Shame, I just stopped running a 1e AD&D game in London a few months ago because some of the group moved away - we were explicitly a no politics, especially no identity politics, group. If I can get a game up and running again, I'll let you know.   

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 10:58:08 AM

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.

They don't do a Battletech reboot because reboots inevitably alienate as many as they please. Instead, they encourage you to find a place in the Battletech timeline that you like and explore it. My favorite time period(s) for Battletech range from 3049-3081 (Clan Invasion through Jihad). I'm not a huge fan of the original (late) Succession Wars period, and I really don't find Dark Age/ilClan very appealing (but there are a few good bits in there too), so I don't put much of my effort into exploring that part of the timeline. If others like those periods, so be it, that doesn't infringe on my enjoyment of the parts I like. This is largely because the Battletech rules change very little from one period to another, and the biggest impact would be on a Battletech RPG. I'd certainly play a Battletech scenario even in a time period I don't really like, but I wouldn't run (and probably wouldn't play) a Battletech RPG outside of the periods I like.

"Reboots alienate too many people" is a silly argument. There's plenty of reboots that were good, like Transformers Prime or Thundercats 2011. You might as say we shouldn't write new fiction period and just keep making endless sequels and requels. That's worked out terribly so far.

But anyway, I just don't like the BattleTech setting. There's no alternatives, so I have to give the entire mech genre a pass. Just like I do every genre nowadays.

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I'd offer a spot in my online game, but your location and times available are "very bad" (I'm in the US and we play on Friday nights).

I think the easiest way to find a normal game is to look at the system first, then the description. If you see a Castles and Crusades game, 99% chance it won't be filled with morons. Probably the same with AD&D and maybe even B/X. Once you start getting into other systems, then pay careful attention to how they shill the game. Anyone wanting 47 page back stories for 1st level characters = problematic.

Since you are in the UK, have you tried Dragon Warriors? I played in two DW games online before, and both were the polar opposite of "woke". One was run by an Irish due who cussed a lot and seemed like he'd bomb a government office at the drop of a hat, so it was pretty interesting.

That "Cleric Activities and Work Table" is awesome!

My game has a feat (that no one used so far) that allows clerics to have "true authority".

Which means, if they perform a wedding, blessing, etc., it works in the afterlife, in other planes, etc.

It becomes "true" in the spiritual sense. Probably inspired by Matthew 16:19.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on May 14, 2024, 08:19:14 AMAleena? Elmore has done quite a bit of cheesecake art but Aleena wasn't one of them. She was depicted wearing full chainmail. I guess where leftists are concerned, a female drawn with actual female body proportions is pornographic. Remember these are the people who can't even define what a woman is.

UNREALISTIC BODY STANDARDS AND CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE!?!? BLASPHEMY!

"unrealistic body standards" is just code for "not a giant fatass" and "conventionally attractive" means you look like an actual woman. It's funny how normal women have zero fucking issue with Elmore art (except I have heard on more than one occasion "I wish I looked like that"), it's the fat, ugly feminists that complain the most. All while shoving cheesesteaks down their throat and complaining about thyroid issues. Yes, mad.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on May 13, 2024, 02:20:38 AMYoungins asked me "why do dms give old grogs priority in feedback and implementation, why are newer people second fiddle"?

Answer was painful; because that grog is a player, barring snow or health issues grog will always show up to play, grog prepares to play ahead of time, grog is always playing even in time between sessions as he talks about what characters should do or are doing in downtime, grog plans in-game construction projects and draws up maps of them....grog is a real player. authentic. real.

Definitely agree.  When I was running my longest campaign, I frequently went to the grumpiest player (who incidentally introduced me to roleplaying more than a decade earlier!) for specific targeted feedback.  Admittedly I fed that feedback through a filter based on knowing him for almost 15 years at that time to weed out things that were just his personal bugbears but he was the most reliable source of at least some concrete response to what I was asking.  I'd ask the other players as well who were newer to roleplaying but, depending on the person and usually their length of play in the hobby, they were less likely to respond.  If they were completely (<2-3 years) new to RPGs, they were more likely to slowly fade away or even just ghost than give any feedback for the in person game.  If they had some experience (5-10 years), they might give a thumbs up but you had to press them for any actual detail.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on May 14, 2024, 01:56:48 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 11, 2024, 05:43:49 AMThe SJW crowd can't seem to decide if sex work is empowering and sex workers must be respected or whether it's exploitation and bad.  Their outrage or lack of it seems highly instrumental.

I'd settle for the GenZ and GenAlpha 'tards simply not being schizos that can't differentiate fiction from reality. They seem to alternate between porn brain and shrieking like banshees if they see anime tiddies or something. Or them clutching their pearls over the cover of Eldritch Wizardry. It's frustrating that we have to put up with absolute slop like Aphrodite Pandemos being a tranny in the Hades 1 videogame, which was celebrated as being 'representation', only for them to scream bloody murder when someone altered the art to make her stop looking masculine. And yes, I get that 'art fixers' are hypocrites, but it's friggin hilarious when their BS is flipped back on them causing them to go apoplectic. These ESG/DEI/BRIDGE nimrods are going to run out of money one day and all the house of cards they've built will come crashing back down on them.

Gen Z males are very conservative compared to prior generations and Gen Z females are schizo.  Those Gen Z females that are sane will be breeding up, and those Gen Z females that are degenerate will mate with a large market of degenerates. 

We are literally watching a plot from an Xanth series books by Piers Anthony.  In that world the goblins were cursed so that the females would only find the weakest and most degenerate goblin as attractive and mate with them, which led the goblins to become a small twisted and degenerate race, that is the lefts future.  They are going to be small, twisted, crippled and degenerate.

Millennials are the problem, they have faggotized a large enough group of males that if conflict kicks off, they will have to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, you just have to suss out the clues that are usually present in any conversations or posting about games looking for players and vice versa.  The types of people who inject real world current day (or at least their highly biased one sided willfully blind view of them) tend to do it in their day to day activities and online postings.  It's the basis of the virtue signal phenomenon in society as well as similar to when poisonous insects and animals display bright unnatural (for the environment) colors in nature.

I can only recently (since the pandemic started) speak to looking for a game online but things I look out for digitally as red flags are pronouns in the bio, declarations of immutable phsyical characteristics whether genetic or acquired as advertisements, flags signifying support the "current thing" whether geopolitical or calendar based, specific statements about performative friendliness to certain groups (which usually goes hand in hand with toxity to others), overt declarations of politics (I've seen people actually advertise pro-socialist and anti-fascist statements in their LFG posts), lengthy "safety tool" and/or diversity checklists that are required reading/filling out prior to joining, and "no asshole" rules which frequently (but admittedly not always) means they're also an asshole who will accuse you of it if you disagree with their overt injections into the game.  I've seen all of the above over the past couple of years and avoided those LFG posts for the same reason.

If you post online that you're looking for the opposite then you're just likely to attract those same types like flies to a grill on a hot summer day.  As evidenced by threads on other forums like enworld and rpg.net, they will purposefully post crap in your announcement just to torpedo the chances of success with unnecessary drama in a campaign that they never had any intention of joining.  You'll unfortunately have to weed them out reading the tea leaves in conversations pre-game looking for hints of the same red flags I posted above. 

It's sad that you're pretty much forced to do this just to have some apolitical escapist fictional entertainment nowadays.