Because every game needs one...

Okay. I will wait for the next big update then! excited quivering

Lord Vetinari....

Sounds familiar.........

*suspicious stare*

*whistles and waits, doodeedoo*

I blame the bloody empty boxes that need to be filled.

No worries. Whenever you're ready, we'll continue!

Check your PMs! ;-)

The image link is broken. I can't see the map you're referring to.

Weird, I can see it.

This is the link to it: https://i.ibb.co/g3jqvZf/Expedition-Map-Current.jpg

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to do anything in particular with the latest post or wait for further updates.

Just giving you a chance to interject a question if you want, otherwise I'll just crack on.

Not many, but there's a couple. Thank you for being considerate. You're doing a great job!

I was especially impressed with how you communicated the drows' dark genius and made them still a problem, even though they couldn't threaten me with violence directly.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:23, Fri 28 July 2023.

My air conditioner/heater central unit died completely early Sunday morning. During the hottest, most humid week on record. It's not going to be under 90F at any point during the week, even at midnight. I was sweating making a ham sandwich Monday morning. It will cost $11,500 to fix and won't be installed until next Monday.

I am crashing at different friends' houses in the meantime and trying not to be incredibly depressed.

I will post as soon as I can.

*eyes pop-out*

Hoooowwww mucchhhh?... Holy crap.

Praise God and the Risen Christ!

(Also Dustin the HVAC guy.)

I have AC! I am not dying! Yay!

Uuuuh. Do you remember Randulf's sister's name? I may have forgotten...................

In reply to Ataraxia (msg # 17):

Cristene. Not sure it was said until now.

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"Be like Elminster," don't get me started. Ugh. I generally loathe the Forgotten Realms, but I'm finding that here, at least, you're not hitting me over the head with the annoying parts.

ANYWAY.

A game can never be truly realistic, but it can be believable, and ideally it is. Realism helps with that because the real world is, well, real, and believable, so being more like the real world is inherently more believable. I think it's called verisimilitude.

For example, beautiful women are treated with deference and given presents just for existing. This happens in real life. Some people are also resentful and disrespectful. Adding these elements to a game where a PC is a beautiful woman can make the game world feel more real.

Economics can be another example, with different costs for different things in different places, if those things are available to buy at all, because of different conditions. A rich agricultural valley is going to have cheap food and lodging but expensive weapons and tools, a desolate war-torn province will have everything be cheap because everyone is poor, but most things simply won't be available for sale. It also pays (heh) to be mindful of the specific conditions of specific places and characters who are doing the buying and selling. NPCs are people too, after all.

Where they differ from reality, the rules of the game world should be the rules, they should operate as they do, and exceptions should be rare and notable. That makes a good game world. They don't have to be like the real world, just consistent and follow reasonable chains of cause and effect.

I agree about grogs in Ars Magica. It's my favorite RPG system, but grogs are just weird as a concept.

We are roughly one AD&D edition before they turned the realms into a circus. Speaking of Elminster, at this time he's not anything of relevance. The realms at this point are just a notch above Hyboria, magic is far more pervasive, but it's still the realm of rare specialists who cannot produce fireballs willy-nilly. This timeline is before AD&D 3rd ed where, IMO, the entire RPG got really silly.



And that's very correct. Which is why I struggle with so many sci-fi games. I think they are far worse for that. Nothing in them is believable usually starting with the way the societies are built. A bit like in Star-Trek empires are monolithic and species are not much less monolithical. They have tried to make it better but, by building the diversity into total corner cases only made it slightly worse. Speaking of economy, there are numerous articles on the net about the post-scarcity economy and why it makes no sense the way it is portrayed in Star-Trek.



And what is a good game world for Lady Ataraxia?
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:27, Fri 20 Oct 2023.

It's not just the thousands of level 20+ NPCs, but also that there are more gods than named bodies of water, and they're all superpowered ultrabeings, and PCs not only can never be one, but they can never oppose them. Also, even if it did somehow happen, there's an omnipotent overgod who actively promotes the continued existence of evil. The whole setting is just bad.

I only know 3.5e and on though. Maybe it was different, back in the day.



It's a shame, too, since sci-fi is so much easier to make believable by injecting the trappings of realism that, ultimately, amount to style rather than intruding on narrative directly. For example, orbital paths. If you just throw in a few images of orbital paths, talk about orbits once or twice, and have people calculate delta-V with a computer in the background, instantly more believable. The original Star Wars trilogy did that; it was very hard sci-fi, despite being laser sword samurai fights in space. The Death Star obeys orbital mechanics, X-Wing S-foils are radiators, the thrusters and engines on ships are all bell-nozzle shaped like real rockets, and so on. It's all style, but it makes a difference and makes the setting feel more believable, more like it might actually exist and have consistent internal rules.

