It took me two days to learn D&D 3.5 from scratch, two goddam days, how much effort is that? About the same as watching a marathon of FRIENDS or scrubs followed by Lord of the Rings. It's not a big deal. 4th is like windows vista, you see some new things and elucidate "gosh, that makes so much sense, why ...didn't they do that earlier?", but on the vast majority of things I panic and scream "Oh god, they're ruining it!". You can bit-torrent all the 4th core books from Thepiratebay.com with utorrent.
It took me 30 minutes to learn Savage Worlds from scratch, 30 goddam minutes, how much effort is that? About the same as watching an episode of FRIENDS or scrubs followed by making a cup of noodles.
The system just seems to lock characters into roles. Magic users deal damage, fighters defend them, rogues deal damage and cause crazy effects. WTF? OK so now your sword becomes redundant, your mission in life is to tank like in WoW. Call me crazy, but I think that burning someone with a fireball is about as effective as stabbing them through the chest. And WOTC have the gall to call wizard robes "cloth armour" just to follow WoW. If you were wearing your casual clothes, I bet you'd get some funny looks if you started referring to it as armour.
How dare they attempt to make classes that don't cast magic useful?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Lacy Mizner Would Like To Not Be Raped
By Jagerhund
This would have been - I think - Origins 2004. I had gone to the con with four or five of my friends, and had spent most of the weekend playing various one-offs where we'd show up in pairs and just try to generally be the most awesome people at the table, in a (hopefully) not obnoxious way.
On the last day, we'd all been trying to get into a Call of Cthulhu game that was advertised as being for "adults only". Since people are kind of touchy about child safety at cons, we figured this warning translated to "horrific madness and mind-twisting gore", which is what we'd signed up for. There were two such games, with different story lines, apparently, and two of us signed up for each. About an hour before the start of one game, however, one of the games got canceled, so at the last minute one of our group managed to muscle in on the other game. Having three people who all knew each other at one table seemed a little unbalancing, but hey, gently caress it, it was the last game of the last day, and besides, there were going to be another five people at the table.
Things seemed promising at first. The group running the game was reportedly some "legit" outfit that ran games every year, and they had a room dedicated to the games they'd be running over the weekend. The CoC room was decked out in appropriate mood lighting and had some decent, haunted house-style decorations going on. Nothing extreme, but it created a decent ambiance.
That was the end of the good news. Me and two of my friends sat at the table with the Keeper and five other people. The Keeper reminded us all that the game was for "adults only" and said he'd distribute our pre-fabs for the game.
The game itself was supposed to be a sort of Nature Trail to Hell scenario, where a group of friends set out on a wilderness excursion and things then go horribly, horribly wrong. Sounded pretty decent. The Keeper hands out sheets without bothering to ask anybody what sort of character they'd like to play or whether a given character was suitable for the player. Normally, I let that go, because some GMs just don't have time to gently caress around trying to fill orders. Fine, cool. The character I was given, however, was a seventeen year-old high school girl. Again, whatever. I can live with that. I've played girls before.
A few years back, I started keeping all my character sheets, pictures, notes, etc in a folder at home, so thankfully I can now share with you exactly what was handed to me:
I was fairly disappointed about the rather anemic set of skills, if only because it limits what the character can do, but again, gently caress it, I figured I could make this work and pull myself through by just playing smart. Then I got handed the character writeup, and a semaphore squadron’s worth of flags went up:
The emphasis on sex caught me off guard. Maybe the relationships between the party members were going to play some integral part in the plot down the line, but the paragraph of sentences used to catalog my character’s sexual history could have been summed up in one sentence, no more. I was glad to know that one of my pals was playing Craig, the big brother character, so at least I’d be assured there were no creepy incest tropes I’d be forced to endure. I was handed a piece of white cardboard with my character’s name on it to place in front of me, and as the rest of the group got familiar with their characters, we started.
Five minutes in, Craig broke his leg while trying to climb up a ridge, and was forced to play the rest of the session using a makeshift crutch and dosed to the gills on pain pills one of the other characters had in their equipment. I think “cripple on opiates” would have been a role better suited to an NPC, but whatever. The game went on, our party comprised of myself, the older brother, two of the older brother’s guy friends (one of which was the dreamy ‘Dominic’), Craig’s girlfriend Stephanie, the girlfriend of the other guy friend, and lastly, our tour guide, played by my other mate. I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with the tour guide, but he was an older guy, and had some disfiguring deformity that made him “ugly”. For purposes of this story, we’ll say he was a burn victim with a harelip.
Rather than trot back to our vehicles and call the expedition off, the Keeper informs my friend, the harelip burn boy, that there’s a sort of backwoods little hamlet about two kliks away. Harelip, who had until then been advocating we simply go back, was curtly informed by the Keeper that “hours” had passed before the accident, as opposed to the few minutes we had all believed it was, and that it would be faster and easier to just move on to the village. When my friend asked if they had a clinic or even a nurse at the town, he was told that no, there wasn’t. Even though he still decided we should turn back, the Keeper forced us all to move on, insisting that there wouldn’t be a game otherwise. Whatever. On the rails we go.
Arriving at the town, we find ourselves trapped with the cast of Deliverance, which is what I’m fairly certain most of the concept for this game was pulled from. The locals, some fifty of them, live in this backwood little community without electricity or sewage, cars, or any roads leading in or out of town. Again, the whole idea is pretty dumb, but we roll with it.
