Quote from: yosemitemike on Today at 05:49:10 AMI gave up trying to run WoD by the rules in the book after a handful of sessions. I spent a lot of the 90s hand-waving it. I ran 6 or 7 campaigns of various flavors of WoD. I never actually ran it in the sense of using the rules as written.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 12:54:50 PMCheck out Frank Trollman's Anatomy of Failed Design series to see what I mean. He writes several articles where he explains that the rules are unplayable as written and the groups who "played" ignored the rules anyway in favor of fiat or whatever.
This even extended to the CoD groups. They used fiat rather than even reading the rules. This notably resulted in things like groups not knowing basic facts about CoD vamps, like that they can identify other vamps on sight. I vaguely remember arguing with bad faith critics about it in the 2000s.
QuoteAnd soon the Tolkienesque template of D&D began to chafe, as did the varied inheritors of Tolkien's literary imaginings. (The other great influence on D&D's world-building, Robert E. Howard, especially his Conan works, held no appeal for me whatsoever, as there was no beauty, no grace, no romance—just blood, brutality, butchery, and overt racism.) As much as I loved Middle-earth, it was still a world where lordship was borne in the blood, where inheriting country gentry were served faithfully by loving and dutiful servants, of the uncertain triumph of "Western civilization" over the dark and fallen peoples who stood against it. And while Tolkien's orcs and their filmic, gaming, and media iterations have been shaped by and expanded on savagist anti-Black and anti-Asian stereotypes, they're also informed by stereotypical ideas about Indigenous primitivism (as are his Drúedain, the reclusive Woses who aid the Rohirrim on their way to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields).
Quote from: cavalier973 on May 15, 2024, 07:03:48 AMI thought the cartoon characters were officially in the Forgotten Realms. Have they moved to Greyhawk?