Quote from: Mistwell on May 30, 2024, 04:25:16 PMAlt DMG cover is Lloth

I thought the purpose of the alternate cover was to make you want to buy it, too?

That cover is trash.

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2024, 04:03:17 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 30, 2024, 03:05:44 PM

Quote from: Dracones on May 30, 2024, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on May 28, 2024, 08:47:22 AMAnd if I correctly recall the discussion at 5E's launch, this was intended to be common for more experienced players--Levels 1 and 2 were meant as 'training levels' for players new to the system, and to go by very quickly.

Yeah. 5e basically "starts" at 3rd level. It's one of 5e's design issues. The game doesn't do well for high level play(not a problem limited to 5e) and then they killed the starter levels. So you have this very narrow band of the game, levels 3-7 or so where the game actually functions well.

That was close to my experience with 5e too. We blazed through levels 1-2 with barely a pause. I then enjoyed running the game from levels 3-9, but by 10-11 it was nowhere near as much fun, and we stopped just after hitting level 12.

That was also my experience. I recently ended my 5E campaign at level 9.

On the other hand, it was similar for me with AD&D decades ago. Characters felt unwieldy to me at the upper levels. There were less special abilities in the AD&D rules, but by then each character would have a dozen or more magic items - and spellcasters were juggling dozens of spells. One of the things I liked about 5E was toning down the extent of magic items.

Funny, I've got 3+ years playing AD&D2e disregarding stuff like perpetual light/darkness stones (which we can easily craft) we have about 3 magical items each.

Which makes me think your experience with it is more of a GM problem than a game problem. Meaning the GM was handing out way too much magic items to the players. Something a GM can also do in 5e.

As for the spells, not having played 5e but from what I've seen casters will have about the same number of spells to "juggle".

But in AD&D2e there's no power creep by way of feats and other shit that 5e has.

Don't get me wrong I dislike the magic system of D&D in general, it makes no sense to me that you have to re-memorize a spell, it should work more like Harry Potter, once you know the spell you know it and can spam it, which creates a different problem for "balance" reasons. There have been different attempts at solving this, magic points, random roll to se if you cast successfully, etc.

Alt DMG cover is Lloth

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 30, 2024, 03:05:44 PM

Quote from: Dracones on May 30, 2024, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on May 28, 2024, 08:47:22 AMAnd if I correctly recall the discussion at 5E's launch, this was intended to be common for more experienced players--Levels 1 and 2 were meant as 'training levels' for players new to the system, and to go by very quickly.

Yeah. 5e basically "starts" at 3rd level. It's one of 5e's design issues. The game doesn't do well for high level play(not a problem limited to 5e) and then they killed the starter levels. So you have this very narrow band of the game, levels 3-7 or so where the game actually functions well.

That was close to my experience with 5e too. We blazed through levels 1-2 with barely a pause. I then enjoyed running the game from levels 3-9, but by 10-11 it was nowhere near as much fun, and we stopped just after hitting level 12.

That was also my experience. I recently ended my 5E campaign at level 9.

On the other hand, it was similar for me with AD&D decades ago. Characters felt unwieldy to me at the upper levels. There were less special abilities in the AD&D rules, but by then each character would have a dozen or more magic items - and spellcasters were juggling dozens of spells. One of the things I liked about 5E was toning down the extent of magic items.

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2024, 11:56:21 PMTo clarify, I am opposed to MORAL relativism. I do not believe that different moral system are all equivalent, and that we cannot judge people from a different system....  However, I think relativism is fine to apply to things like beauty and taste.

Well, who cares?  I know that narcissistic personality disorder goes hand-in-hand with being woke, but you are not the arbiter of what qualities are relative and which aren't.  Bluntly, your opinion doesn't matter.  Either "racism" is a term with an objective meaning that can be directly demonstrated, or it can't.  The same holds true for "beauty."  Daniel Justice claims that he had no love for Conan stories because there was no beauty in them.  The "to me" refers to the appeal, not the beauty.  He states the lack of beauty as if it is a factual statement, the same way he does the racism.  So either both are objective and factual, or they both aren't.  And that you want to dodge this inconsistency is irrelevant to whether or not it is inconsistent.  So, no, I reject your separation of the two elements.

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2024, 11:56:21 PMI'll try to clarify that "race essentialism" is the unscientific belief that race is more important than it is in reality. It often overlaps with racism but there could be some distinction.

Except that's not a "clarification" at all, without delineating what "important" means in this context and describing what reality you are referring to.  Is race "important" in medicine?  Is it important in jurisprudence?  In education?  Much of what people today term as race is in fact a product of culture, as most behaviors (outside of well-know instances like addiction and schizophrenia) have little to no genetic determinants.  So, unless you can clearly define "racial essentialism," it's nothing more than a subjective dodge.

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2024, 11:56:21 PMI think your classic definition of racism is fine, and I'll try to stick to it in my arguments regarding "The Last White Man".

Once again, who cares?  You do not define the limits of conversation here, and that story (which I have not read and have no intention of reading) has nothing to do with my original questions.  Justice used REH's Conan stories as his argument, and asserted that they held no beauty, grace, or romance.  This is an objective assertion (once again, the to me refers to the "appeal").  Is this assertion correct?

I understand that you dare not contradict Justice, otherwise the woke left will cast you out like garbage, but that is the topic of this discussion.  Your evaluation of what is or isn't moral, what is or isn't subjective, etc. really doesn't matter.  I reject the idea that you could act as an authority on morality, anyway, based on your own admissions on this site.  Quite frankly, it's not about you, or what you think, you value, or you believe.  It's about Justice's statement about the Conan stories and their influence on D&D.  Now, is Justice correct, is he accurately describing D&D, or is he wrong?