Pretty much immediately after rolling into town do the contrived sex scenarios start. While getting his leg splinted by one of the local girls, Craig is compelled to gently caress his willing caregiver, in spite of his ostensible faithfulness to his girlfriend and the, y’know, freshly broken leg. Meanwhile, the couple gets roped into a four-way with two of the strapping village bucks, and the Keeper makes it a point to describe to the male player that his character gets hosed in the rear end by both of them, “but strangely, you seem to enjoy it.”
At this point, I took my name plate, pulled out a sharpie, and added the following under my character’s name:
quote:
LACY MIZNER
would like to not be raped. Seriously.
For my part, there isn’t a lot for me, Dominic, Stephanie, or Harelip to do. Stephanie eventually decides to go looking for Craig, and ends up getting seduced by one of the locals. Harelip wanders around town for a bit, and I, foolishly thinking that maybe I should try to do some roleplaying in this abortion, strike up a conversation with the dreamy Dominic, with whom I make an honest and sincere effort to flirt with, as best as a chubby (at 5’6” and 140lb?), embarrassed, self-conscious high school girl would. Dominic’s player showed admirable role-playing skill himself, when he passed on the opportunity to vicariously bang a high school girl in his imagination and instead politely gave me the “You’re a sweet kid” speech. It turns out that Dominic’s background sheet noted that he was attracted to Craig’s girlfriend and was kind of hoping to throw a wrench in she and Craig’s relationship during this trip. Cool.
At this point, my character is crestfallen, mopey, and even more self-conscious and down on herself than normal. Makes sense, right? I figure, hey, I’ll go look for Craig, see if I can find my big brother to console me. Instead, I walk in on him banging six shades of poo poo out of Stephanie and some farm girl – mind you, he was basically being run as an NPC at this point, my friend had no part in this – and in horror, convinced that the world was hosed, she ran away in tears.
The next time I get any face time is at some fest hall banquet dinner the yokels are throwing for us, their “guests”. I insisted that I wanted to sit next to Craig, regardless of his indiscretions, but the Keeper informed us that our hosts had laid out all our places for us, and none of us were sitting together, but all of us were bookended on either side of the bench seating by some appropriately-sexed local. I tried to insist otherwise and was promptly told to gently caress off. The meal begins, and I mention – because I’m still desperately trying to do some actual roleplaying – that my character isn’t eating. The Keeper becomes thoroughly distressed by this, and demands I eat. At this point, I know something’s up, but the decision had nothing to do with suspicion: I’d decided that my character, the fat girl, felt unattractive and sad, and so she was going to starve herself in a fit of self-hatred. That seemed reasonable to me, but when the Keeper started becoming unhinged by the fact I wasn’t eating, it gave me plenty of OOC motivation to stick to my guns. Then he asked me if I drink anything, and I said I didn’t. He continued to bully and browbeat me throughout the dinner scenario to eat or drink, and I continued to tell him to get hosed.
The reason for all this ham-fistedness became apparent pretty quickly: the food and drink all had some sort of Cthulhoid aphrodisiac in it (Rhy’lethian Fly?) that forced all the PCs to become sex-obsessed hand puppets for the Keeper. Everyone at the table degenerated into some bacchanalian orgy, except for Harelip, who’d taken a few bites and quietly excused himself to go outside and smoke.
The end scenario of the game was basically the Keeper detailing what happened to our characters with little to no actual choice in between. The last vestiges of choice left in the party were mine and Harelip’s, and despite playing against the Keeper’s infantile little erotic fanfic, we were railroaded all the same. Harelip was called out to the woods by some siren song, where he found a dark cave. Venturing inside, he discovered a Cthulhoid monstrosity, a sort of great, seething ball of flesh that lured him in with a series of inviting lips, genitals, breasts, etc. Thinking perhaps it would advance the plot and eager to run this loving nonsense into the ground, he willingly gave himself up to the Pleasure Sphere, and that’s where his story ended. Mine hit a dead end after dinner. A couple of the farm boys tried to seduce my character, who was, at this point, horrified, sickened, and frightened, and the Keeper was genuinely astonished that I didn’t break the loving sound barrier opening my legs for these guys. He called me out on “poor roleplaying”, which pissed me off enough to jump right down his loving throat about how hosed-up and insane the game was, the scenario was, and how my fat, rejected, virgin character was doing the only thing that made sense in the loving game. At this point, the Keeper got angry with me, and told me that the two boys were now attempted to – you loving guessed it – hold me down and gently caress me by force. I made a token roll to resist, but I already knew how it was going to play out, and I had my poo poo packed up by the time the Keeper had started describing how I was overpowered, raped, and then thrown to the Pleasure Sphere, followed shortly by everyone else in the party. I went outside and had a cigarette, myself.
After the game was over, I saw the guy who played Dominic, and asked him what he thought. He echoed the sentiments shared by my friends and myself, but admitted that he was too sheepish to walk out, and stayed to the end. Apparently, he explained, the village was some self-contained cult for a minor Cthulhoid deity of lust that they tended to in the nearby cave, feeding it occasional travelers by seducing them with food and livestock grown and raised with the aid of a “nectar” that the Pleasure Sphere gave them. We agreed that the game was a miserable, clusterfucked railroad along the Bullshit Express, and, lacking the Keeper’s presence so that we could feed him some knuckles, awkwardly apologized to each other and parted ways.
