Quote from: Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick on April 17, 2024, 02:21:58 PM

Quote from: Omega on April 13, 2024, 11:46:14 PMBemusingly I went practically the opposite.

I found BX alot more user friendly and the "make it your own" nearly blank setting" was a brilliant idea that AD&D should have tried as well. Iver the decades I've had an easier time getting players into D&D with BX.

I Dabbled a little with BECMI and while the intros are great. The overall system just felt too stretched out.

I'm thinking of making an rpg where the gm can generate a setting with dice. I appreciate the idea of having free-reign to make a setting your own, but some people like to have more guidance and structure. It's all down to personal taste.

I've got a section like that in my system. It states upfront that should freely ignore any rolls you dislike or outright pick something if you have a preference, but it does allow you to roll up an entire region randomly including realms and dungeons within said region if you're feeling particularly uninspired.

It's a tool, not a rule.

Quote from: oggsmash on April 27, 2024, 09:47:27 AMYeah it is really strange to me people with the money for IP and good artists seemed to have lost the account numbers when it came time to hire a game designer for a system.

My experience with RPGs based on licensed IPs is that, unless the IP itself is fairly moribund (ex. WEG licensed the Star Wars IP in 1987) the main concern isn't actually to create a good game, it's to cash in on a hot IP.

Good art is more valuable than good rules because fans of the IP will often pick up things like a slick-looking book with no intention of ever actually playing the game.

Paying for good game design is just an unneeded expense when that's your goal.

By contrast, doing a game based on a moribund IP is generally going to be a labor of love because the designer wants to play in a setting they're personally a fan of and so will care more about the rules properly reflecting the setting.

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is a good guideline I've found.

Quote from: Thor's Nads on April 27, 2024, 12:10:21 AMThanks.
Yeah, the hard part of running a tower adventure in a world where magic flying exists is controlling the ways in and out. Players love to skip all the stuff the DM prepared.

Yeah.  At this point I am making a lot of it up as I go.  I am going to do some preparing and I have the basic idea of the adventure planned out.

It used to drive me crazy when players skipped area but as I have improved as a DM, I don't care anymore.   Much of the time they are missing Money, Jewels and other valuable items and they just hurt themselves.

Yeah it is really strange to me people with the money for IP and good artists seemed to have lost the account numbers when it came time to hire a game designer for a system.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on April 27, 2024, 08:01:01 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on April 23, 2024, 08:26:40 AMIf I could obliterate one OWoD game line so it never existed I'd nuke... Werewolf. But if I had a second, that would be Mage (honestly, with time, I've realized that lorewise the WoD peaked with Hunter's Hunted 1e and everything else with the exception of adding dhampirs has been downhill).

Werewolf does suck in that its an eco-terrorist Progtard's wet dream. I liked Mage, but The Traditions are just 100% wrong. I'm not saying The Technocracy are right, but FFS, the neurotic, bong juice swilling, crystal-waving hippie sexual deviant asswipes in the Traditions are just so fucking stupid. That and you had morons claiming Nikola Tesla (who is really The Godfather of the 20th Century) was an Aetherite.

The only time the damn game made ANY sense was when they declared 'The Technocracy won'. The Ascension War was stupid and bringing it back into play did nothing but make the game developers look like Neo-Luddites.

Mage is fundamentally Woke (Mages are even called The Awakened), which is to say Gnostic, with the underlying concept that if you believe something enough then it is true. It's literally trans-ideology before it got mainstreamed.

Similarly, it is the Sleepers' collective beliefs that most stand in the way of your beliefs becoming truly real. For the woke it is the oppressors (i.e. anyone who doesn't believe in their mental illness) who are preventing utopia (and for the Gnostic it is the masses ensnared by the Demiurge's lies that keep the enlightened from achieving their godhood).

Woke, Gnosticism, and Mage all feed from the same original lie... "You can be God."

The World of Darkness in general also suffers from the problem of having existed long enough for its rebel ideologies to become the establishment, but are unable to let go of the Revolution to see they've actually become the bad guys. The Leftwing nuttery that in the 90's focused on "tolerance and freedom from the establishment" has now reached the point where it now requires intolerance of other ideas and tyranny by the establishment to maintain.

But they won't let the natural rebels actually rebel against the real modern establishment, instead they must rebel even further into Leftist nuttery and maintain the fiction that it is still the 90's establishment and it's ideals who are in charge (ex. Vampire 5e has introduced the 2nd Inquisition backed by Religious and Rightwing elements because they can't have the Totalitarian Left as the villains).

And so they flounder because the underlying structure of their setting has no truth to it anymore. It's collapsed into the same late-stage Marxist hell that every institution which embraces it does. It can't understand that anti-establishment rebellion is now rebellion against them.

But yes, Werewolf should die first because without it's stupid we'd never have gotten to Mage and the other bad ideas (for context, prior to WtA the WoD setting was reasonably coherent and had an objective reality, the Lupines were savage beasts in the wilds akin to folklore, what became Mages were practitioners of various numina; magic paths, psychics, true faith; ghosts, fae, and demons were mysterious otherworldly entities... in contrast to defined playable factions with their own New Age/Gnosticism to push).

Quote from: Chris24601 on April 23, 2024, 08:26:40 AMIf I could obliterate one OWoD game line so it never existed I'd nuke... Werewolf. But if I had a second, that would be Mage (honestly, with time, I've realized that lorewise the WoD peaked with Hunter's Hunted 1e and everything else with the exception of adding dhampirs has been downhill).

Werewolf does suck in that its an eco-terrorist Progtard's wet dream. I liked Mage, but The Traditions are just 100% wrong. I'm not saying The Technocracy are right, but FFS, the neurotic, bong juice swilling, crystal-waving hippie sexual deviant asswipes in the Traditions are just so fucking stupid. That and you had morons claiming Nikola Tesla (who is really The Godfather of the 20th Century) was an Aetherite.

The only time the damn game made ANY sense was when they declared 'The Technocracy won'. The Ascension War was stupid and bringing it back into play did nothing but make the game developers look like Neo-Luddites.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on April 26, 2024, 07:20:52 PMEven Ungoliant's a bit ambiguous as it's unclear if she is even apart of Arda and Eru's design or if she is some sort of byproduct of Malkor's corruption of reality.

The best theory is that she and Tom Bombadil were creations of The Music of the Ainur, specifically Ungoliant is the Discord of Melkor. Probably also the Nameless Things that Gandalf encountered below Moria while chasing Durin's Bane were of the same sort. Also The Watcher in the Water in the lake created by damming the Sirranon as well. Tom would be The Music given form,

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 27, 2024, 03:41:46 AMThat one in the back there is a woman.  Okay, but who even gives a shit?  What difference does it make?  None.

Thank you for the inch.

https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/03/warhammer-40k-the-emperor-is-genderqueer-and-4-other-major-reveals-from-the-end-and-the-death-volume-1.html

Quote from: Venka on April 26, 2024, 01:57:30 AMAnd there's no way that's a smart call in the long term, and yet, that's what so very many companies are doing.  Why create "brand unembassadors" or whatever?  How does that help?

The thing is that the entire business is completely pointless. 


That one in the back there is a woman.  Okay, but who even gives a shit?  What difference does it make?  None.

The 2d20 system falls utterly flat for me, for whatever reason it just fails to click in a good way for me and I can't precisely pinpoint why.  SW feels better to me as a system to such a degree that I'd rather do something like Fallout hacked into SW than try to play a Modiphius book custom-written for the setting.  I'll grant that Modiphius has top-notch art and overall presentation, but that's all just icing on the cake.  A snazzy book doesn't make up for middling mechanics.