Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 03:23:56 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PM

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

No 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?

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.

Yeah, no multiverses, IDGAFF about D&D's different settings, especially BECAUSE they are a multiverse not really different settings.

IPs dominate the market BECAUSE it's what the market wants, how are you gonna fix that? Force people to buy/play/reads/whatever different stuff?

You have a creative brain, write up the setting for a totally not SST RPG, I bet there's lots of developers waiting to get their hands on something like that. But that's lore and you hate lore.

Here, go read Armaggedon 2419 AD and the sequel Airlords of Han, then use that as the starting point for your own lore, it's public domain. Add whatever you want to, power armor included.

That's where Buck Rogers got it's start, but while Buck is Copyrighted the original novel is public domain, expand on it, add more enemies, aliens, bugs, whatever, add space travel for the humans. Boom you have a setting for RPGs with lots of room to play in, WITHOUT multiverse bullshit, the party jumps on a ship and goes to a different planet, where the sentients aren't the same as in the last planet.

I'm working on a game with THAT characteristic, where you can play in different planets, but it's set in the past, not the future, it's the future as it never was from the 1920s-1930s point of view.

Quote from: cavalier973 on May 14, 2024, 03:25:33 PMWho is "Double-D"?

Ah...it's the "Diversity & Dragons" host

I'm sorry, but this entire argument over "lore" is stupid.  Because there's no such thing as "lore" in an RPG.  There are only setting conceits and background information.

Roleplaying works best when players can get immersed in their characters.  When they can think like their characters would in the situations their characters find themselves in, that is when "roleplaying" happens.  And this is often dependent on the player's understanding the setting well enough to make informed choices with proper evaluation of possible consequences.  That requires an understanding of the setting and its conceits (basic assumptions).  And background information (i.e., the history of the setting, the cultures of the setting, the past and present conflicts, etc.) help provide context, models, motivations, and examples of what does happen in the setting when X does Y. So-called "lore" only exists as a tool to allow players to understand the setting and its conflicts, such that they can make decisions because of this.  If the last king to raise a demon ended up causing a continent-wide apocalypse, the local villagers will look upon your attempts to raise a demon differently than if the rich and powerful use demons every day to do their housework. It's one of the reasons so many WotC campaigns turn into "modern day Seattle with swords";  these asshats don't have the knowledge, worldbuilding, or talent to competently express a fictional world such that they can provide enough suspension of disbelief for players to effectively roleplay in their settings!  It's also one of the reasons I've always said that "modern" settings are the crutch of weak role-players and DMs. If you have to fall back on modern expectations to buoy your  setting, you've failed as a worldbuilder.

So, sorry BCT, but whining about the (mis)use of lore and "IP" is a fundamental misunderstanding of what roleplaying is and how you do it.  A game that provides lots of hooks for players is a good game (and setting).  And what you call "lore" is one of the fundamental methods of doing so.  Where "lore" becomes a problem is when it saps the agency and choices of the players (a la DM-PC or metanarrative the world must follow).  Of course, Vampire does this, because it's a terrible game made by terrible people whose primary motivation was LARPing all of their social and sexual fetishes with tween girls.  The problem isn't the "lore"; it's the fact that the lore is both useless and counterproductive to roleplaying anything but a perv and sex-pest.

And this is why the female Astartes is a bridge too far.  Part of the setting conceits of WH40K is the way that humanity has needed to become something different (and arguably less than human) in order to survive.  It's not the right place for "representation."  It jars many players out of the setting when the happy, lesbian girl-boss sweeps in to save the day.  That's not WH40K.  So, where the "lore" in WH40K makes it harder to immerse yourself (due to contradicting what you as a player have internalized to help you understand the setting and place), it is stupid and wrong.  Lots of other minor details have been changed in the setting that produce no outcry, primarily because those changes didn't contradict something vital to the ability to immerse the player.  And lots of changes having nothing to do with modern politics have seen 40K players lose their minds, because it affected the tenor of the setting in ways that broke immersion.  It's just that modern woke people are so fucking narrow and talentless that they can't even hide their "message" enough to allow people to still immerse themselves in the setting.  They demand you come back to reality to pledge your allegiance!  Were I woke, I'd be embarrassed that my side was obviously so devoid of talent and intelligence that the best they could conjure was this.  But, hey, I guess if they were self-aware, they couldn't be woke!

Quote from: Corolinth on May 14, 2024, 09:02:09 AM

Quote from: Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick on May 12, 2024, 04:58:33 PM

Quote 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.

Exactly!  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: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 02:35:51 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2024, 01:07:42 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 13, 2024, 01:35:07 AM

QuoteI 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.

I love Darkman. (Haven't seen The Crow. ) I just don't put it in the same category as "Superhero".

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.

Yes. That's why I said *If you squint really hard*. Mostly because superheroes as a genre can include other stuff. Marvel in the 80's ripped of The Terminator (Cable) and Alien (The Brood) So you could argue that X-Men is a Sci Fi and/or Horror comic. But I think at that point the genre categories are pretty much useless. 
I could argue if Punisher is a superhero, why not John Rambo? They're both pretty similar characters. Military veterans who had a traumatic experience and went rogue.

I have had great luck finding games to join at my local game store. They have a bulletin board and it is easy to see what games to avoid. I might be lucky though.

Who is "Double-D"?

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PM

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

No 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?

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: 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.

That's true. There are a lot of actual predators hiding in their ranks. Like, a lot. And anime fans have been keeping a running record of assholes that attack us, calling us 'pedophiles' for liking anime, so we have an archive of all the various scum that have eventually been outed as actual predators/sex pests that routinely attack anime. It's like the slime at the UN attacking us and then going apeshit cause many of us reminded them their organization has 'peacekeepers' that run organized kidnap/rape rings in conflict zones.

But I will say that its been hilarious to watch how most of their BS blows up in their face cause they're tourists that didn't get filtered/gatekept out of anime (sadly). They're the worst aspects of the same slime that have invaded RPGs, but at least anime for the moment has hentai (or stuff that's extremely close like ecchi) that will filter them. Its partly why I think nude art should make a comeback for RPGs. If nothing else, it will chase off the undesirables. At least some of the OSR crowd embrace that, and its always worth a chuckle at watching the same old suspects sputter and shriek about Frazetta-inspired art.

Funniest goddamn thing I ever saw was dumbass 'art fixer' on Twitter who took the cover of an issue for the collected manga for fantasy-isekai Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World (which is cutting it so close to hentai as to be razor thin in the difference). The character Sherry (a dwarf sex slave who looks more like a small Elf) was wearing an obvious bodystocking colored dark, so the midwit decided she had obviously been whitewashed by the American studio that did the translation. So she 'fixed' her to be black. All the while not knowing the first damn thing about the series, until it promptly detonated in her face.

Hi Folks, there seems to be at least some fans of Big Geek Emporium around here. Certainly some linking to it.
They appear to be down -- i.e. they only have like 3 products up. Looks like a significant site crash/error. Anyone have any inside info?

I put up my games a few months ago and got one sale of most of them, which was nice.