Sorry for the long-rear end post. Anyway. Worst game ever.
This would have been - I think - Origins 2004. I had gone to the con with four or five of my friends, and had spent most of the weekend playing various one-offs where we'd show up in pairs and just try to generally be the most awesome people at the table, in a (hopefully) not obnoxious way.
On the last day, we'd all been trying to get into a Call of Cthulhu game that was advertised as being for "adults only". Since people are kind of touchy about child safety at cons, we figured this warning translated to "horrific madness and mind-twisting gore", which is what we'd signed up for. There were two such games, with different story lines, apparently, and two of us signed up for each. About an hour before the start of one game, however, one of the games got canceled, so at the last minute one of our group managed to muscle in on the other game. Having three people who all knew each other at one table seemed a little unbalancing, but hey, gently caress it, it was the last game of the last day, and besides, there were going to be another five people at the table.
Things seemed promising at first. The group running the game was reportedly some "legit" outfit that ran games every year, and they had a room dedicated to the games they'd be running over the weekend. The CoC room was decked out in appropriate mood lighting and had some decent, haunted house-style decorations going on. Nothing extreme, but it created a decent ambiance.
That was the end of the good news. Me and two of my friends sat at the table with the Keeper and five other people. The Keeper reminded us all that the game was for "adults only" and said he'd distribute our pre-fabs for the game.
The game itself was supposed to be a sort of Nature Trail to Hell scenario, where a group of friends set out on a wilderness excursion and things then go horribly, horribly wrong. Sounded pretty decent. The Keeper hands out sheets without bothering to ask anybody what sort of character they'd like to play or whether a given character was suitable for the player. Normally, I let that go, because some GMs just don't have time to gently caress around trying to fill orders. Fine, cool. The character I was given, however, was a seventeen year-old high school girl. Again, whatever. I can live with that. I've played girls before.
A few years back, I started keeping all my character sheets, pictures, notes, etc in a folder at home, so thankfully I can now share with you exactly what was handed to me:
I was fairly disappointed about the rather anemic set of skills, if only because it limits what the character can do, but again, gently caress it, I figured I could make this work and pull myself through by just playing smart. Then I got handed the character writeup, and a semaphore squadron’s worth of flags went up:
The emphasis on sex caught me off guard. Maybe the relationships between the party members were going to play some integral part in the plot down the line, but the paragraph of sentences used to catalog my character’s sexual history could have been summed up in one sentence, no more. I was glad to know that one of my pals was playing Craig, the big brother character, so at least I’d be assured there were no creepy incest tropes I’d be forced to endure. I was handed a piece of white cardboard with my character’s name on it to place in front of me, and as the rest of the group got familiar with their characters, we started.
Five minutes in, Craig broke his leg while trying to climb up a ridge, and was forced to play the rest of the session using a makeshift crutch and dosed to the gills on pain pills one of the other characters had in their equipment. I think “cripple on opiates” would have been a role better suited to an NPC, but whatever. The game went on, our party comprised of myself, the older brother, two of the older brother’s guy friends (one of which was the dreamy ‘Dominic’), Craig’s girlfriend Stephanie, the girlfriend of the other guy friend, and lastly, our tour guide, played by my other mate. I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with the tour guide, but he was an older guy, and had some disfiguring deformity that made him “ugly”. For purposes of this story, we’ll say he was a burn victim with a harelip.
Rather than trot back to our vehicles and call the expedition off, the Keeper informs my friend, the harelip burn boy, that there’s a sort of backwoods little hamlet about two kliks away. Harelip, who had until then been advocating we simply go back, was curtly informed by the Keeper that “hours” had passed before the accident, as opposed to the few minutes we had all believed it was, and that it would be faster and easier to just move on to the village. When my friend asked if they had a clinic or even a nurse at the town, he was told that no, there wasn’t. Even though he still decided we should turn back, the Keeper forced us all to move on, insisting that there wouldn’t be a game otherwise. Whatever. On the rails we go.
Arriving at the town, we find ourselves trapped with the cast of Deliverance, which is what I’m fairly certain most of the concept for this game was pulled from. The locals, some fifty of them, live in this backwood little community without electricity or sewage, cars, or any roads leading in or out of town. Again, the whole idea is pretty dumb, but we roll with it.
Pretty much immediately after rolling into town do the contrived sex scenarios start. While getting his leg splinted by one of the local girls, Craig is compelled to gently caress his willing caregiver, in spite of his ostensible faithfulness to his girlfriend and the, y’know, freshly broken leg. Meanwhile, the couple gets roped into a four-way with two of the strapping village bucks, and the Keeper makes it a point to describe to the male player that his character gets hosed in the rear end by both of them, “but strangely, you seem to enjoy it.”
At this point, I took my name plate, pulled out a sharpie, and added the following under my character’s name:
quote:
LACY MIZNER
would like to not be raped. Seriously.
For my part, there isn’t a lot for me, Dominic, Stephanie, or Harelip to do. Stephanie eventually decides to go looking for Craig, and ends up getting seduced by one of the locals. Harelip wanders around town for a bit, and I, foolishly thinking that maybe I should try to do some roleplaying in this abortion, strike up a conversation with the dreamy Dominic, with whom I make an honest and sincere effort to flirt with, as best as a chubby (at 5’6” and 140lb?), embarrassed, self-conscious high school girl would. Dominic’s player showed admirable role-playing skill himself, when he passed on the opportunity to vicariously bang a high school girl in his imagination and instead politely gave me the “You’re a sweet kid” speech. It turns out that Dominic’s background sheet noted that he was attracted to Craig’s girlfriend and was kind of hoping to throw a wrench in she and Craig’s relationship during this trip. Cool.
