@KorvinStarmast I'd prefer back room or discord--something synchronous. We could even do voice if you like, though I'll admit to finding one-on-one voice RP to be a bit... I suppose "intimate" really is the word... for my tastes. (cc:@MikeQ @NautArch @Shalvenay @trogdor)
@BESW I have found duets to be very rewarding with the right people. So far, in my life, "the right people" has included only people I'm married to or related to by blood.
@nitsua60 I think we could make it work by voice, but no way can I be in the league with your one and only in terms of comfort. ;) Discord would be great, when's a good time?
I had a game last night where I had to convince the group that we couldn't just let an extremely strong unsanctioned psyker go on a planet where the fabric of reality was massively weakened.
@Ben They weren't exactly happy about it, especially once we discovered that her noble father has sent all of his elite death squads after us for vengeance, but I stand by it.
To elaborate, the Dh system uses the percentile dice for everything. When a psyker invokes the warp (ie. uses their powers), they also roll on the warp table to see what happens. If they roll a 99, then another 99, pop Demon Prince! Yaaaaaay
There are 4 arms of chaos - Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeench. They have Greater and Lesser Demons, but any person that either is granted the favour of one of the Lords of Chaos can be turned in to a Demon Prince
In 2e you only roll for Psychic Phenomena if you get a double on a Focus Power test, but PP results in Perils of the Warp on a 75+. Or 45+ if you're stuck on this garbage planet.
Of course, unsanctioned psykers roll PP at +10 already, and they're usually dumb enough to push, so on this planet, they're likely to get Perils of the Warp every time they do anything.
You can do anything with it. We went through the Underhive, a civil war planet, a desert planet where they were trying to bring the word of the emperor to the far reaches of the system, a space hulk, and Knowhere.
I'm not sure about the human sacrifice to the emperor though
@V2Blast @Trish @Miniman So I think I was tired when I wrote that.. I meant No metal. feels dumb Sorry about that. I think i'll take the magically enchanted bone armor into consideration. His character has a severe metal allergy. So much so that if he has prolonged contact with any metal at all he starts to have issues.
@Miniman I think he does for light armor. Which is why we were trying to make a suit of bone armor that would be "Metal Free" because then wouldn't it be considered light armor?
@Thatguy I was assuming you wanted it to not suck. If I was trying to be realistic, I'd say it was no better than ordinary clothing. Well, for AC, anyway. For Intimidation checks it might be of some benefit.
But it depends, really. Are we talking about armor made of human bones, or armor made of plates carved from dragonbone?
Because, yanno, one of those is basically worthless, and the other is probably the equivalent of plate, maybe even with resistance to the damage type of the dragon in question.
@Ben I definitely wouldn't argue that. I dont think he's going for stealth. I think he's more going for any AC bonus he can get, and the regular shock value of seeing a beautiful Tiefling covered in the bones of her enemies.
@BESW I thought yes. It hasn't come up in any of my games though... so maybe it's true that it's not in 5e... I would need to check
Even without ironwood, at later levels you can be a little Monster Hunter-ish and have armor of monsters like a Bullette, or more commonly dragon's hide... So eventually the no-metal it's just there for the flavor anyway
And metal is still a thing of nature. Processed, yes. But so would be wood armor, and so is cooked food, and those clothes didn't grow on trees (or yes, but It helps the point too)
@BESW I love me my non-legal Monks (I always hated the "I grew in a shaolin monastery and I am super strict), my non zealot Paladins (don't need to serve a god and kill heathens in it's name), and In my story they are fighting a "Legal Evil" group of barbarians... (I didn't actually give them an alignment, but their actions and attitudes would correspond to that, I think)
But they don't use the psionic subsystem, they've got their own unique thing.
The core concept is twofold. First, that almost every monk power is a twofer: for every power, there's a offensive power AND a mobility power. When you use one power in a paired set, you can't also use a power from a DIFFERENT paired set in that turn.
Second, every monk gets a bonus damage ability that triggers once per round when they hit with an attack. It deals a little damage and has an additional effect, which is improved if the target of the bonus damage is NOT the target of the attack which triggered the bonus damage ability.
For example, a fire-specialized monk's bonus damage ability imposes a penalty to attacks that include you, if the target isn't the person you were attacking to trigger the bonus damage ability.
Another specialization will lock down the target making it difficult to move or take opportunity attacks; a different specialization lets you force the target to move.
Monks are supposedly strikers (high single-target damage, good mobility) but they have some strong controller elements as well (multi-target damage, debuffing).
They're very complex --probably the most complex class in 4e, and arguably one of the worst written-- but that also makes it possible to push a monk's build in many different directions depending on your play goals, if you have the system mastery to do it.
