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casualplayer

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Posts posted by casualplayer

  1. Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

     

    Just finished the audiobook of Neil Gaiman's "Anansi Boys" - read by British actor/comedian Lenny Henry. Young man discovers that his late father was Anansi the trickster god of West African tradition. Magical and supernatural fun ensues. Excellent book with some memorable characters. One thing I noticed' date=' which was not spotlighted at all, but when I noticed it made me grin, was that the only time a character is described by their skin colour is if they are caucasian - a nice reversal of the usual assumptions in most literature.[/quote']

     

    Did you read/listen "American Gods" by Gaiman, where you first get to meet Mr. Nancy. Also enjoyable.

     

    I finished up "The Wise Man's Fear" by Patrick Rothfuss, the second of The Kingkiller Trilogy. Devoured it, like I haven't a series in a very long time. I very much like reading about Kvothe and his friends, how the man became a legend became an innkeeper. The first book, "The Name of the Wind," starts confusingly and slow but gets going after 75 pages and doesn't let up from then on. I like a protagonist that makes mistakes and non-optimal choices because of his character.

  2. Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread.

     

    Death Tribble wanted an Evil Whale. My first go around tried to animorphasize the beastie, but DT really wanted a pretty straight up baleen whale. I gave it a bit of a "chin" growth and red eyes to hopefully push it a bit into 'eeeeevvvviilll!!" territory. But I'm not sure.

     

    evilwhaleII72copy_zps035ba406.jpg

     

    Professor Ishmael Strom!

  3. Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

     

    I'm with Socio. If Batman in Arkham City used this term in regards to a woman, I would have a problem, refuse to purchase or play the game, and encourage others to do the same. But bad guys have to act badly otherwise you can't tell the bad guys from the good. And there is the problem, deteriorating discretion and being too complacent to teach people how to tell the good from the bad and the idea that zero tolerance policies help the situation.

  4. Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

     

    Just finished The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Supposedly he's a local guy, into SCA and gaming, massive geek cred. He also just happens to have scorched off a pretty damn good novel, the first of a short series. The hero telling his tale after his derring-do is done. Took me two tries to get going on it but once I reached the turning point I was hooked.

  5. Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread.

     

    That warrior woman is off the charts amazing but I don't know if she is Exalted enough. Maybe if she had a frost giant's heart clenched in her teeth or had just cloven a mountain in twain. If she won the battle all by herself, that would be Exalted enough.

     

    I wish it wasn't a contracted piece because I would love a print.

  6. Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

     

    I don't know if Omega status will ever be completly removed' date=' but perhaps culturally we will move toward that being not as nasty a thing. I was hoping that some of the stuff I talked about with giving boys and girls more time together when they are fairly young could pay off for both Genders as they get older.[/quote']

     

    As long as we continue organizing things into lists someone will be at the top of the list and someone will be at the bottom. Nonlinear hierarchy is our only hope of breaking out of this mindset.

  7. Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

     

    I think back to the 13 year-old gamer I was, and I have no problems imagining the sexist depths that gamer girls can find themselves subjected to. How sad though to be a grown man and still be a 13 year-old inside. The hobby matured: how about you?

     

    One of my favorite anecdotes: Jim Ward, one of the original fatbeards of Geneva, was trying to market his new RPG 1492, where The Old World was enlightened but The New World had elves. He just couldn't understand why restricting the options for the female characters, who had to originate from The Old World, would be offensive or even a dealbreaker. I mean, historically women weren't allowed to be military or get an education! Suggestions that enforcing historical realism in a fantasy game was a hard sell and discouraging half your potential customers was an even harder sell. He ignored us and that is why 1492 is the most popular RPG on the market today! Shows what we, the sales team at ACD, knew.

  8. Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

     

    So, does all of this Con ass-grabbery also go on at comic and SciFi general conventions? Or is it more for writer and programmer type conventions?

     

    Because my wife wants to go to a couple of the comic cons up here some time, and I don't want to have to mangle anyone up if they get frisky. I'm asking this in all seriousness.

     

    Used to be that women were pretty darn scarce at cons, and treated like an alien species. Still remember the Trek con I went to when I was in high school that had Marina Sirtis as a guest, the intense, teeming hordes surrounding her wanting something they dare not name. Waves of flopsweat lechery. A girl throw into that stew wouldn't have stood a chance.

     

    I also remember Pacificon 91, where my girlfriend's GM just kept "bumping" into her. Almost had to put him down hard. I also scored big points at a early 90's con by offering to gift my soda to a lady so she could throw it in a creeper's face.

     

    While there is still improvement to be made, those days are mostly done. Geek social skills have come a long way. Admittedly they started out with nowhere to go but up, but they have dramatically improved. Your wife might get a lot of attention but it should be reasonably polite appreciation, and someone stepping over the line will likely get chastised by a passerby before you or she even get a chance.

  9. Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

     

    Not even sure what to say. Men are creeps. Beginning to think we should bifurcate the country give one half to each gender and permit no one to cross the border. There may be benefits to women of having men around' date=' but they do not outweigh the drawbacks Given that reproductive technology means procreation no longer requires physical contact, this is not a barrier to sustainablity. Child contracts arranged by matching services, payment to women who agree to have sons to ship back across the border. I could be worked out. Women would not have to put up with male creeps, and men would no longer have the chance to be creeps to women. With modern technology we could even go back and modify literature and movies and such so that children growing up in either state would never even be made aware of the other gender until after high school.[/quote']

     

    Because social skills just flourish in a vacuum? Boys learn how to interact with females from the men they know interacting with females. No interaction with females, no opportunity to learn.

