D&D Minis was HUGE in my area back in the day, more tables of that were being run than any tabletop D&D at the time) and for being able to run non-magical settings (ex. Robin Hood, Three Musketeers) without needing a ton of house-ruling to cover all the ways magic classes affected game progression (ex. The Three Musketeers needing to spend months regaining lost hit points via natural means vs. hit points are mostly endurance and morale so that charismatic badass PC who's good at keeping people motivated can restore the party's hit points).

Its less good at sandbox worlds/campaigns and for that I'd use a 1E or 2E (or the system I've built).

It all depends on what you're looking for in a particular campaign.

One of Pathfinder/3e's biggest flaws was training an entire generation of players that you can use the same set of mechanics to emulate any setting equally well and enough amateur designers who cared more about their 'one cool concept' or their campaign world than designing mechanics to actually fit that world they were creating jumped on the bandwagon because it looked like easy cash since they didn't have to do all that design work.

It was actually kinda amusing to watch the Arcanis crew (who at one point had 100 people LARPs and 200 player all-day mass combat "battle interactives" at both Origins and GenCon) struggle with designing their own system when 4E came out and they realized that to make the switch to the GSL they'd basically have to tank all their current books and didn't anticipate 3E having any legs at the time (Pathfinder was not the obvious contender to 4E it became back in 2007-8). They had not the slightest clue what they were doing with mechanics.

I still remember the day during their playtest phase when I posted the actual probabilities for their mechanic system. Their main numbers guy posted right afterwards on the public forum saying "Yup, those look like the probabilities our internal number crunching gave us" and not one hour later I got a personal e-mail from the very same numbers guy asking if he could get a copy of my probability spreadsheets because they actually had NOT done any sort number crunching at all... in fact their difficulty calculations for tasks presumed that 2d10+1d8 had the exact same probability curve as 1d20+5 because they both had the same mean result of 15.5.

That massive change in how the mechanics made their world operate was one of the key factors that all but killed Arcanis (they're trying to make a comeback piggybacking on 5e this time, but I don't think they'll ever hit the glory days again). Their new mechanics didn't fit the world as it was described any more than using BattleTech's combat engine would have.

So yeah, 2e, BECMI and 4E makes as much sense as saying Battletech, Mekton Zeta and Jovian Chronicles. All three do 'giant robot combat' really well, but each supports particular styles of play much better than the others and which I'd pick to run a giant robot campaign would depend on the style I wanted for that campaign (ex. I wouldn't use Battletech to run a "Gundam Wing" style game, but would use it for a "Gundam 08th MS Team" style game).

Problem is. no matter how "inclusive" you are, how much bending over backwards you do. Its not going to garner you more sale. May lose you sales. and you likely will STILL be attacked for either not being inclusive "enough" or for it not being written by a transgender mutantbikercanniballibrarianclown who identifies as an attack helicopter.

Quote from: Chris24601;10559074E is exceptional for a Big Damned Heroes type campaign, people who enjoy tactical combat scenarios (D&D Minis was HUGE in my area back in the day, more tables of that were being run than any tabletop D&D at the time) and for being able to run non-magical settings (ex. Robin Hood, Three Musketeers) without needing a ton of house-ruling to cover all the ways magic classes affected game progression (ex. The Three Musketeers needing to spend months regaining lost hit points via natural means vs. hit points are mostly endurance and morale so that charismatic badass PC who's good at keeping people motivated can restore the party's hit points).

Its less good at sandbox worlds/campaigns and for that I'd use a 1E or 2E (or the system I've built).

I can attest to this since I've tried and failed several times to run 4e D&D sandbox campaigns. Its natural home seems to be a more reactive fantasy superhero team style where the Big Damn Heroes are called on to defeat a particular Growing Evil via lengthy tactical combat - my big 4e Loudwater campaign 2011-16 felt very 'Fantastic 4' at times.

5e D&D has been very good for sandboxing over the past 4 years. Only real issue was too-fast recovery, but going to 1 week long rest solved that completely.

