Quote from: Opaopajr;760024Considering I had zero expectations for Yu Gi Oh! and Kaijudo and Vanguard, as they came long after the CCG bubble, it is quite valid that one can still make it.

Kaijudo is the ressurrected corpse of an older game. Try 2. With cartoon.

Yu-gi-oh is still chugging away because its multimedia and got its start on the crest of the CCG wave.

Chaotic or Rokugan are better examples as they came out well after the bubble burst and which are still going last check.

A handfull in the vast ocean of dead CCGs.

Kinda like 1st level wizards. "ow... dead... again... ow..."

Good news, relatively speaking, is that with 5th ed you can still get wiped out.

In my mind, which is a much more awesome place than the world outside of it, the OSR Taliban consists of one loony neckbeard in a bi-plane kamikazing into the WoTC building while clutching hos copy of Game Mastery signed by Gygax in his terrified sweaty palms just before Boom!

PS I dont care if he's a duechebag or that he didnt finish that megadungeon kickstarter, or if he's a hypocrit, I enjoyed reading Grognardia and I miss it. Poseur or not, he was an entertaining writer.

Quote from: estar;759832I view actual play D&D has being skewed to the viewpoint of the PCs. They encounter the above more often because that is the social circle they are part of. They don't deal with the seething masses of peasantry on a day to day basis.

Again because of the modern day we are used to dealing with and knowing about strangers from across the globe. The situation for the D&D setting is one of where a day's travel in any direction is the practical limit for 80% of the populace. With once in a year week long journey. And a once in a decade month long journey.

PCs are the exception because they travel far and encounter at lot of variety.

As far as entry requirement, you could roleplay that like in Ars Magica or Harnmaster Magic but in D&D it can be abstracted by the virtue that you created a character of that class. A wizard PC has had a master, had the connections or luck to become an apprentice, spent the time learning and is now on his own for the first time.

He is part of a loose but privileged class that includes other adventuring types.

And I will stress that the above is only for when the referee wants an explanation, or has a interesting idea that dovetails nicely with the above.

As for me, the social background for the Majestic Wilderlands is two decades worth of extrapolation and actual play based on the premise of the last two posts.  It mostly background noise but I had observant players pick up on it and use it to their advantage. It also served as a source of complications that led to adventures.

It has also checked more industrious players who attempted to ignite the industrial revolution on their own. The main source of frustration is the lack of anybody they can rely on to make industrial revolution happen. The inhabitants just don't GET it. They have little concept of being on time other than sunrise, noon, etc. Or working steady for hours on hours throughout the year. They are burst workers for the most part. They work hard during say harvest or during an emergency. But afterwards it is back to the slow rhythms of the agricultural year. In our history this was overcome by sheer brutality.

In most D&D Settings somebody trying this would be quickly be consider an evil overlord and bring down the ire of the established powers and the interest of adventuring parties.

Yes eventually the magical industrial revolution will happen and it will work exactly like the distractors say it would with unlimited iron and all that. But the typical D&D setting is set in the time before that with centuries to go before circumstances are right and the intellectual foundation is in place to make it happen.

Along with the fact the player is not willing (or finds it boring) to make his character part of an industrial assembly line.

That is a load of pretty specific setting assumptions.

The Base D&D game makes no claims to be anything like that at all and is at best a vague sketch of a medieval-ish europe-esque hodge podge.

The material provided for the official settings liek Greyhawk and FR doesn't match your proposed design at all.

I can see that IF the world was as you described THEN some of your logical reasoning would be correct but the whole thing would have the logical consistency of a PG Woodhouse novel (Bertie Wooster is constantly meeting people seemingly at random who are associated with or related to his extended family or chaps he went to school with).

Quote from: CRKrueger;759865It's obvious some 1e players touched you in a very bad place indeed.

Nah I played it basically daily through all of high school.

But the "say" of 1e is very much out of kilter with the "show" of 1e.

Logical consistency is just one of my pet peeves (I am the guy that works out where the orc's take a shit and what they eat daily, the guy that likes to ensure that the water catchment area of the valley could indeed lead to the creation of a lake of that size etc etc ).
There is no point saying Magic users are rare if every town has a mage guild and the PCs can learn magic with no need to have found a mentor or attended a college or arcane arts or whatever. If any PC can be a wizard and there is no restriction on any back story they have to have to have been trained as a wizard then anyone can learn to be a wizard, ipso facto wizards are common not rare.
Saying but PCs are "rare" just because they are adventurers is just a fudge that covers up a hole in setting logic.

I would prefer if a setting had a random roll to see if you have magical potential or had much harder % changes to learn each spell (make 15 int a 10% change or something) or had a background requirement that only nobility or people from Blahblah land could choose the wizards path or ... make mages common like they are in normal D&D but accept that and alter the background accordingly.

And again I am not angry with D&D of any stripe. I just don't bother to adopt them as games. I never moved to 3e because it was quite obvious from cracking the first set of books open that is was a game of system mastery and I am not a fan of system mastery. Its true over time we altered a lot of the 1e/2e game to suit our play style but its still D&D. My own heartbreaker goes further and ends up with a game that can't be considered D&D but at its core its as close to D&D as St John's gospel is to St Luke's/

Quote from: TristramEvans;760036In my mind, which is a much more awesome place than the world outside of it, the OSR Taliban consists of one loony neckbeard in a bi-plane kamikazing into the WoTC building while clutching hos copy of Game Mastery signed by Gygax in his terrified sweaty palms just before Boom!