@BESW I have a question for you, knowing that you like 4e, what's your opinion on Dragonborn? Most people I know dislike 4e and think noone that's not a teen or a weird weeb would play one... But I'm not sure how much of that is disliking the race, or the fact that It was popularized in 4e and their hate for the edition is rubbing of on them
In the default Points of Light setting, dragonborn are a scattered, diasporic race who have a very self-sufficient sense of honor and duty but are viewed with suspicion by most other races; in the previous major civilization that united all the major races (the one whose ruins you adventure through), dragonborn were treated as second-class citizens.
In 5e they are a little bit underwhelming. The dragon breath encounter power in 4e had it's uses, but in 5e it's a poor man's burning hands you can use once a day. I mean... Really? I can breathe fire ONCE and that's it?
This is because a very VERY long time ago, there was a world-spanning war between two civilizations: one was ruled by dragonborn and all other races were welcome but not able to be part of the ruling class. The other had a ruling class of tieflings but was exclusively human in its citizenry; all other races within its were subjugated.
Both civilizations dwindled and shattered at the end of the war, but the tiefling empire's anti-dragonborn propaganda survived to influence future cities and nations.
(Tieflings in 4e lore are not actually a separate race like others; they're the descendants of human rulers who entered into bargains with devils in order to save their kingdoms by uniting into an empire against the dragonborn, and the tiefling traits are the mark of those lineages.)
I remember disliking the lore of the Tiefling a lot, and their open and drastic demonic appearance
In 3.0/3.5 i loved tiefling because they had just that little part of them that showed... like spots on the edges of the skin, some might have slightly pointy teeth, or a small proto horn, some might look like were smoking constanty, etc...
And it was mostly a: I'm descending from someone ho made a pact, or mingled with a fiend, or I myself made a pact
now they are red horned beasts with a tail (that Dragonborn don't have and it annoys me a lot), flaunting their demonic heritage wherever they go
it's a totally different concept of the same, to the point that I would say are different things altogether...
For the most part, I like the 4e racial concepts as much as I can like any traditional racial fantasy concepts.
Splitting elves into eladrin and elf made a LOT of sense, rather than trying to wrestle both Child's Ballad and Tolkien inspirations into a single group.
I like that they had multiple competing origins for races like half-orc and dragonborn, and never definitively chose one as true.
I like that. First thing I did when I started DMing 5e was making "official" eladrins in our campaing. Everyone chose to be elf, half elf, or tiefling anyway... but they are official :P
I think WotC should fire their lead artists though. I think that the concept of most races is cool, but their depictions are HORRIBLE. Dragonborn look like turtles, eladrin have those horrid diagonal eyes that are supposed to be "almond eyes" and attractive... attractive to aliens maybe?
@doppelgreener There are good pieces here and there, but most of it its like: We have this description, it says a lot of them tend to be thick, let's turn that up to eleven! Chubby neckles gnomes!
@Helwar D&D gnomes derive a lot of their "culture" from stereotypes about the itinerant peoples of Europe: itinerant tricksters with inborn illusory powers and massive extended families, for starters.
@BESW but don't most cultures and races mimick or are based on something in real life? I mean I think I instintively knew what you just told, but I never considered it anything else than a "huh, so this is that"
those nuances escape me, I never understand them. I mean, in my head it was like: Cool, they gave them gypsy flavour, I can play a cool gypsy and do whatever with the trope. But to other people is an horrid act of racism or "ethnicisism" or whoever is said
@BESW That's they trying to congeal the old idea of gnomes with the newer ones introduced later. For example Dragonlance had them as a warped dwarf race, focused on tinkering, or blizzard has them as super-engineers. They tried to meld that with the "David the Gnome" idea of being woodland entities and friends with animals
I mean, language like "tinker" and "gypsy" aren't great in connection with traveling peoples, but it's also about who gets to tell their own stories, and who profits from it.
I dunno, I agree that things could be done better, but nowadays you seem to be the devil if you don't include social minorities, but you are satan if you try and fail
there is a so slim line in between that's the path to: hey you don't suck
Including orcs (which represent an amalgamation of xenophobic tropes about native nomadic peoples) and including similar amalgamations of xenophobic tropes about European nomadic peoples... isn't including social minorities. (Nor even trying and failing.) It's just including villainisation about them, which is gross.
@BESW nor they should be, Romani aren't gnomes... I see where you are going with this, It's just that I think I chose not to read too much into these things and enjoy them, maybe raising a "how quaint" with things like cultures based on real life. And other people takes it to heart it then that makes me unconfortable for liking it in the first place
For myself, I've found that there's speculative fiction which scratches my itches--for reading books, for playing RPGs, etc--that's learning from these mistakes instead of stubbornly doubling down on them in the name of tradition.
I don't see how the amount of time they've been around is relevant. If, over that period of time, they'd become less recognizably embodiments of real-world prejudices--or maybe even if those real-world prejudices had died out--that would be a good thing.