At this point, my character is crestfallen, mopey, and even more self-conscious and down on herself than normal. Makes sense, right? I figure, hey, I’ll go look for Craig, see if I can find my big brother to console me. Instead, I walk in on him banging six shades of poo poo out of Stephanie and some farm girl – mind you, he was basically being run as an NPC at this point, my friend had no part in this – and in horror, convinced that the world was hosed, she ran away in tears.
The next time I get any face time is at some fest hall banquet dinner the yokels are throwing for us, their “guests”. I insisted that I wanted to sit next to Craig, regardless of his indiscretions, but the Keeper informed us that our hosts had laid out all our places for us, and none of us were sitting together, but all of us were bookended on either side of the bench seating by some appropriately-sexed local. I tried to insist otherwise and was promptly told to gently caress off. The meal begins, and I mention – because I’m still desperately trying to do some actual roleplaying – that my character isn’t eating. The Keeper becomes thoroughly distressed by this, and demands I eat. At this point, I know something’s up, but the decision had nothing to do with suspicion: I’d decided that my character, the fat girl, felt unattractive and sad, and so she was going to starve herself in a fit of self-hatred. That seemed reasonable to me, but when the Keeper started becoming unhinged by the fact I wasn’t eating, it gave me plenty of OOC motivation to stick to my guns. Then he asked me if I drink anything, and I said I didn’t. He continued to bully and browbeat me throughout the dinner scenario to eat or drink, and I continued to tell him to get hosed.
The reason for all this ham-fistedness became apparent pretty quickly: the food and drink all had some sort of Cthulhoid aphrodisiac in it (Rhy’lethian Fly?) that forced all the PCs to become sex-obsessed hand puppets for the Keeper. Everyone at the table degenerated into some bacchanalian orgy, except for Harelip, who’d taken a few bites and quietly excused himself to go outside and smoke.
The end scenario of the game was basically the Keeper detailing what happened to our characters with little to no actual choice in between. The last vestiges of choice left in the party were mine and Harelip’s, and despite playing against the Keeper’s infantile little erotic fanfic, we were railroaded all the same. Harelip was called out to the woods by some siren song, where he found a dark cave. Venturing inside, he discovered a Cthulhoid monstrosity, a sort of great, seething ball of flesh that lured him in with a series of inviting lips, genitals, breasts, etc. Thinking perhaps it would advance the plot and eager to run this loving nonsense into the ground, he willingly gave himself up to the Pleasure Sphere, and that’s where his story ended. Mine hit a dead end after dinner. A couple of the farm boys tried to seduce my character, who was, at this point, horrified, sickened, and frightened, and the Keeper was genuinely astonished that I didn’t break the loving sound barrier opening my legs for these guys. He called me out on “poor roleplaying”, which pissed me off enough to jump right down his loving throat about how hosed-up and insane the game was, the scenario was, and how my fat, rejected, virgin character was doing the only thing that made sense in the loving game. At this point, the Keeper got angry with me, and told me that the two boys were now attempted to – you loving guessed it – hold me down and gently caress me by force. I made a token roll to resist, but I already knew how it was going to play out, and I had my poo poo packed up by the time the Keeper had started describing how I was overpowered, raped, and then thrown to the Pleasure Sphere, followed shortly by everyone else in the party. I went outside and had a cigarette, myself.
After the game was over, I saw the guy who played Dominic, and asked him what he thought. He echoed the sentiments shared by my friends and myself, but admitted that he was too sheepish to walk out, and stayed to the end. Apparently, he explained, the village was some self-contained cult for a minor Cthulhoid deity of lust that they tended to in the nearby cave, feeding it occasional travelers by seducing them with food and livestock grown and raised with the aid of a “nectar” that the Pleasure Sphere gave them. We agreed that the game was a miserable, clusterfucked railroad along the Bullshit Express, and, lacking the Keeper’s presence so that we could feed him some knuckles, awkwardly apologized to each other and parted ways.
Sorry for the long-rear end post. Anyway. Worst game ever.
Grognard.txt 2: 'Sperg Harder!
I have not idea what blog this was from, but this motherfucker was 7 pages, double spaced. Someone clearly doesn't like change...
-----------------------------------------------
I figure any game blog is going to require a discussion about what's happened to our tried and true dungeon delver since Wizards of the Coast got it from TSR, and what they've since done to it. So I'm going to have it out right here.
No, I do not like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.
I don't hate it. I might play it, but to me it's like playing Candyland after playing Diplomacy for so long. I don't invest enough emotion in any game to "hate" it, as the erstwhile defenders who wasted good money on it say. And yes, the real haters are the ones who vehemently will not accept any criticism of this game.
I've been playing AD&D since 1st Edition. I had very few problems with 2nd Edition; they were annoying, but mostly they were nothing that a good and savvy DM couldn't handle with a bit of tweaking. I had quite a lot more problems with 3rd Edition, particularly with what they did to the mighty Paladin, who was reduced but to a shadow of his former glory. Again, that was nothing that a good and savvy DM couldn't handle with a bit of home rules.