1e/2e AD&D is good for sandboxing. Probably better than 0e-BX at the very start - pre-1e PCs are so weak that options are heavily constrained and staying alive means having a small army of followers who then become increasingly unncessary later on. This can be partially solved with a few tweaks like max hp at 1st level and death at -10. But you can do those in 1e too, plus with weapon spec and cleric bonus spells you get starting 1e PCs of close to Savage Worlds or d6 System level of competence. In my current OSRIC FR PBP game, the 1st level Rangers with 16 hp & weapon spec are more powerful than 5th level BX Fighters.

Quote from: S'mon;1055915I can attest to this since I've tried and failed several times to run 4e D&D sandbox campaigns. Its natural home seems to be a more reactive fantasy superhero team style where the Big Damn Heroes are called on to defeat a particular Growing Evil via lengthy tactical combat - my big 4e Loudwater campaign 2011-16 felt very 'Fantastic 4' at times.

Which just goes to show that not all campaigns are nails, so a single game system/hammer shouldn't be expected to solve all of them.

4E has it's place. Its just not one that many OSR fans go to particularly often. Doesn't make it bad; just specialized like a lathe (if you're into wood-turning its an indispensable piece of equipment, if you're not then its an expensive paperweight). If you ever wanted to try wood-turning you could try to cobble something together using a power drill, some clamps and some duct tape (i.e. some other game system), but a lathe (4E) will do it better and with much less fuss.

That said, if no single tool is right for the job, you also build your own. The system I've been developing for the past few years (and will have its own website up soon-ish) has been a case of combining the tactical combat elements I enjoy from 4E with a more sandbox style overall engine (flatter progression, no "end-of-encounter" style durations, no "wealth-by-level" assumptions, the ability to actually hire mercenaries if you want them to help you fight something, the "Diplomacy" skill functioning as a modifier to Reaction Rolls instead of mind control, etc.).

Instead of 'you can only use this maneuver once/encounter' (or 'recharges with a short rest' in 5e terms) you instead get a bonus the first time you use each maneuver against a foe who's never seen you use it before. You can repeat the maneuver whenever you want (maybe you want to save the 'surprise' bonus of a particular maneuver for a more opportune time), but you only get the bonus when you're using a new maneuver (relative to the opponents). The decision of when to employ a new maneuver to get the bonus (and which maneuvers you want to hold back on to employ at more opportune times) is part of the 4E-style tactical combat I want to encourage without needing to make specific combat maneuvers into "you can only try to trip an opponent 1/battle."

The end result is a 4E-style tactical combat in an otherwise sandbox world where it doesn't matter if you're level 1 or level 15, you still run from a hundred angry goblins unless you've set up an ambush for them first.

Quote from: Chris24601;1055907Accept that other people have different tastes than you and you'll be happier.

Also, different games work better for different things. I wouldn't use AD&D to run giant robot combat (and every d20-based giant robot game abjectly sucked) and I wouldn't use Battletech or Mekton Zeta (depending on your preferred flavor of giant robot combat) to run a fantasy dungeon delve.

4E is exceptional for a Big Damned Heroes type campaign, people who enjoy tactical combat scenarios (D&D Minis was HUGE in my area back in the day, more tables of that were being run than any tabletop D&D at the time) and for being able to run non-magical settings (ex. Robin Hood, Three Musketeers) without needing a ton of house-ruling to cover all the ways magic classes affected game progression (ex. The Three Musketeers needing to spend months regaining lost hit points via natural means vs. hit points are mostly endurance and morale so that charismatic badass PC who's good at keeping people motivated can restore the party's hit points).

Its less good at sandbox worlds/campaigns and for that I'd use a 1E or 2E (or the system I've built).

It all depends on what you're looking for in a particular campaign.

One of Pathfinder/3e's biggest flaws was training an entire generation of players that you can use the same set of mechanics to emulate any setting equally well and enough amateur designers who cared more about their 'one cool concept' or their campaign world than designing mechanics to actually fit that world they were creating jumped on the bandwagon because it looked like easy cash since they didn't have to do all that design work.

It was actually kinda amusing to watch the Arcanis crew (who at one point had 100 people LARPs and 200 player all-day mass combat "battle interactives" at both Origins and GenCon) struggle with designing their own system when 4E came out and they realized that to make the switch to the GSL they'd basically have to tank all their current books and didn't anticipate 3E having any legs at the time (Pathfinder was not the obvious contender to 4E it became back in 2007-8). They had not the slightest clue what they were doing with mechanics.