But since they haven't appreciably divorced themselves from the real-world prejudices over time, and the real-world prejudices still exist, then "It's okay if they've been around for a long time" sounds more like "The people perpetuating the prejudice-based creation aren't the ones who first thought it up so they shouldn't be held responsible for choosing to perpetuate it."
Jemisin's "The unbearable baggage of orcing" talks about the difficulty and value in deconstructing, confronting, or reinventing prejudiced fantasy, vs simply abandoning it.
It's not that prejudices should be accepted if they've been along for some time, that's not what I meant
I mean that they are their own thing now. They might have started as "romani inspired" but over time they have evolved and look nothing alike. Even I just said that WoTC don't seem to know what they want them to be anymore, woodland beings or engineers.
THey are this weird amalgam of 2 concepts that's engrained in the fantasy tropes now.
I don't know then. I guess the conclusion is: Since I like them and I don't feel like I am insulting anyone for playing as a gnome, I don't think they are bad. Even with all you've been telling me, I feel it is like a "quaint" connection at most. So I guess I'm too self-centered or something
It's not really a black/white issue where you're a bad person if you can't see it, or still want to play them. I'd hold the developers to account more than the players, here.
Stereotypes won't magically rub off their creative work through use; stereotypes are self-confirming. It needs active effort, and the language in 5e's entries for gnome and half-orc tell me they aren't trying.
(The reason gnomes seem to be especially dichotomous, btw, is that they're also sharing Child Ballad inspiration with the elves.)
There's nothing wrong with being ignorant of a work's problems, or with liking the work and continuing to engage with it despite its problems once we're aware of them.
Like I said earlier, if we only like perfect things then we'll never like anything.
I moved away from traditional fantasy not because it has problems, but because I got tired of banging my head against the same stuff over and over. ...and because I found out how much really awesome stuff modern speculative fiction is doing instead.
I'm gonna tell the "joke" I thought earlier, just because if I don't I would explode
but this whole conversation made me remember a couple of vegan coworkers, that took every oportunity to guilt-trip me and shower me in their propaganda... I can't count the amount of times they came to eat in the same room as me and they were "disgusted" by what I was eating
And i felt like: yeah, I understand why you do what you do, and maybe I am an hipocrite for liking dogs and eating pigs, but let me have these spaguetti with meatballs in peace, please
and I was like... I just like the gnomes! T_T
No no, you weren't like that, but the whole issue remembers me of that
I dunno, recently I've been tagged as a racist for not liking "forced racial representation" in movies, and race or gender-bending well stablised characters just to tick another box in the representation checklist
eg, I really REALLY like playing Great Ork Gods but I'm very aware of how deeply its premise is seated in the kind of racial propaganda that's been used to justify generational slavery and genocide. I'm working on a way to reconcile this.
Well, yeah. If the representation is truly forced that's bad because it leads to tokenism, stereotypes, and other things that not only don't help the marginalized people but also make for bad stories.
But there's a lot of stuff, like the casting of Jodi Whittaker as the Doctor, which people are seeing as forced when it's really not.
My position was that if the character is previously existing, don't change it. By all means, introduce all kind of new characters with all kind of racial or social backgrounds, but don't change what was already there. Also please, don't add tokens, either commit to it or don't... Apparently I'm racist for thinking like this :/
Marvel's track record on diversity in the comics is spotty--they're mostly tokens and gimmicks and Status Quo Is God--but they're getting better, slowly. It makes sense for the films, which aren't beholden to the comic continuity anyway, to take cues from the comics' philosophies going forward rather than sticking to the old philosophies the comics are trying (at least superficially) to ditch.
Which isn't to say you're a racist for thinking that; just offering a different perspective.
No, I guess not. It still rubs me the wrong way. I mean, I want to see the characters I grew with, and they are not that. They are different and I don't like it. I'm not saying they are worse, just not what I wanted to see.
That's legit. The films are definitely trying to straddle an impossible line by invoking nostalgia while also updating for modern sensibilities and an audience that's mostly uninitiated.
Also everyone praising Heimdall and Valkyrie for not being the nordic stereotype... But I think we had all the reasons for them to be, and they are token characters. Every other asgardian we see looks white.
They want to be for everyone, and it's amazing how close they DO manage to come to that, but ultimately the comics industry has been a backwards-looking nostalgia machine for almost three decades while Disney's looking forward to the next generation of audiences.
I always find it a bit weird when people get particularly finicky about characters and characterisations from comics, particularly comics that have existed so long and had so many different writers/artists that the characterisation and physical appearance of any given character tends to have dramatically varied over time and between runs etc.
Yeah, the "Vikings were all white" thing doesn't hold up too great even if we want to pretend that a superhero comic about scifi aliens who used to pretend to be human gods, is beholden to historical accuracy.
