I don't know what the critics are saying because as someone who really liked the Marvel superhero movies  at first, I checked out around the time of Ant Man.

I feel like the genre was beaten into the ground and the Marvel films started to all look the same and retread the same story beats. I stuck around for Endgame, which I think was a complete wet fart of a wrap up to the story they had been building. After that, I stopped watching.

So yeah, Madame Web could be a great movie, but I'm super saturated with the Marvel Disney stuff, and only have an opinion and comment because I did like the "first wave" of their stuff.

"People who want to destroy civilization identify with fantasy destroyers of civilization." News at 11.

These people aren't happy until the things that make D&D fun have been destroyed and replaced with their personal ideologies.
And WOTC agrees with them.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 13, 2024, 11:39:02 PMMagic that attempted to spontaneously create life (homunculi, for example) was banned by the church.

Of all the laws mentioned, this is the only one with which I wasn't familiar. Do you have a source so I can read the law myself? The subject is of interest to me.

Unfounded assumptions, personal anecdotes probably embellished, straw men. It's a cheap and lazy hit piece.

Exactly.

When you confront the fans about it, they get irrationally defensive. I once tried suggesting to CoD fans to use point buy a la GURPS (or more specifically Everlasting) to keep splats balanced against each other for mixed splat play, and they told me that's bad because having good crossover rules would ruin the distinct vibes each splat is going for. Oh, and they admit they've never played any games other than CoD. They completely refuse to acknowledge any constructive criticism of the rules and settings.

For example, power creep is a huge problem with the splats. IIRC a starting vampire or werewolf with the right build can lift a car for a few seconds, while a starting geist can telekinetically lift all the the cars on a street. Another example is the Coils of the Dragon are basically worthless. They either give weak highly situational benefits or provide "solutions" to "problems" that are already easily avoidable.

I get that CoD has gotten tons of bad faith criticism ever since it first released. It still gets irrational hate from butthurt WoD fans, even though it's been cancelled for years and has fallen into such obscurity that new fans all go into WoD and are only aware of CoD by its reputation as "that sucky bad game with no lore" (this is completely wrong btw). But not all the criticism was bad faith.

I get that Justin Achilli wanted the vampires to be depowered to the point where vampire hunters are a credible threat, but a better way to accomplish that would've been to have vampires get worse curses as their powers increased such that vampire hunters could take advantage of to compensate for being only human. Not to mention that you could make the vampire hunters into outright superheroes to compensate. I don't care that would go against the "vibe," that emo goth vibe is not why I'm interested in urban fantasy.

This is a roleplaying game, not limited by a tv budget. I want the vampires to be supervillains. I want the Ordo Dracul to have drugs that can let vampires walk in sunlight for hours at a time, not let them survive a few seconds longer against dawn light specifically. Make it costly to manufacture or inflict some other drawback for the sake of game balance, I guess, but make it worth spending XP on.

Of course that's not gonna happen because the game is cancelled, and I don't expect Curseborn to be any good. God, it sucks to be an urban fantasy fan in the tabletop scene. d20 Urban Arcana has been dead since 2008 and nobody has tried to recapture its setting.

Double post, sorry.

Quote from: RPGPundit on Today at 06:10:43 AMAgain, the only forms of magic that were forbidden were ones that touched directly on other laws or rules of the Crown or Church. Things like enchantment, necromancy, trying to create (artificial) life, curses or other forms of witchcraft etc.

Of course if your magical investigations led you to conclusions that were contrary to whatever the rather malleable positions of the Church were at any given time, you could find yourself executed for it, but the same was true of people who did the same with hard science.

And again, for the entirety of the middle ages until the Renaissance really got into gear, the vast majority of magicians in Christian Europe were Catholic monks or priests.

Ok, but how common were magicians?

At a 30,000 foot overview, those practicing magic in Europe were very rare and almost always persecuted as heretics if they weren't doing it under the direct supervision of the church.  Sure, there are exceptions but there wasn't anything along the lines of "court wizard." 

Magic practitioners in Europe were about as rare and controlled as nuclear reactors are today in the US.  Sure, they exist but less than one percent of the population have actually seen one from the outside, let alone directly interacted with one.

Compare that to just about any other place in the world outside of Christendom or the Islamic Caliphates.  Practitioners of mystic arts were just part of the tapestry of daily life.  Particularly renowned magicians were elevated to regional or national level power in their field but shaman, medicine men, witch doctors, etc. were available to most people.

This article is an excellent reminder of Why We Fight.  It's bad enough when freaks like this take over a hobby -- what if they take over the world?

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