Yes, but she is still there for another 8 Days.  How much damage can an evil wench do in 8 Days, when she knows she's leaving anyway?

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on April 18, 2024, 11:35:35 AM

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 16, 2024, 10:56:21 PMI mean on the one hand, yeah, some storygames probably aren't RPGs. But I also don't think that everything that's a storygame isn't an RPG, if that makes sense? I basically feel like if it does satisfy immersion in roleplaying a character, and emulation of a living world, and has related game mechanics, then for me it's an rpg even if it has storygaming elements or is arguably a storygame...

Of course there can be degrees, instead of it being a binary yes/no proposition.  However, keep in mind that when reduced to a yes/no proposition, that's short-hand for "did a line get crossed?" 

You can be traveling due North.  You can be traveling mostly North (almost but not quite "due North") but also slightly West (thus no longer truly, actually due North, by definition).  Keep adding more West at the expense of North, eventually you aren't traveling "North" anymore by any reasonable description.  A wag can try to cloud the issue with some sleight of hand about Northwest or North Northwest or West Northwest or Up Down Sideways Northwest or however you want to talk about it. However, all that does when examined clearly is focus on which boundaries are meaningful (or not, as the case may be).

With an RPG, there's a lot more room.  At a bare minimum we have roles, play, and games--which even in their simplest forums are complex by themselves, let alone when they interact in one thing.  Then tack on the actors, audience, the GM, the accounts of what happened, when those accounts are consumed, and any meaning assigned there of.  Oh, and to put the cherry on top, the whole thing is in service to both single person and group imagination.  This is the environment that allows the wag to play semantic games.

You can insert all kinds of things into an RPG at the table that aren't really part of the RPG itself, and it still be (mostly) and RPG.  Heck, they are nearly always social things, with chatter, and food, and generally like a party.  At some point, you put enough of that in, it stops being an RPG and becomes a party.  Same with putting anything else in that isn't about you making a decision as your character or the GM controlling the world's reaction your actions.  That doesn't prove that parties and all that other stuff are RPGs.  It just proves that RPGs are resilient mediums.

So essentially if I read this right, the argument is roughly that storygaming waters down the rpg components of an rpg. To some degree I would concur with that proposition. I do think it can detract from both living world emulation/simulation, and character immersion, for instance. Intuitively, that does make sense to me as something that oftentimes happens.

I guess likewise, though as you say RPGs are a multifaceted experience, and an effective confluence of multiple things each with their own definitions... I think a good rpg doesn't gain much of anything purely rpg related from meta currency mechanics and the like within storygaming, though I guess maybe it could flesh out a particularly weak rpg and make it playable or something.


On the flipside, I feel that as with the North vs West paradigm, unless North has utterly vanished, one is still I guess moving northwards if the northward movement is properly noticeable? I'm not trying to claim that west is north, that is to say, or that storygame is RPG, just that both can coexist within the same medium. Heck, for some folks, a blend may even be the type of rpg they like. (Not as much myself a fanatic of that kind of thing, though to each their own tastes.)

There was a player in past games that I wouldn't allow to play female characters except for when we played Macho Women With Guns. Because he was such a rampant mysogynist.

I don't see the point, and I think it's funny how the usual characters are playing it off as no big deal, while also celebrating it like it's some victory. If it's not a big deal, why bother to change the lore that way anyway?

It's also the way they made the change: a crappy reply Tweet that just asserts they've always been there even though theres no lore suggesting that. It's the same thing as when they gave the Emperor a female assistant to aid in the creation of Space Marines. It was an unnecessary change that undermined the lore rather than improve it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 18, 2024, 11:26:21 AMOne Page Rules will give a gamer a "living game" that's got rules updates and they can use lore from older editions of 40k, since many of the factions in Grimdark Future are famous IP's with just enough differences to make them identifiable but not infringing on copyright.

IE One Page Rules is a way to play with your old figures and old rulebooks with a current system that means you can go to the local game store and everyone is on the... same page... ruleswise.

And most importantly, not give GW any more money.

What exactly are you supposed to do if you're interested in non-miniatures media like rpgs, video games, books, etc?

Thanks Shark! I think I'll pick up Case Blue, and start the process of collecting Italians. I've always thought about getting a small force, just about 1,000pts, but I'm open to getting more. Probably end up being a summer project.

When it comes to video games, I don't think the general position of the industry is a good marker of what's to come.  Larian, who doesn't ascribe to any DEI nonsense publicly and whose "woke content" is just the ramifications of allowing an incredibly huge number of things to play out under the player's control, made a magnificent game- the best CRPG ever by almost every metric and one of the top hundred video games in history.  At the time, they pointed out that it could be used as a tabletop sim with the right mods perhaps (granted with the slightly different ruleset, but it's like 97% 5e).

What does WotC do with this incredible gift, this hugely profitable beast?  Well, we see Larian saying that they aren't gonna make any DLC and that Baldur's Gate 3 is being turned over to Wizards of the Coast and they are working on a different project.  Which means that WotC wanted to burn down the license, take everything that Larian did that was wildly popular, and somehow assume they'd be able to be a good controller of this.

But clearly they won't.  They lack the technical capacity, they axed everyone who worked with Larian on it, and clearly they didn't offer Larian the terms needed to begin immediately working on BG4, which would take years and blow away BG3.  They fucked up massively.

Quote from: David Johansen on April 17, 2024, 09:44:46 AMI think the most telling thing about the "there should be female space marines" camp is that they've been whining about it for eight edtions now.  There were some "female space marine models in the Rogue Trader Adventurers range.  What they were called, I do not know but you couldn't complain they didn't exist at the time.

They were just called "female warriors," but if you pay attention to the designs on their power armor you see that they are Rogue Trader era Sisters of Battle (they have the insignia from the main Rogue Trader rule book molded on).

I have! I use it semi-frequently.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 16, 2024, 02:36:50 PMIMO HD in general looks way "cleaner" than movies (and TV shows) made previously. Maybe it's a generational thing, where if you were used to non-HD, you really notice HD clarity, and not in a good way.

As noted with the live action Aladdin, for me the problem was watching it felt like I was looking at a movie set for some reason. Its not that it looks cleaner. It looks, like some old 90s movies where it feels like you are looking at a set with actors rather than a movie.