PS I dont care if he's a duechebag or that he didnt finish that megadungeon kickstarter, or if he's a hypocrit, I enjoyed reading Grognardia and I miss it. Poseur or not, he was an entertaining writer.

Nah, JMal was a pompous, small minded little cock who had nothing much of worth to say.

Quote from: Omega;760034Chaotic or Rokugan are better examples as they came out well after the bubble burst and which are still going last check.

Never seen or heard of Chaotic.

But I know my L5R (Rokugan) and that was very much before the bubble burst. To be more precise, Imperial edition (the 1st set) was rather during when Spellfire and On the Edge and the like was floundering and Decipher was up shit's creek with Paramount over Star Trek CCG. By '96-'97 it was reprinting its core, after 3 or so expansions, in Obsidian edition prepping for the Day of Thunder.

'94-'95 was around MtG 3rd ed (a.k.a. Revised) and Fallen Empires, and the mega printing of Jyhad, proved that customers could not absorb so much and FLGSes took it in the pants. The first big crash was pretty much in the following two years as Spellfire, Mythos, etc. implodes while MtG, Netrunner, and Jyhad catches a cold. Oh the heady days of youth...

Quote from: jibbajibba;760056Nah I played it basically daily through all of high school.

But the "say" of 1e is very much out of kilter with the "show" of 1e.

Logical consistency is just one of my pet peeves (I am the guy that works out where the orc's take a shit and what they eat daily, the guy that likes to ensure that the water catchment area of the valley could indeed lead to the creation of a lake of that size etc etc ).
There is no point saying Magic users are rare if every town has a mage guild and the PCs can learn magic with no need to have found a mentor or attended a college or arcane arts or whatever. If any PC can be a wizard and there is no restriction on any back story they have to have to have been trained as a wizard then anyone can learn to be a wizard, ipso facto wizards are common not rare.
Saying but PCs are "rare" just because they are adventurers is just a fudge that covers up a hole in setting logic.

There is an option also that mage rarity increases with level. While apprentice magic users might be as common as other adventurers, those that survive to become high level won't be so common and there might not be even one in every town, much less a guild full of them.

Of course the DM must actually show this in the npc population for it to be true for the campaign.

Quote from: TristramEvans;760036In my mind, which is a much more awesome place than the world outside of it, the OSR Taliban consists of one loony neckbeard in a bi-plane kamikazing into the WoTC building while clutching hos copy of Game Mastery signed by Gygax in his terrified sweaty palms just before Boom!

See the Exploderwizard quote currently dwelling in my signature. I liked it so much I entertained the idea of doing an OSR Taliban video, with demands and shit (and maybe even "executing" a 5enthusiast), and uploading it to Youtube.

Quote from: TristramEvans;760036PS I dont care if he's a duechebag or that he didnt finish that megadungeon kickstarter, or if he's a hypocrit, I enjoyed reading Grognardia and I miss it. Poseur or not, he was an entertaining writer.

Quote from: Fiasco;760069Nah, JMal was a pompous, small minded little cock who had nothing much of worth to say.

He may well be. Nevertheless, the things he did say on that blog had some worth to me, someone who wasn't around in the days of OD&D, B/X and 1e, but helped contextualize some poorly understood reminiscences of my AD&D 2e and BECMI/RC experience.

It was also the first place I read about Appendix N and it got me to track down and read Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Poul Anderson and others I haven't even heard about.

So yeah, whatever his failings as a human being, or his lack of Old School Ideological Purity, JaMal was my first guide into old school D&D and the OSR. You can credit him with at least one "convert". For what I'm worth – I don't even play exclusively old school D&D! But I'm skeptical of 5e, do I count?

Quote from: The Butcher;760077For what I'm worth – I don't even play exclusively old school D&D! But I'm skeptical of 5e, do I count?

To the Inqui5ition, that makes you a ringleader.

Quote from: jibbajibba;760056Nah I played it basically daily through all of high school.

and that's how YOU played.

Quote from: Opaopajr;760071Never seen or heard of Chaotic.

But I know my L5R (Rokugan)

Chaotic is a Swedish CCG/multimedia, 2 cartoon series and an online play version.

Rokugan, ook, mispelled that. Meant, Redakai. The one with the transparent cards. Been a long day. Also multimedia. Though I've not seen the anime.

And that is something the OSR lacks. A cartoon series. :rolleyes:

Quote from: CRKrueger;759946The one with Melnibone and Cthulhu?  I have like 4 of 'em, didn't know they were that rare.

They're not; I had six a couple of summers ago, sold most of 'em off.  I've owned a total of thirteen copies.

People "think" they're rare because of the publication issues, but nobody was ever sued or legally threatened.  Something like 30,000-40,000 copies must've been printed (very likely more) as ten to fifteen thousand are still in existence (estimated).  They're just not rare.  People assign value to them that they just don't have.

D&D doesn't appear to be that expensive for those that want it either.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;760087They're not; I had six a couple of summers ago, sold most of 'em off.  I've owned a total of thirteen copies.

People "think" they're rare because of the publication issues, but nobody was ever sued or legally threatened.  Something like 30,000-40,000 copies must've been printed (very likely more) as ten to fifteen thousand are still in existence (estimated).  They're just not rare.  People assign value to them that they just don't have.

Why have you owned 13 of them?

Quote from: jibbajibba;760096Why have you owned 13 of them?

The sacrificial altar has to be propped up by exactly 13 copies of deities & demigods or dread Cthulhu won't answer.