My big problem with 3E, and with d20 in general, was the Attack of Opportunity, which necessitated the need for the battlemat. It's not that I don't like maps; I love maps. I mind being forced to rely on a battlemat. Because you now had to draw out a map to a more exact detail in terms of distance and reference than you were required to before because of the AoO. I'm a GM that likes combat to go fast, smooth, and generally easy to follow without having a ton of modifiers to track, which is another nit I pick off of d20 games.
4th Edition is not Dungeons and Dragons. It is in name only. It barely resembles Dungeons and Dragons of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Edition. Don't believe me? I can't take a character from those editions and faithfully convert him to 4E.
I have a 27th Level High Elf Archmage named Myrow the Magnificent (and yes, he actually did earn that title). Actually, in 3.5E terms he's a Wizard 14, Artificier 4, Mage of the Arcane Order 2, Archmage 5, and Loremaster 2. Getting away from the Prestige Classes, to convert Myrow from 3.5 to 4E would to castrate him. This is a guy who can level entire cities, smash castles into dust with meteors, and cast Wish at will. Wish doesn't exist in 4E. All of his spells would be reduced to jokes; doing the math, his Meteor Swarm converted to 4E could not even kill an entire squad of CR 3 Hobgoblins!
Maybe that's an extreme example, but a Fighter from 2E or 3E is not a Fighter in 4E. In fact, a Fighter in 4E is a Defender. He has a specific role; he's a tanker, a term derived primarily from MMOs.
In previous editions, you could make a fighter into anything you wanted. True, even back in my beloved 1st Edition, there might've been pigeonholing going on, as players adapted to the play-environment which they were given by necessitating a good balance of abilities within a party. But if you wanted to make a light fighter, one who relied more on mobility and stealth than brute force, you could do that.
Can you do that in 4E? Not really. For one, the abilities you get limit you to what you can do. You may want to have a fighter who's concerned enough about stealth to want to wear leather armor, but then you'd be hampering your abilities as a "defender," and that's the problem.
Your fellow players expect you to be a defender. So, hold that thought.
In 1st and 2nd Edition, the rules were, in black and white, that you rolled for your stats. Sure, there were optional rules that allowed you to make stronger characters if you wanted, but I preferred rolling 3d6 for your stats and keeping what you got.
Why?
Because of the challenge. It's called Role-Playing!
Sure, your character may not be as strong as you'd like or smart as you'd like, but the idea was to play him. The idea back then was that heroism wasn't defined by how strong or smart or quick you were. Heroism is defined by what you do, by using what you have and overcoming the odds. And you built your character up from there. There was more to Dungeons and Dragons than simply leveling and gaining magic items. There was buying new weapons and armor, looking for special material components, looking for new jobs and adventure.
If you look at the 4E PHB, they've totally done away with any notion of you even daring to roll your stats. They would rather you took the pre-determined values and place them in the ability scores best suited to the class you were playing.
Now, of course nothing's stopping you from actually rolling your stats. But if nobody else at the table is, you better be prepared for their anger if you don't roll up something that is acceptable to them.
Because 4E is designed with a particular party arrangement in mind. Look at the 4E DMG. This game starts with the premise that there will be about 4-5 players at the table, that there will be a defender, a striker, a controller, and a leader, with someone else taking a role to boost a particular part of the party (everyone likes two defenders up front, right?). It then goes on to spell out what you'd have to do as DM to your own bad guys if your players don't measure up to that paradigm in anyway.
It already presumes that everyone is expertly competent, at least according to their stats, in their assigned (note, not chosen) role.
I've argued with a lot of people on that point. They don't see a problem with that. Why roll up and play an incompetent, or less than competent character? They simply don't understand. They think there is freedom and variety in being able to make a fighter with a higher Constitution or Dexterity than one with the high 16 stat in Strength, but they would be wrong. Play the game long enough, you'll learn what works, and you'll have to eventually bow to the conforming nature of 4E and play a fighter with the 16 Strength and the Scale-Mail Armor.
And then every fighter, in fact every character, begins to look the same. If you give me a 4E Wizard or Cleric or whatever, I can generally predict just what he'll look like on the numbers. From there on it's little variation. You needn't have bothered to name the playing piece you've handed me; because you've just handed me a wargame piece.
That's a stark contrast to a freshly rolled character from the 1E and 2E days. There was more individuality, more character in that character than there is in the cookie-cutter design of the 4E paradigm.
And then there are the patronizings.
4E is a game that caters to those who don't ever want to lose.
If you read the DMG, it is filled with platitudes and emasculating nonsense that could only come from a liberal city like Seattle. There are no instantly deadly traps. It tells you not to have combat encounters next to an 80' cliff for low level characters; because, you know, if they fall, they might...oh no...they might die!
I'm sorry; I thought D&D was about high adventure! How can you have high adventure if there is no high risk of failure or death?
Of course, as I mentioned, most 4E people have never actually read the DMG. I know; I quiz them from time to time. Oh, they may have consulted the charts, they may have flipped through it, but they never just sat there and read this.
Those that have read it tell me the same casual defense of it. "I don't run my game like that anyway. I put instantly lethal traps (or, I have my monsters pound on fallen PCs)." That's not the point. The point is that the whole premise of 4E is fully expressed in the DMG, and that premise is this:
The PCs are already heroes, but they're heroes utterly interdependent upon one another to survive, but they are never going to face anything that, statistically, they shouldn't be able to handle when they're all together.