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2024, 02:18:31 PMIt explicitly says "when they slew white men, progress ceased". That differentiates the races by their capacity for progress. Why wouldn't the black people make weapons and weapon factories for themselves, if they were capable? 

But it doesn't differentiate the races by their capacity for progress. Let's not forget that whites still exist at that point. Why aren't they still progressing? Because everyone is focused on the global war. It doesn't strike me as realistic - in real world wars, military technology improved greatly. But that's how it is in this story - when things kick off, nobody progresses any more.

As to why they didn't create new factories, the story isn't clear. But you can't just create them out of nothing. The infrastructure to smelt iron, extract industrial levels of coal, move it by rail, etc., takes a long time to create, and the various components support each other. It took Europe centuries to reach that level. If war has decimated that infrastructure, it's not going to be easily or quickly replaced. Maybe the real reason is the REH was racist, and thought that blacks were incapable. But the story is not overt in pointing that out, which was your claim.

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2024, 02:18:31 PMYou argue later that "animal-like rate of birth" is intended as a positive, but can you really suggest anyone - black or white - who would take kindly to be complimented on their group's "animal-like rate of birth"?

It doesn't strike me as less kind than:

Quote from: R.E. HowardAnd the white race was exhausted by dissipation; birth rate almost ceased.

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2024, 02:18:31 PMMore generally, is there any story or game that you do consider racist? For example, Eirikrautha earlier suggested he thought The Birth of a Nation (1915) was racist. Alternately, GeekyBugle cited Coyote & Crow (2022) as racist. Could you demonstrate your standard of proof in showing how something fulfills it?

I've never watched that film or read/played that RPG, but from what I've heard of them, they sound racist. I'm not going to watch a 3-hour film over an Internet debate, but a quick search gave me this from C&C:

QuoteIf you do not have heritage Indigenous to the Americas, we ask you not to incorporate any of your knowledge or ideas of real world Native Americans into the game.

That's racist. They're asking that people refrain from doing things based on their race. No heritage indigenous to the Americas, but an expert on it? Pretend you're not. A little bit of heritage, but all you know you gleaned from watching a couple of westerns? Go ahead. That's overt racism.

Quote from: jhkim on May 29, 2024, 01:05:18 PMJust because someone comes from a communist society, that doesn't mean that they're not communist. They're still a communist - it's just that their reasons for being communist should be considered to fully understand them. The same applies for racism.

If I read a story and don't know who the author is or when it was written, I can still describe it objectively and factually using words, including "racism".

 Tell that to the Solidarity movement in Poland during the Cold War. Or the Order of the White Rose in Germany, students who opposed Nazis in their own country. They were opposed to communism and Nazism in their respective countries and were in no way, shape or form communists or Nazis. You made a blanket statement that holds no water.

Same goes for racism. you can live in a racists society, but it doesn't make you a racist. And people speak out against it. Ya know, like repealing Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement of the 60s.

If someone uses racism as part of the story, including characters who reflect that, it does not make the author racist, unless that author explicitly states they are IRL (people can also change over time too). I'd think the author of Lovecraft Country and Spielberg about Schiendler's List would agree. There are many more I could cite, but I'm sure you could find more.

I'm done. Have a nice day.

I now eagerly await seeing how you'll move the goal posts.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 30, 2024, 02:10:12 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 30, 2024, 05:09:43 AMDisney got on one of the LARP forums and asked alot of questions about LARPing and we answered as best we could.

We called it that they were planning some manner of interactive park. And not long after the interview Disney filed a patent on some LARP-like tech. And sure enough a few years later and SW: Galaxies is announced.

I wanted to go see it and the starship but alas that was never to be.

Take note in the review how she had so many problems with things going awry.

They could have made it work. Star Tours ran as a semi-interactive ride for decades.

There's a huge difference between a single contained ride where all the employees had to do was load you into/out of theatre boxes where you watch one of a handful of slightly interactive films vs dozens of employees pulling off multiple lines of extended LARPing.

Quote from: Dracones on May 30, 2024, 09:42:50 AM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on May 28, 2024, 08:47:22 AMAnd if I correctly recall the discussion at 5E's launch, this was intended to be common for more experienced players--Levels 1 and 2 were meant as 'training levels' for players new to the system, and to go by very quickly.

Yeah. 5e basically "starts" at 3rd level. It's one of 5e's design issues. The game doesn't do well for high level play(not a problem limited to 5e) and then they killed the starter levels. So you have this very narrow band of the game, levels 3-7 or so where the game actually functions well.

That was close to my experience with 5e too. We blazed through levels 1-2 with barely a pause. I then enjoyed running the game from levels 3-9, but by 10-11 it was nowhere near as much fun, and we stopped just after hitting level 12.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 30, 2024, 02:37:51 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 30, 2024, 02:18:31 PMI'm going to focus on just the first passage here.

Quote from: R.E. HowardThe black race was doomed. They were destroyers, not builders. When they slew the white men, progress ceased. The blacks reverted to savagery. They did not even know the art of making weapons. They had destroyed and could not rebuild. And they were going back to bestial savagery, and to a slaughtering of one another which even their animal-like rate of birth could not control.

QUOTE FROM A CHARACTER IN A STORY WRITTEN BY ROBERT E HOWARD YOU LYING PIECE OF SHIT!!

What the fuck! Is every character a writer creates now a stand-in for the writer? Is every character or non-player character you roleplay in a game now actually just you?

Only the ones written by the wrong kind of people, since he engages in passionate defense of shit like Coyote & Crow, both claiming it's not racist and the author isn't either.

But in C&C the "diversity", as soon as the Huwhite Devil is extinct engages in cumbaya and reaches a utopia.