Current status
I'm not actively maintaining Droidstack anymore, I guess real life just got in the way. Being in college and having a full time programming job leaves no room for hobby projects. Also, ever since the mobile-optimized web UI launched, I felt there was no need for an app like thi...
Well, The Corset Scene is when a character who has worn them her whole life complains about being stuffed into one. It's a clear sign the movie either is not gonna bother understanding the experience of an actual historical person in the time period it depicts, or is made out of lazy archetypes.
It's like having a character who hates, I dunno, wearing socks.
You could do it, maybe.
But if every movie's doing it it's either really lazy characterization or writers just don't understand what socks are.
@BESW Science fiction is, indeed, a very loose term and I wouldn't presume to try to define it properly, but in this case it felt rather forced.
In the same cinema there was another film showing. Robert Redford's All Is Lost. It's about a man on a boat that... no, wait, let me quote:
> After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face.
Other than one being on a boat at sea and the other on a shuttle in space, I see very few differences between the films. One is 20th century technology, the other 18th.
And while Gravity does bear strong resemblance to certain Arthur C. Clarke stories from bygone decades - I'm trying to remember the title of one I liked, about a stranded astronaut out in his suit hoping that his trajectory will send him crashing back to earth - it's no more sci-fi than a technothriller like Hackers, even if those themes would have been sci-fi a decade earlier in cyberpunk literature.
20 Thousands League Under The Sea is science fiction. The Hunt For Red October? Not so much.
Would The Hunt for Red October be science fiction if HG Wells had written it?
I don't think science fiction should be evaluated based exclusively on whether the technology is contemporary. There's a subset of science fiction which is about exploring the impact of contemporary technology on the individual and society; it's a fuzzy area, but an important one.
Taking existing tech and stretching it to its absolute limits to explore how people react to it emotionally and morally is not really any different from speculating about as-yet-uninvented tech and exploring how people react to that emotionally and morally.
An astronaut in the midst of an ablation cascade is the former.
20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is the latter.
If five years from now ablation cascades are proved impossible, will that change whether you think Gravity is science fiction?
The relevant criterion is the state of technology when the film was made, not when I watch it. Science Fiction is about taking technological and scientific (and by "scientific" I also count psychological, sociological and other softer sciences) and extrapolating from current knowledge outwards (either forward, or sideways). You could say that Gravity is a borderline case, and I would agree, but it's hardly a clear-cut case.
Again, contrast it with All Is Lost. Both take a person, take a set of technological circumstances that throw him or her into isolation and danger from the elements, and the story that unfolds is one of resourcefulness, conquering of fears and personal achievement. What makes one more sci-fi than the other? The fact that it's in space? People have been in space for the past 50 years. It's science, and it's fiction, but I'm not sure it counts as science fiction anymore.
For Verne, submarines were science fiction. For Tom Clancy, they weren't. Technology catches up with science fiction.
(Incidentally, the relation between science fiction and the progress of science and technology is fascinating. When Internet visionaries quote William Gibson, and NASA engineers say they chose their careers after reading Clarke, you can see the power of sci fi)
I'm looking for recommendations for a published (but not necessarily WotC), fun, single encounter to introduce some friends to D&D 4E. We'll be using a virtual tabletop (Roll20 specifically) for it, and are planning a relatively short session of 2 hours.
Since most of the folks are new to 4e, I'...
Not just "it's based on a Chinese myth" or "has a tribe with Native American flavor," but honest-to-goodness "the point of this story is not a Western one, and it will not be told like a Western story."
When even the Prydain Chronicles are considered to be deviating from the cultural standards of the genre, you can be pretty sure you've got inbreeding.
@BESW The ones that aren't based exclusively around western culture, are based around heavily exoticized and Orientalized representations of other cultures.
I ran into a Fighting Fantasy gamebook in my school library, swallowed a dozen of them up in a month, discovered RedBox D&D, swallowed all five boxes in a couple of months, asked my parents for AD&D, and got the 2e books just as they were published. 2e still holds a soft spot in my heart.
Of all the D&D editions I've looked at or tried, 4e is the most pleasing to me.