Heaven forbid that the PCs should ever encounter anything dangerous enough that they'd have no choice but to run for their lives. If you run your game as per the 4E DMG, that option would be the last thing in your mind.
There are other mechanical flaws that I find annoying, all of which is easy to see that WotC was looking to curry favor with the MMORPG crowd; World of Warcraft (WoW) in particular.
Encounter Powers, for instance. Why do they only work once per encounter, especially martial powers? Why do I have to wait five minutes in order to do this special attack again? You may not have a problem with that, but in RPGs that can be a nasty problem. That's what I call a "Man Behind the Curtain" problem, where you are no longer role-playing in a fantasy world, but now you are playing a game because the game mechanics have interfered with the role-playing aspect.
And take monsters. I've DMed 4E, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is an exasperating thing when you have monster abilities that recharge on a result of a d6 roll.
What's wrong with that, you say? Plenty.
Consider what they've done to everyone's favorite monster, the dragon. Dragons, in the 4E Monster Manual, get to use their breath weapon once at any time during a combat encounter, and it recharges on a d6 roll of a 5 or a 6. You're thinking that's a 33% chance that it'll come back each round. That would not be the correct way of looking at it. The correct way to look at it is that the breath weapon is 66% unreliable.
That means that once the dragon has used his breath weapon, there is no reasonable expectation that it'll come back in the next round for him to use. What's wrong with that? The problem is that now I, as DM, can't role-play this intelligent dragon properly. How do I properly use his abilities to their fullest expression? In the past editions, there was a guaranteed rate of return for such a weapon, within 1-4, or more, rounds. But the 4E dragon has no such expectation. There's a really good chance it may never, ever, come back for the rest of the combat encounter. The 4E dragon doesn't know when it will come back; he has no way of knowing! So now, he has to use tactics and attacks that do not factor in his breath weapon at all because he can't rely on it.
And even so....the breath weapon is weak compared to what it was before. In previous editions, an adult dragon was something to be feared. He could raze armies in one gout of his breath weapon. Not in 4E. But since every other class has been just as castrated, it's hard to tell from that perspective.
Every creature that has such mechanics suffers the same dilemma.
Conclusion
There are other deal-breakers with 4E, but one is enough for me. At best, 4E is a mediocre wargame. It is not an RPG. If this game were called anything else but D&D, I don't think so many people would play it. In the deepest part of their hearts, even the most stalwart 4E defender knows this to be true; he has trouble admitting that he was duped, and admitting he was fooled. I don't begrudge anyone for being fooled. We've all been taken by charlatans and crooks passing bad products. They appeal to our emotions.
4E is a bad game overall. I give it a 2 out of 5. I don't begrudge people who play it; I just hold the fort, waiting for the day when they're ready to play something a bit more exciting and a lot better.
Like Shadowrun, or Savage Worlds.
---------------------------
Savage worlds is still a pretty awesome system though.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Christian Humber Reloaded: Yet Another "Worst fanfiction ever"
"Know, O Nerd, that between the years when the spam drank fanfiction.net and the gleaming deviantart, and the rise of the Sons of Furry, there was an Age undreamed of, when awful fanfics lay spread across the internet like shit-brown mantles beneath the servers - My Immortal, Sonic in the Search for Love, Rectified Anonymity with its Poke'bestiality and genital mutilation, Squad Broken with its Space Marine that comes back as a Necron and jams a Gauss Flayer up an Ork's ass, Full life Consequences that bordered the pastoral lands of Haloes in Space... But the proudest fanfic of the world was Christian Humber Reloaded, reigning supreme in the dreaming basement.
Hither came Vash, grey-haired, dark-eyed, gunblade in hand, a wolf, a bounty hunter, a Gary Stu, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic author surrogacy, to tread the jeweled thrones of the web under his pawed feet."
This one, discovered by SA goons during some modern midnight conversation, actually has a back story behind it so vivid, that the chances of this being a troll seem unlikely.
“It is a terrible fanfic like many terrible fanfics, but it is different in a key, key fashion: It has the most powerful self-insertion character I’ve ever seen. I have no doubt that, in time, something new and worse will be offered, but few are so overpowered and at such length as Christian Humber, or shall we say Vash Blade Rarely-Referenced-To-And-Always-Different Last Name. Further, few have touched so many different fandoms in their Bad Places, to the point where damn near every internet nerd will have a favorite or reviled series of anime or game abused at some point. Watch as Christian Humber shows up everyone from the Space Marines to the Protoss to the Bionicle to Neo to Sora to Alucard (The One From Hellsing) to random street gangs to dragons to… notably, NOT Street Sharks. I assume it’s Street Sharks he refers to, because he’s a mutant shark wearing coconut armor, and, despite being gene-spliced to become a mutant shark, is nonetheless mostly cybernetic. He is the only character Christian Humber respects, seemingly to the point of arousal. The rest are fodder, an excuse for a new power or artifact or both.”
I'd say this was a troll, but apparently it was written by some kid at a boarding school named, well, Christian Humber. According to legend he was apparently a withdrawn, likely Asperger suffering anime fan. He was so anti-social and seperated from classmates that the administration removed all his anime and manga and video games and internet. This did nothing to help. Instead, he went to another outlet to immerse himself in his fantasy world: writing. Thus was the long, unending epic of Christian Humber Reloaded born.
