Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 03:23:56 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PMNo multiverses, eh? What exactly would you call the plethora of official campaign settings for D&D? Much less all the 3pp settings? What would you call Chronicles of Darkness? What would you call GURPS?Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.
I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.
Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.
Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.
Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.
The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.
That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.
But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.
As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.
I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.
But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.
I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics
I'm sick and tired of some dead boomer's stagnant IP dominating [insert genre here] for decades on end, strangling alternatives, and then shitting the bed. It's not going to kill you if somebody makes a game with more than one setting. The game police are not gonna break into your house and burn the books you already bought for that game you liked.
Like, One Page Rules is releasing its own setting books, but nobody is forcing you to use their setting. The setting isn't baked into the rules. You could write a lot of settings using the same rules. (Also, I heard the writer is a furry who can't help but write the furry races as heroic persecuted minorities, so there's that.)
Worldbuilding isn't a one-size-fits-all. The SST tabletop miniatures game has been out of print for decades, the books were pulled from Drivethru due to losing the license, and there's no alternatives that I know of. One Page Rules Grimdark Future is a pastiche of 40k and doesn't have any army comparable to the Federation, the Skinnies or the Arachnids. This is a good example of how 40k's dominance is detrimental to the hobby as a whole. It actively reduces the amount of creativity and diversity of ideas in the genre.
Federation marines are not religious roided up supersoldiers. They're space Muricans in powered armor. The Arachnids are not just tyranids with a different coat of paint: a brain bug is completely different from a hive tyrant, in the original novel they use conventional technology instead of psionics and biotech, in the OOP ttrpg one of the castes was literally a cockroach used for espionage like that scene in The Fifth Element, etc. The Skinnies... I don't even know what their shtick was besides breathing methane. There's no shortage of other OOP scifi miniatures games with neat ideas that got forgotten.
Apparently OPR has an army builder that supports custom armies but you have to pay a fee to see it, so I have no comment on that.
Quote from: cavalier973 on May 14, 2024, 03:25:33 PMWho is "Double-D"?
Quote from: Corolinth on May 14, 2024, 09:02:09 AMExactly! I don't have ass-burgers, nor do I have ADHD, so what relevance does that have to me? If you are making a statement about the (near) universal appeal of something, or the objective qualities of certain things, starting it up your own ass isn't the most effective way to do so. Tell me something I don't know about RPGs, not you...Quote from: Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick on May 12, 2024, 04:58:33 PMQuote from: Corolinth on May 12, 2024, 04:57:42 PMI tried to watch this, because I understand the appeal of Studio Ghibli, but as soon as the chode started talking about his ADHD and his ass burgers, I'm done.
If that pissed you off, there's more where that came from!
Disinterest is more accurate than anger. It lets me know the vlogger is a useless poon with nothing to say.
Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 02:35:51 AMQuote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2024, 01:07:42 PMQuote from: Omega on May 13, 2024, 01:35:07 AMQuoteI never understood classifying Darkman as a superhero movie. It's like saying Evil Dead 2 is a superhero movie. Kinda, sorta, maybe if you squint and broaden the definitions to their maximum.
er. The Darkman movie about the scientist who is disfigured and fights crime using synthetic skin to disguise himself as different people?
Thats like claiming Batman isnt a superhero because he has no superpowers?
Darkman is a deranged psychopath. He doesn't fight crime. He wants cruel and bloody revenge on the specific criminals who caused his situation. Even at their worst, "dark and gritty" superheroes like Batman or Punisher still have some kind of code of morals and a goal to help people. Darkman is just some poor guy's ID run rampant. If anything, he has a lot more in common with supervillians.
Agreed but then... Isn't The Crow the same? He's NOT fighting criminals, hes getting cruel and bloody revenge on those who killed him and his fiance.
And I looooove them both.
QuoteFurthermore, isn't Batman, Punisher, The Executioner (especially those who do kill) just extending his revenge to ALL criminals? Just playing devils advocate here but you could make THAT argument and not be 100% wrong.
Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PMNo multiverses, eh? What exactly would you call the plethora of official campaign settings for D&D? Much less all the 3pp settings? What would you call Chronicles of Darkness? What would you call GURPS?Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.
I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.
Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.
Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.
Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.
The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.
That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.
But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.
As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.
I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.
But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.
I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics
Quote from: honeydipperdavid on May 14, 2024, 11:17:14 AMMillennials are the problem, they have faggotized a large enough group of males that if conflict kicks off, they will have to be dealt with.