Mostly because it knows exactly what it wants to do, does that thing very well, and doesn't apologize for only giving lip service to what it's not interested in.
I like a game with purpose and the honesty and integrity to be proud of that purpose.
3.5 is a lying little con artist that pretends it wants to please everyone, then lectures you about "playing wrong" if you try to do something it doesn't like.
3.5 makes broad claims to "realistic simulation" that aren't supported by its own ruleset. It repeatedly introduces ever-more-specific-and-fiddly subsystems to more accurately represent actions or conditions that don't need so much rule attention, and which ultimately fail to increase the realism anyway.
For example, grappling.
There's a whole page dedicated to the grappling subsystem, laying out exactly how you grapple with an opponent and what it lets you do.
This is silly, because it brings focus onto grappling, which should make people more likely to grapple in combat... but then overcomplicates it.
Nobody grapples unless they have a grapple-focused character, because it slows combat down into a rules debate when it should be at its most exciting, and is less effective than just grabbing a chair leg unless you dedicate your build to it.
Another example: 3.5 uses a skill system to resolve out-of-combat actions of all kinds.
It's the same basic skill system for everything, and the target number is usually fixed.
Diplomacy is resolved by a single roll which any moron can succeed at if he puts his resources into it.
So a game that vaunts its role-playing versatility, its ability to handle any scenario... does so by reducing each scenario to a single very swingy roll with one of two options: the person who didn't specialize in that skill has to rely on pure luck, and the person who did specialize will succeed no matter what.
D&D Next's stated goal is to reconcile the disparate factions of D&D.
That is, it is supposed to be a tight central core of simple rules onto which you can attach modules in any combination to create the D&D experience your group wants.
Indie games that cater to niche experience goals are increasingly the norm.
D&D's flagship status is predicated on the idea that it is the "default" RPG, partly because it claims to be able to cater to any game-experience goal you might have. People are getting wise to that.
This article, for example, seems to have been written by someone who only knows about 4e through what people were complaining about when it first came out.
@Nathan D&D got a lot of backlash from the community because it tried to be very different from earlier editions. It succeeded quite well in doing what it set out to do, but what that was was quite different than earlier editions, and people felt "betrayed".
@Nathan As did many. I, personally, didn't like 4e much. But I don't have an issue with it, as if D&D somehow owed me to be something specific, and wasn't allowed to change.
I've heard similar complaints from people whose favorite bands shifted in style between albums. I had a friend who vocally resented Radiohead's post-OK Computer albums (back in 2001 or so) because they "Weren't really Radiohead".
As if he was more qualified than Radiohead to decide what Radiohead are.
...and in between / sips of Coke / he told me that / he thought we were / selling out / laying down / sucking up / to the Man ...
@Nathan For a dozen different reasons, D&D Next is an awesome idea that is being handled very poorly.
Everything we know about it, from the beta tests to the regular design articles to the press releases, reinforces the impression that these guys are either totally un-self-aware and don't know how to design a game, or that they know what's going on but are forced to make bad decisions by non-designers and then pretend it's what they meant to do and it's all good.
True. My brother is making another attempt at learning the game with his friends, and they've apparently decided on 3.5. Which works, because I have all the books lying around, but at the same time, ugh. I tried to talk him out of it, but apparently the combination of people who know anything about the rules and general preconceptions dictated 3.5
I'll be throwing the 13th Age book at him, as an almost-D&D. Unfortunately, I don't have physical Fate books...
They do. They are arrayed nicely on the shelf, and I hope they get recommended to newbies asking around. I haven't, however, bought them - got all the pdfs from the kickstarter.
@Magician Could you at least get him to try Pathfinder? It suffers from the same mechanical problems as 3.5, but at least the variety of options it gives for character differentiation are available right on character creation, and not only at levels 6+ when you start hitting Prestige Class requirements.
Heck, FAE is 50 pages including covers. You could print that at a copy shop.
> No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior express permission of the publisher.
> That said, if you’re doing it for personal use, knock yourself out. That’s not only allowed, we encourage you to do it.
> For those working at a copy shop and not at all sure if this means the person standing at your counter can make copies of this thing, they can. This is “express permission.” Carry on.