  10. Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy

     

    I honestly don't have any idea what you're even talking about anymore. I was just talking about how the attrition model through the 4-encounter workday (or however many encounters beyond that you want to even use) neither worked or made any sense and now...you're agreeing with me? Alright then.

     

    D&D wasn't ever meant to encourage simulating "4-encounter workdays," even though that is what the gaming masses gravitated towards. You're criticizing the system for not working properly when being used incorrectly while incorporating character classes that were designed post-release by people sketchy on the design parameters. There's lots of things to criticize D&D for but Challenge Rating is not one of them.

     

    An adventure cycle is the time and events between full rests, full rests being the only meaningful increment of time in D&D.

  11. Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy

     

    So GMs take a flawed premise, that CR-equivalent encounters burn exactly 1/4 of party resources, multiply that out and try to max out every adventure cycle , assuming everyone in the party is the same level and every encounter is set precisely at that CR, and then there are introduced character classes that don't diminish progressively with each additional encounter bringing people to the conclusion that the forced, befuddled "4-encounter workday" that was not the intended use of the rules structure in the first place should be abandoned. I get that you had lots of company in this misinterpretation and misuse, but if you crap on the scale the balance shifts.

     

    More than STUN and SPD and END and PD and DCV, I think this kind of thinking is why I prefer HERO to non-HERO for fantasy.

  12. Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy

     

    Considering how I'm one of these "people" -- I think the only person who needs the kick in the pants is you. The four-encounter workday pretty much only worked if your party was under a constant dungeon crawl' date=' like World's Largest Dungeon or something. Try to do literally [i']anything else[/i] in the campaign and it broke completely because four encounters a day just doesn't make any sense at all from a verisimilitude standpoint. Gee, it sure is funny that we're running into four exactly-challenging encounters in this forest per day, while merchant caravans are traveling through it all the time!

     

    Truth be told, it didn't make any sense in dungeon crawls either thanks to the existence of spells like Rope Trick. It only ever worked when the party was under serious time constraints, which is a story mechanic that can get tired and overused extremely quickly.

     

    You're one of the people, the people you mentioned before, who created D&D classes that don't have expend-and-recover abilities and didn't play nicely with the game's core paradigm? What did you want to go and do that for? Or you're one of the people who played in games where your GM lined up 4 beasties in a queue, you fought them one at a time and then took a nap or climbed a rope? Tough break, because that does make for boring, repetitive games.

     

    Guess your GM didn't get that "cunning" means in D&D that even though I might be the first person you meet I intend to be the 4th or 5th person you encounter, when you are depleted, weak, easier pickings. I'm sorry that your GM didn't realize the basic story progression of Mook (CR much less than party level,) Peer (CR slightly less or equal,) Lieutenant (CR equal or greater,) then Boss Monster (CR much greater) that leads to tense, satisfying, dramatic climaxes. Just because it wasn't used properly doesn't mean CR wasn't a useful tool.

     

    HERO is a little trickier to scale competition but still doable. If the adversaries have +3 DCV or greater on your party's OCV it hardly matters what the adversaries' defenses are because they won't be touched. If the enemies have defenses tough enough to soak the party's best attack their DCV hardly matters. If the antagonists' base attacks are enough to one-shot the party then all the party will be doing is turtling, Dodging or hunting for cover. You have to know your party thoroughly and make sure none of these areas is completely outclassing their capabilities. Slightly outclassing, that's good fun and makes for satisfying victories.

  13. Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy

     

    I don't think, in the latter era of 3.5, anyone really subscribed to the "four encounter workday" style of D&D anymore. By that point just about everyone realized that 1) it didn't ever happen that way anyway and 2) it totally broke verisimilitude.

     

    Eventually, people started releasing classes that weren't balanced around the four-encounter workday. When they were at first made with weaker abilities to compensate (the first effort from WotC on this line was the Warlock), they turned out to be weaker effectively all the time.

     

    Having never played 4e, I cannot speak to that. The point I'm trying to make here, though, is that while there are major differences between the systems, this isn't really one of them.

     

    Yeah, those "people" deserve a swift kick in the pants. The Challenge Rating system of D&D was a nice framework for GMs to base adventures on. 3 CR=party level encounters/day, nice easy xp rake with room for dice to go cold and not risk a TPK. 4/day, ebb and flow, could go poorly, might have to press the panic button device, use the emergency exit item. 5/day, seriously harassed, risking coming up empty in the last battle, wizard might have to draw his dagger and fight. The GM could vary the number of encounters to easily manage the pacing, since D&D RAW has few motivators other than potential death and loss of stuff.

     

    You're probably right about CR being 1/4 rather than 1/6. Been a while.

  14. Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy

     

    A beginning D&D spellcasting character might have a bare handful of options, Magic Missile or Cure Light Wounds, and be able to cast them a limited amount of times per day. A beginning HERO spellcasting character probably has a wider selection of spells and can cast them as many times until the END runs out. D&D adventures are built off of Challenge Ratings, which means each encounter pegged at party level is meant to burn off 1/6 of the party's resources. Adventures built off of CR are serious mismatches against characters that don't have finite capabilities.

     

    This is what Markdoc was talking about; he "broke" D&D by making a character that didn't have a finite pool of abilities that could be GM-chipped away at. He HEROed D&D!

  15. Re: Help me grok HERO!

     

    Who knows? Maybe there's a hellmouth or something similar under Middleton. Maybe since Middleton is what the empowered have in common the town has special powers and allure. Lots of dramas get set in what appears to be unremarkable tiny towns. People just kept turning up dead around Jessica Fletcher.

     

    Keeping the setting focused allows you to explore the nooks and crannies and every little darkened corner.

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