Still, you're absolutely right that Idris stuck out like a sore thumb in the first two films.
@Carcer I think that's WHY we are so nitpicky. I mean, Mary Jane has been altered by every single author and artists to the point that the only thing linking every Mary Jane together is that she's a Redhead, wants to be an actor, and calls Peter "Tiger"
Kenneth Branagh is famous for casting "unexpected" ethnicities in his films but it's usually still a majority white cast. Thor was typical of him. Dark World just drew its template around Thor.
Ragnarok, however, was aggressive about showing a diverse Asgardian population and that was interesting; it's effectively a reboot of the Thor franchise in so many ways, why not that way too?
@BESW I dunno about reboot, more like doom :P I know what you mean, listened to the video you linked the other day and agreed, but I mean... Thor is the only asgardian left now, not enough to repopulate a world :P
@Carcer Very much so. Infinity War didn't really give the impression it understands or particularly likes Cosmic Marvel.
I'm not in any way a stickler for "it's not like the comics" as a bad thing in principle, but I still wish they'd gone with Thanos's original motive from the comics.
Yeah. Wouldn't have been too hard to tweak Cate Blanchett's Hela and bring her in a little earlier in a few end-credit bits, with Thanos courting her in her prison.
the reason in the movies is contrived... The character looks more humane, yes, but I mean, with infinite power at his hands, why not wish for double the resources instead of half the population? :P
once, on imgur, I saw a version where wolverine just pretends he's on Thanos's side and then cuts his arm off. That's the extent of my insight into different versions of infinity war
Avengers & The Infinity Gauntlet is a four-volume summary/re-imagining of the original sprawling storyline, with Spider-Man as the POV character instead of the Silver Surfer and mostly focusing on the confrontation with Thanos (the original spent a lot of time on Thanos's epic fetch-quests interspersed with the SS's philosophical hand-wringing). It's by the Atomic Robo writer.
I understand in theory but I have a massive hangup about skipping things or reading them out of order which compels me to start from the beginning if I'm going to actually pay attention to something
Each story takes place at whatever point in Atomic Robo's life the writers are interested in at the moment.
There's also the spinoff Real Science Adventures, which is short stories where some side character in an Atomic Robo comic gets to be the main character in one of their own adventures.
He started out as a character in the Free Comic Day issues.
Atomic Robo is a good example of speculative fiction that doesn't feel beholden to old tropes and traditions if they're a problem, while keeping everything it likes from the pulp comics that it's inspired by.
@Carcer me too! Just started doctor wh. Everyone told me to skip the very first seasons... And here I am watching them because I cannot not do it. ANd it's not as bad as they made them seem! (Not hte first first ones, just the first after the restart)
@Helwar I really like the Ninth Doctor. A lot of folks don't, but contrariwise I have a hard time with Ten but he's super popular. Don't let anybody tell you your favorite Doctor is wrong.
but hey, if you managed to make it through the scene where Rose just does not notice she's in a car with a melting plastic man, you can probably tolerate the worst Who has to offer
at least until everything changes when the Mofffat Director attacks
@Helwar I feel like Tennant will be a great Doctor in five or ten years, but as played he's only got two settings: I Am Very Serious, and Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
The acting, though, that's on Tennant. He's mostly grown out of it, but O man you should've seen him in Hamlet. Whenever Hamlet had a particularly energetic moment he suddenly became the Doctor.
(And it's also either a promise or a warning sign, depending on your perspective, of Things To Come: Moffat seems to have used COFD as a checklist for his time as showrunner.)
@Carcer I think I might've liked Tennant if he hadn't gone on for so long. Certain patterns and motifs got really overused.
One of my favorite Ten episodes is "Midnight," in large part because it savages Ten's "I'm the Doctor, trust me" patter.
I might be misremembering and it was me that hated it. I remember having the impression that they go from 0 to "gottta kill someone" very quickly and with for no apparent reason
was a very long time ago that we watched it and I start to have difficulty remembering which opinions statements were mine and which were his after a while
I couldn't stand "I don't want to go." The rest of the episode's victory lap is fine, it's earned, but all the whinging about how he was going to die and another man would walk away? It felt like a real stab in the back to the oncoming cast and crew, making it as hard as possible for the audience to welcome the transition.
We know Russell T. Davies can write a regeneration transition that's emotional and heartfelt and sad and triumphant without stacking the deck against the next Doctor: he did exactly that for Nine's regeneration into Ten! "You were fantastic. And you know what? So was I."
...Though, that was nothing compared to the viciousness of Moffat's stab at Davies in his last episode.
Diaspora has a whole section on this, which boils down to the idea that the GM is referee of a discussion about the rules, rather than an adjudicator of the rules.