"I know I'm late to subscribe to your event, can you give me some more info?" - then he disappears for days and I have no means of contacting him except e-mail he's not even watching, and we need to know our numbers today. Wraaaaaaaargh! WHYYYYYY? /rant
but since we're not an official thing and we promote casual fun and trying to be nice to everyone, I have hard times just saying him no. Mostly because he could be one of the three "a friend of mine mentioned he'd like to come" whose name has never been given to me
But the sad truth is, "not official" and "casual fun" also has to mean "my time and energy for this project are severely limited and if you can't respect that then please try again next time."
University professors have "overflow" in their classes. It means they can give special permission to a certain number of extra students above the class size, based on the fact that some students always drop the class early.
But it's not carte blanche to let in any student how shows up and begs: they have a very limited number of overflow slots and they have to make tough decisions about who gets the slots.
It's not "being nice" to anyone if you let people overwork you so that the quality goes down for everybody.
The people who managed the convention before us are trying to make us change the name because they don't see in us the same "let's be nice to everyone" attitude they had - and "man, you don't want to have this stupid thing get between us, right?"
We don't know what our number is going to be until we know what each partecipant wants to do. Every time we get one less partecipant what they want to do could change, so...
My response would be something like "No, I really don't want it to come between us. But since I have to be realistic about what I can do, it's your choice whether my being honest is a dealbreaker."
It's basically: we don't recognize your convention as ours. You'd better change its name or we're feeling forced to criticize every thing you do because you don't do it as we would (by the way, we don't have time to organize it ourselves again)
I'm not entirely sure who the extorter-people are and the whole social balance of power there, but one thing you can do is just keep the name, run the con they way you want, and leave them with the choice to keep on criticizing endlessly, which can backfire when they're seen as obstructive while you're constructive.
We already ran it thrice, with apparently good feedback. But I can feel the underlining criticism to my sterile approach. And it's the same I get when I DM, right from the "look, I'm pointing a rifle to his head, you shouldn't let me roll for damage, you should rule him dead." I had while DMing Legend
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan Guy. My userpic is a female PC of mine
You can't please any of the people all of the time, and some of the people can't be pleased any of the time, but it sounds like you can please a good number of them pretty often the way you're doing it.
@Zachiel I know the feeling. I've been involved in organizing cons (though never the primary organizer) for years, and my wife's been very active in scifi cons and fandoms as well. You can see the difference between the "I want this to happen" people and the "I'll just sit here and hope someone makes this happen" people.
@Zachiel All I can say is you should try to expand the circle of organizers, so that you can take turns, either divide the day between you, or divide the cons themselves between the different organizes.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan we're already too many. 8 people to organize a 30 people convention.
But I'm like the only one who can actually transform gaming preferences into a timetable, and the one who believes in "if you want it to be done like you want to, do it yourself"
So this is your old GM dilemma all over again: you want a game (con), you've got friends who'd enjoy a game (con), and you're the only one who'll actually run the game (con)... but they want it done their way and since you need people to participate in it or it won't be a game (con) they can extort you into running it their way because they don't care as much if the game (con) doesn't happen.
@Magician How much are they selling for at your FLGS?
I'm not sure if my local store has them in yet... what they stock depends on their supplier, and they weren't sure whether their supplier would get involved with Fate
I'm pretty sure none of the very few (as in, two, I think at this point?) FLGSs in Israel carry Fate, and if they did, it'll probably be marked up by a ridiculous amount, just to balance the cost of imports and keeping hte business afloat.
I want to support local shops, but when DrivethruRPG prices, with shipping, still come out to less than a local price, it's a problem.
Well, that's part of what I wanted to talk about. Which ones are best for which situations?
Right now, my group is discussing if they are worth the time, or even needed. We meet once every few weeks, and we all live in different cities between 1.5 hours to a half hour away from eachother.
Some virtual tables I've used, I felt like they took more time to set up and prepare than to use.
Current status
I'm not actively maintaining Droidstack anymore, I guess real life just got in the way. Being in college and having a full time programming job leaves no room for hobby projects. Also, ever since the mobile-optimized web UI launched, I felt there was no need for an app like thi...