I don't think anybody could make it through the text alive, but some goons did a complete graphic novel adaptaion of the entire work here. It then becomes hilarious.
Hither came Vash, grey-haired, dark-eyed, gunblade in hand, a wolf, a bounty hunter, a Gary Stu, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic author surrogacy, to tread the jeweled thrones of the web under his pawed feet."
This one, discovered by SA goons during some modern midnight conversation, actually has a back story behind it so vivid, that the chances of this being a troll seem unlikely.
“It is a terrible fanfic like many terrible fanfics, but it is different in a key, key fashion: It has the most powerful self-insertion character I’ve ever seen. I have no doubt that, in time, something new and worse will be offered, but few are so overpowered and at such length as Christian Humber, or shall we say Vash Blade Rarely-Referenced-To-And-Always-Different Last Name. Further, few have touched so many different fandoms in their Bad Places, to the point where damn near every internet nerd will have a favorite or reviled series of anime or game abused at some point. Watch as Christian Humber shows up everyone from the Space Marines to the Protoss to the Bionicle to Neo to Sora to Alucard (The One From Hellsing) to random street gangs to dragons to… notably, NOT Street Sharks. I assume it’s Street Sharks he refers to, because he’s a mutant shark wearing coconut armor, and, despite being gene-spliced to become a mutant shark, is nonetheless mostly cybernetic. He is the only character Christian Humber respects, seemingly to the point of arousal. The rest are fodder, an excuse for a new power or artifact or both.”
I'd say this was a troll, but apparently it was written by some kid at a boarding school named, well, Christian Humber. According to legend he was apparently a withdrawn, likely Asperger suffering anime fan. He was so anti-social and seperated from classmates that the administration removed all his anime and manga and video games and internet. This did nothing to help. Instead, he went to another outlet to immerse himself in his fantasy world: writing. Thus was the long, unending epic of Christian Humber Reloaded born.
I don't think anybody could make it through the text alive, but some goons did a complete graphic novel adaptaion of the entire work here. It then becomes hilarious.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Expurgation of the Squats OR Why Games Workshop Doesn't love you, part one
In the recent history of hobby gaming, no hobby games manufacturer has been able to cultivate an especially good reputation among its followers. TSR, distributor of dungeons and dragons, was notorious for suing into oblivion any who who co-opted the D-20 system for public use. Wizards forces its patrons to buy products in unmarked random "booster" packs. The corn liqour inspired results of incest who brought us FATAL have managed to malign no less than 70% of the earths people. And all such companies have abused their customers by charging exorbitant
amounts of money for their products.
All of the offenses detailed above (save one) have been comitted in the name of the capitalist economy and the norms thereof. But there is one company that cares less about profits than it does about making its adhearants suffer. This company does not care who you are or what you've done. This company simply wants to get you. (And when I say "You" I mean YOU personally!)
What company am I referring to?
Why Games Workshop, of course!
Many would say that this is a serious accusation and that without providing sufficient evidence to support my case, I could be susceptible to a highly unpleasant libel suit from which I might never recover. It is for this reason that I will now outline the evidence that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that not only does games workshop not care for its customers, but that, in many cases, this apathy manifests itself in acts of sheer spite.
Exhibit the first: The Squats
For those not "in the know" the squats were a race of spacefaring dwarf archetypes, supported under the first and second editions of warhammer 40,000. When third edition was released in 1997. the squats ceased to exist, with the rationalization given that "they weren't selling well". Fair enough. Why then did Games Workshop proceed to purge the background material for the game of all references to this once prominent race? Why liquidate them without so much as a period of grace for those who had invested signifigant time and effort into their squat armies?
As time passed, the reasons for this became all too clear. Games Workshop, overseers of the hobby, had grown ashamed of the squats. It wasn't enough to stop making models for the race or to limit them to a barebones core rulebook list, as they had done for the Chaos Dwarves in fantasy. No, the squats had to be destroyed. And so, the squat players, their countless hours of work, their hundreds of dollars invested, were sacrificed on the altar of a few designers pride.
Some rationalize the exodous of the squats by invoking the right of an artist to control the distribution of his intellectual propery. My rebuttal is this:
Any person who collected a squat army during their heyday paid for a box of unassembled grey plastic components. It was left to the player to assemble and paint thse models and only then could their artistic value be realized. We can compare this to another field; Architecture. A pile of girders, bricks, glass panes, wires and other raw materials would only qualify as art amongst the pseudo-intelligensia of New York City. It takes an architect and his subordinantes to assemble these components in such a way that as to be aesthetically pleasing and/or thought provoking, thereby qualifying it as a valid example of what could be described as "art".
Games workshop produced the components for the love of money, wheras the player assembled and painted these components for the love of the game. Who, of these two, is the real artist?
The last reference to the squats in any piece of fluff can be found in the third edition Ork codex in a transcript of Ghazhkull bragging about "Crushin da stunties at Golgotha". The Eulogy of a race which held honour at a premium is nothing more than a passing insult directed not only by the Ork warlord towards his vanquished foes, but by games workshop towards those they betrayed.
amounts of money for their products.
All of the offenses detailed above (save one) have been comitted in the name of the capitalist economy and the norms thereof. But there is one company that cares less about profits than it does about making its adhearants suffer. This company does not care who you are or what you've done. This company simply wants to get you. (And when I say "You" I mean YOU personally!)
What company am I referring to?
Why Games Workshop, of course!
