Ugh, I give up on the transcript, you guys get all chatty over the weekend :P
My 2c on things I saw in passing:
3.5e covers - check out the Special Editions - black leather with silver embossing & silver page edges. I managed to get the Monster Manual on special, years ago.
Writing/steampunk/gaslamp - My wife is writing. She's fed up with her "day job" so is trying to find something she enjoys that has a chance of making money. A few short stories done, a novella being edited, & a novel half written. She's going to self-publish.
@BESW My first reflex was a denial of self-publishing with the fire of a thousand suns, but I remembered that we weren't talking about research before I posted it.
Yeah. Starting with ebooks (probably via Amazon & other sites), then probably print-on-demand. And if she wants to sell some "in person", eg at a convention, she'll just order a pile then.
Ursula Vernon has written a lot on both self-pub and "regular" publication; she's generally got a publisher to do it for her, but a few of her works aren't really things any major publisher will bite.
Ursula Vernon is an author/illustrator of fantasy works. Among other things, she writes the kids' series Nurk for Scholastic, got a Hugo for her epic graphic novel Digger, and recently self-published a collection of bizarre short stories.
@BESW Notable locations are going to include the night club district, or one of the clubs in particular. Harold probably knows the mind magic practitioner at least in passing, since they both work on the club scene.
I'm thinking it's a little island off the coast of a bigger Hawaiian island, with one town and some wilderness. Only accessible by boat, which why is the gangsters use it as a base.
@doppelgreener Other notable locations: the dock, which is the only way in and out (unless you have a helicopter) and is carefully watched by the gang; a seedy apartment building; and wherever the gangsters hang.
(At least one PC lives in the seedy apartment building, and it's probably the only place for strange visitors like the Warden to get a room.)
Reading 4e I was like "ooh, they learned! Now Tome of Battle makes sense!"
Then I read their 5e playtest blog posts and became convinced that 4e was some kind of Masonite conspiracy.
4
Because regardless of how much 5e itself reflects 4e learning (which has been debated), the playtest blogs repeatedly marvelled at how much the playtest feedback was teaching them about stuff they'd already demonstrated mastery over in 4e.
@BESW Their first mistake was in "trying to recapture the essence of classical D&D". Classical D&D was a sadistic confrontational torture-fest run by petty dictators for their own cruel amusement.
It deserved its death and should rot in Hell where it belongs
(And, notably, this is speaking as someone who grew up playing it, loved it, and had no negative experiences.)
I'm pretty sure most of it is due to inept blog writing and questionable editorial oversight rather than being kidnapped by Illuminati and having lasers cut out the bits of their brains related to 4e.
@Miniman I was raised on D&D. Literally, I made my first character at 7 years old and have been playing since then, for a grand total of 16 years to date and going strong. My dad, the group's DM, was a wonderful DM, a great narrator and had a keen awareness of how to make the game fun for the entire group.
And, as young boys do, I wanted to try that for myself eventually.
He takes umbrage with the handling of D&D and Pathfinder by Wizards of the Coast and Paizo, neither of which were associated with D&D during the "classic" period of that game.
This was my first painful experience with D&D, when I went to Dad asking about all the rules in the books that we weren't using, rules that didn't made sense to me.
What he said to me was, "Those were written assuming that the guy behind your screen is your enemy."
"Why would you play with your enemy?"
"No idea, son. That's why I don't use those rules."
D&D is similar to Lord of the Rings in several really important ways, including creating an entire new genre and then setting a bunch of really crappy, cruel, useless conventions.
@Lord_Gareth Teacher: "We're going to be writing a persuasive analytical essay. Pick any American novel; define 'classic literature' using three criteria of your choosing; then explain why your chosen novel is or is not classic literature."
@trogdor Okay, but, look at this from my perspective. I'm a thirteen year old trying to understand why the system is not working the way it says it does. I still have faith in the system at this point, mind you. My questions are not, "Why isn't Paladin working?" but rather, "What am I doing wrong with my Paladins?"
@trogdor Gamers are just like any other group of nerds in that respect though, some of them arepretend to be reasonable about it and some most are not.
And the first, strongest, and most persistent of responses are that I'm a filthy deviant corrupting the hobby for even daring to ask that question and imply that there's a problem.
And that clearly the problem is that I'm playing wrong and need to get out
And you can see why I might be inclined to go, "I'm not bitter," in a bitter tone, with a bitter expression.
The trick D&D is trying to pull is that it seems to honestly believe it can provide rules and structure which make playing with jerks a pleasant experience.
@Lord_Gareth I'm always a little less positive than usual on Mondays. And I wasn't calling anyone here a jerk, just saying that nerds, in general (and including myself) are jerks.
I am a jerk, but that's because I'm a bitter, vengeful, hateful ball of spite that's had any faith in the industry that produces my favorite hobby beaten out of me and crushed to ashes before my eyes, leaving me with nothing but fury about the success enjoyed by the incompetent fools that write 98% of published RPGs
And a keen awareness that most of the remaining 2% work for free
Which is about as messed up as it could possibly get
The people making bank couldn't give a damn at gunpoint
In other news, I honestly did not realize how pun-laced the first few lines of J.P. Morgan's rap is in ERB's take on "A Christmas Carol"
"Don't panic Scrooge/But you're about to crash/I'm J.P. Morgan, the ghost of rich dude's past/Who's properly rockin' the monopoly mustache/Yo I own the railroad, I run these tracks."