I still remember the day during their playtest phase when I posted the actual probabilities for their mechanic system. Their main numbers guy posted right afterwards on the public forum saying "Yup, those look like the probabilities our internal number crunching gave us" and not one hour later I got a personal e-mail from the very same numbers guy asking if he could get a copy of my probability spreadsheets because they actually had NOT done any sort number crunching at all... in fact their difficulty calculations for tasks presumed that 2d10+1d8 had the exact same probability curve as 1d20+5 because they both had the same mean result of 15.5.

That massive change in how the mechanics made their world operate was one of the key factors that all but killed Arcanis (they're trying to make a comeback piggybacking on 5e this time, but I don't think they'll ever hit the glory days again). Their new mechanics didn't fit the world as it was described any more than using BattleTech's combat engine would have.

So yeah, 2e, BECMI and 4E makes as much sense as saying Battletech, Mekton Zeta and Jovian Chronicles. All three do 'giant robot combat' really well, but each supports particular styles of play much better than the others and which I'd pick to run a giant robot campaign would depend on the style I wanted for that campaign (ex. I wouldn't use Battletech to run a "Gundam Wing" style game, but would use it for a "Gundam 08th MS Team" style game).

I'm a big fan of generics like Savage Worlds and GURPS.

Lots of times I find the generic system is better than the specific game for whatever you are trying to do. In theory, a custom system should always be better. In practice, few RPGs have good design so a generic with good design will automatically trump it. Generics tend to also survive longer in this D&D dominated market so they have time to actually refine their designs and make them better.

If D&D ever iterated on itself again, as opposed to just releasing whole new games and calling it an edition update, then they may improve vastly. 5e has a lot of room for improvement and I think could actually be quite good* with some rethinking.

*I think it's bad. I don't like 5e. I think every other edition of D&D is better, excluding only oD&D because I haven't personally read any RPG book from the 70s

Quote from: Chris24601;1055907Accept that other people have different tastes than you and you'll be happier.

That isn't how the world works.  At least not these days.

jg

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055859Hey, don't let the transtrenders give you a bad impression of non-binary as a concept in speculative fiction. I am currently working out the specifics of multiple fictional species with sex/gender norms that do not map to humanity, if only to take back the concept from the transtrenders.

Like, my current favorite idea (I did not invent it, I just read it in a serialized romance novel I am reading) is some aliens/beastfolk with 5~6 different types of male, everyone including females use masculine pronouns, and there was a paradigm shift in their culture so that in the past females were considered the most vicious whereas in the contemporary era the entire female population have been forced into sex slavery to birth more soldiers to feed their numerous galactic wars and the absolute best that unsullied young women can look forward to is becoming the personal sex slave of a high-ranking official. Basically your bog standard The Handmaid's Tale of Gor style of dystopia.

Oh man, Bone Tomahawk portrayed a particularly horrific example of this attitude taken to the extreme.

And of course, the ultimate non-binary speculative fiction example is Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Which you should definitely read if you haven't, given your current project.

I think a lot of it comes down to the sheer level of obnoxiousness it gets when it comes to presenting these woke sidebars. We've had these sorts of things in RPG's for fucking decades now, it's just always been presented in a more tasteful manner that didn't treat the reader like they were in danger of joining the Reich any moment without the sidebar to save them.

Deadlands for example always had a small sidebar that explained Racism and Prejudice may be historical, but in Deadlands it's the domain of Villains only, and thanks to the Supernatural changes to history women and minorities were allowed to do everything White men were.

I think it would be less of an issue if these warnings were simply, "Don't be a Dick. Racism, Sexism, and Prejudice shouldn't be present at your table...and should only be present in your game if your players are comfortable with it, and want to engage with it. Otherwise leave the real world baggage at the door, enjoy the game and be excellent to each other."

I remember playing in a homebrew pbem game "Majestic 12" where the PCs were government agents in 1950s America, investigating the paranormal with the aid of super-science. My PC got a bunch of extra build points for taking the disadvantages of being black and female.

So I was a bit surprised when we drove into a white Southern town on our first case, and the locals treated me just like everyone else.