Many would say that this is a serious accusation and that without providing sufficient evidence to support my case, I could be susceptible to a highly unpleasant libel suit from which I might never recover. It is for this reason that I will now outline the evidence that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that not only does games workshop not care for its customers, but that, in many cases, this apathy manifests itself in acts of sheer spite.
Exhibit the first: The Squats
For those not "in the know" the squats were a race of spacefaring dwarf archetypes, supported under the first and second editions of warhammer 40,000. When third edition was released in 1997. the squats ceased to exist, with the rationalization given that "they weren't selling well". Fair enough. Why then did Games Workshop proceed to purge the background material for the game of all references to this once prominent race? Why liquidate them without so much as a period of grace for those who had invested signifigant time and effort into their squat armies?
As time passed, the reasons for this became all too clear. Games Workshop, overseers of the hobby, had grown ashamed of the squats. It wasn't enough to stop making models for the race or to limit them to a barebones core rulebook list, as they had done for the Chaos Dwarves in fantasy. No, the squats had to be destroyed. And so, the squat players, their countless hours of work, their hundreds of dollars invested, were sacrificed on the altar of a few designers pride.
Some rationalize the exodous of the squats by invoking the right of an artist to control the distribution of his intellectual propery. My rebuttal is this:
Any person who collected a squat army during their heyday paid for a box of unassembled grey plastic components. It was left to the player to assemble and paint thse models and only then could their artistic value be realized. We can compare this to another field; Architecture. A pile of girders, bricks, glass panes, wires and other raw materials would only qualify as art amongst the pseudo-intelligensia of New York City. It takes an architect and his subordinantes to assemble these components in such a way that as to be aesthetically pleasing and/or thought provoking, thereby qualifying it as a valid example of what could be described as "art".
Games workshop produced the components for the love of money, wheras the player assembled and painted these components for the love of the game. Who, of these two, is the real artist?
The last reference to the squats in any piece of fluff can be found in the third edition Ork codex in a transcript of Ghazhkull bragging about "Crushin da stunties at Golgotha". The Eulogy of a race which held honour at a premium is nothing more than a passing insult directed not only by the Ork warlord towards his vanquished foes, but by games workshop towards those they betrayed.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Dark Eldar: The next big thing (again)
Fig 1: She who thirsts
Most everyone in our group, with the exceptions of the Commissar and the Bear-Master, have considered collecting a small dark eldar force for use in games not in excess of 750 pts. In doing so we have all learned an important lesson about the Dark Eldar: That in order to use them correctly, you have to have an exceptional knack for grand strategy. Games Workshop themselves have admitted as much. Perhaps they would like to explain why then they elected to include the Dark Eldar in the 3rd Edition Starter Box, hmmm?
Fig 2: Games Workshop, proudly provides rules,
miniatures and background for Space Marines and
others
So Games Workshop releases a starter box set for a whole new system, which includes the obligatory space marines as well as a new army that is designed for use by those who have had years of practice with said system (I.E, nobody) Why? As we know, standard practice with 40K Starter sets is to keep one of the armies to build on yourself and to give/sell the other to a friend. How many people who bought the 3rd edition box set, do you think said "Billy, you can keep the space marines, I think this new army is great!"?
By now, I belive GWs motives for even including the Dark Eldar in this starter box, the most difficult to master army in the game, alongside space marines, the easiest to use, have become abundantly clear. Firstly, to unload the excess of plastic dark eldar models they over-manufactured while expecting them to be among the predominant armies of 3rd edition, and secondly, to masturbate the ego of the space marine player, bringing us full circle back to part one but I digress.
So what role have the Dark eldar played in the game since this time? To be honest, I'm torn.
I have seen professionally painted Dark Eldar armies intended only for display, and I have seen tabletop ready dark eldar who look like they have been dunked headfirst in Orange enamal paint and covered in flock. I have seen dark eldar players suffer humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat far more often than I have seen them achieve even relative success on the battlefield.
Until quite recently, I was certain that the dark eldar were on the way out, fated to be consumed by the same tyranid hive fleet that destroyed the Squats. However, since the range is purportedly going to be expanded upon by our masters at games workshop, I have come to a new set of conclusions.
Fig 3: Hearthguard Grunhag is not pleased
GW is merely rounding out the Dark Eldar range which they failed to complete the first time around in 1998, adding Mandrakes, Grotesques and the like and providing token new rules two editions after they were relevent. GW does not need to "Squat" the dark eldar. As some of us know, the squats played a major role in the 1st and 2nd edition fluff, serving as antagonists to the Orks and Eldar, occasionally falling to chaos, and participating in major events such as the 2nd armeggedon war, as well as crewing most of the Imperiums war machines in Epic 40k. When GW decided they were no longer relevent, they were written almost entirely out of the fluff, save for a throw away reference in the 3rd edition Ork codex.
Dark eldar, on the other hand, have no major role in the fluff, striking from the webway whenever the need arises. They do not conquer planets, Launch crusades against other races or have any greater motive than their own survival. This puts them in the same category as the Hrud and Jokearo. As long as Games Workshop doesn't overproduce the new miniatures (which I doubt they will, given their current financial situation), the Dark Eldar can be kept on as a "niche" army. One that exists in an official capacity for the forseeable future, but can be pulled out without consequence, avoiding the lengthy process of canonical revisionism that accompanied the demise of the Squat empire.
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