@BESW Yeah but I missed the 'don't panic' pun (Great Panic) and the monopoly pun
On my first few listens
In any event @Miniman, I don't hate D&D and its legacies so much as I'm frustrated and bitter by them. The game that initiated and defined our entire hobby is sloppily written garbage that never really got over its wargame roots
It's not even a Seinfeld Isn't Funny thing
It's that D&D was written by people who were wholly unqualified to write RPGs
But especially Gygax, who should have just been barred from ever having any power over his fellow human being at any point.
Dude was a sick bastard
And his legacy taints the industry to this day.
Gygax influenced roleplaying towards, not away, from sexism. He influenced it towards, not away, from adversarial DMing.
He created and then propagated the idea of the DM as someone with absolute power that deserves obedience.
He created and then propagated the idea that plot lines should take a back seat to random chance that also disrupts player agency (see: The Deck of Many Things)
Not that I'm bitter.
I am especially not bitter about how a lot of his ideas have re-emerged and gained a following in Paizo culture
And totally not bitter about how they spread those ideas to their fans.
No bitterness here
[Sheds physical form to become an avatar of sarcastic spite]
In my experiences players like taking chances they design. That is, many players enjoy inventing risky plans, which is not the same as enjoying a Russian Roulette minigame.
"This might not work but if it does we'll be fighting the bad guy on the back of his own dragon," is a hell of a chance.
One thing to keep in mind is that this chat has a meta-relation to the site and that everything we say is permanent and publicly searchable.
So while there are no official standards for information transmitted via chat, there's a culture of encouraging "quality" or at least factually accurate discussion.
Because literally anyone could be using our transcripts as supplementary information.
The point being, though, that instead of doing what the rest of the internet does and quietly perpetuating that self-delusion with subtle reassurances like password protection and 'hidden' profiles, the Stack chooses to embrace the internet's nature to create something positive.
You know, almost like it was designed by and for people who were raised online and are involved in maintaining and improving the infrastructure.
OH WAIT
IT WAS
[For the first time ever, happy dance instead of raeg face after that phrase]
@Metool Some were more like strongly worded suggestions, but they had to do with how you ran traps and combat, how you designed things. Like the idea that players are "supposed" to encounter at least one TPK threat per session, or the idea that if they're doing too well you should fudge rolls to make them 'lose' some.
Please, do you think I actually tracked that? I'm talking about what the features imply about the design goals and designers, as well as its origins as StackOverflow
I could not give less of a damn about who got to put their names on the front page.
@Lord_Gareth Working stuff out about the designers by knowing the features is a very backwards way to go about it. All of the philosophies present in stack overflow (and by extension, stack exchange) were there from the start
@Tarmikos11 I'm being informatively bitter, and @Miniman is confused as to why I hate crap like The Deck of Many Things, as he is notably confused by many of the things I do and say.
Meaning no offense but I'm starting to suspect "growing up" in a gaming environment that was/is both highly specific and sheltered from alternate viewpoints.
@Tarmikos11 If you imitate a spell, they work perfectly. If you use a prescribed effect, they work. If you try for an arbitrary effect, it's up to the GM. There is no random chance.
Wishes being embodied GM fiat is a toxic house-rule which seems to have become a nigh universal meme for some reason only the Burning Hate could fathom.
I find the current tagging for world of darkness to be quite confusing. world-of-darkness what's the purpose of this? it seems to refer to what is now canonically known as "classic world of darkness" not what is officially referred to as "world of darkness" also known as "new world of darkness" b...
@Tarmikos11 Ah, right. Because you aren't already spending massive amounts of character advancement, you also need to track down an NPC and give them a lot of money.
Anyway, yes. The Deck is not really abusable in any meaningful way; at best it may grant you pleasant things, and at worst it may irrevocably kill you. Balance!
If I was to include such artifacts in my campaigns, it'd be someone using them irresponsibly, and the PC's becoming part of a MUCH larger group working to contain the resulting mess.
And in a game that ostensibly wants to be "balanced," for some value of the concept, these objects are in active opposition to its stated design goals.
D&D is a game where the player is assumed to have spent hours, if not days, designing his character before play, and then every bit of mechanical advancement that character undergoes represents hours of dedicated time at the table.
The idea would be a short story about someone who always seemed to draw the right cards, until they ran out and drew all the cards in hopes of finding a good one, only to get vaporized and unleash a fair bit of hell.
Then the players being recruited by a Guild who's Either A. Taken it upon themselves to try and simply destroy the monstrosities summoned, or B. Has sought to recollect the summoned things and somehow force them back into cards for a new deck.
Based on either A. Dice Roll, or B. the Characters deciding which sounds like a better plan.
@BESW The thing about the deck is that it can only have any effect whatsoever on a player if they choose to use it. At that point, they have accepted the consequences.
Right. But why would I give them an opportunity to make that choice, when its results run from "get a bit more stuff than you ought to have right now" to "roll a new character"? That's an awful choice even for the most inveterate gambling addict.