Star Trek is just all over the place. Deep Space 9 was the only series that made any sense at all, with the economics thing. The writers of that show recognized that a post-scarcity economy is actually impossible, no matter the setting, and included various desired items that couldn't be replicated, including a currency.



This is the only game I've ever been in where I get to play something other than a dirt farmer or failed apprentice or disinherited untalented noble or grunt or other low-level nobody who does nothing, while said game also lasts more than 5 minutes. So uh. Whatever lets her be cool and do cool dragon-y stuff, I suppose, barring a few items I refuse to engage with, such as friendship with demons or sexually exploiting children.

Very! I remember playing it f-t-f, back in the early 90s. Our biggest frame of reference was Conan which I think moulded my way of seeing the realms. I never really engaged with 3 / 3.5 / etc. Tried 5.0 but was immediately asked to select a list of spells for my lvl 1 rogue and things never went past that point. I had never seen rogues at lvl 1 casting spells, or could conceive of a fantasy setting like that in which I would be interested.



Ah. The bane of rpol. Having said that, other sites have other problems and also some of the same, we are every far from the days of 'openrpg'. Still have a copy somewhere.

I still want to find the time to start a Traveller game. I have an idea for running a game, merchant crew find their way in the universe kind of thing that I want to try.

Runequest's native setting, Glorantha, is the kind of place where "rogues" cast spells right away, but it also doesn't have classes, and it's Bronze Age, and myth and tribalism is part of everyday life, and and and and.

Strictly speaking, I think D&D is intended to emulate a relatively low-fantasy, post-apocalyptic environment. The magic system works to support that.

Was openrpg an older website? Or a program?

I'd really like to play Rogue Trader some day, because it's not merchant ship tramp freighter stuff trying to be Firefly. It's about being an awesome space privateer with an ostentatious hat and having cool space battles. Very high adventure, despite the usual grimness of 40k.

Yeah, I think the cantrips of later D&D owe much to Glorantha. Never liked Glorantha always thought the entire thing was out of a 70s drug infused dream. I knew a guy that loved it. So many times he tried to get me into it but I never really could get interested.

Openrpg was an old piece of software, the first (I think) real virtual tabletop. During its glory days it had an amazing community of players. These days does not exist any more even if the name seems to be used by some dodgy looking applications. It was the closest to a f-t-f community online that I have ever seen.

Having been so long in the UK, you either love or hate GW. I never liked any of the settings... In fact, not even the wargames. Bit over the top for me. And GW as a company at some point turned full litigational corporation in a very US style move way never really sat down well with me. I mean, protect your IP but taking it to the extreme of pursuing BGG in order to remove all of the player uploaded images of their games (miniatures people painted and the likes) really showed their true colour. Nothing even remotely related to them will see my table, even the virtual one!

I liked the older Glorantha, or rather, I like it, since I wasn't around for it. I like the Glorantha in the classic King of Dragon Pass PC game. The constructed mythology and Bronze Age setting is very cool, I think.

OpenRPG sounds like it was neat. I remember, very briefly, using a program that had an all-white interface and a default map grip in a top sub-window. It looked kinda like an IRC chat.

I like Warhammer Fantasy because I'm a history nerd and I like 40k because it's so over the top. It's very British humour. The extreme copyright lawyering though, that I am not a fan of in any way. I likewise do not purchase their products anymore, for that reason.

Suspect that's the one because that just about describes it.

Re Glorantha, I suspect, it was the image of a cubic world with a sinkhole in it that killed it for me. It was one of the first things I saw about Glorantha and one of the few it is still very vivid in my mind. I find really hard to enter into fantasy like that.

If the program I tried was OpenRPG, it had, if I recall, exactly two servers I could connect to, with about 10 members each. I didn't do anything with it.

The oldest site/forum/whatever I tried to play an RPG on was something spider-related. Mythweavers, maybe?

Glorantha is supposed to be flat, like those old timey depictions of the Norse cosmology with a world tree and a sky dome. I also very much preferred Glorantha without a world map. Part of what I liked so much about it in King of Dragon Pass was that Glorantha felt like it could be a real place, especially with the strongly thematic cultures with complex social rules, but it also was full of mystery and the unknown. An omniscient presentation of Glorantha is kind of boring.

Yeah, there was a board where you would arrange games. The program itself was used for specific games, not so much as a gathering place.



Still going strong!




King of Dragon Pass is quite a good game. I enjoyed playing it even if I'm not much of a Glorantha fan. One thing re Glorantha is that it seems to have changed so much over the years. RQ6 is pretty standard fantasy fare with very little to distinguish it from a myriad other settings. A bit like today's Forgotten Realms that are barely recognizable from the first edition.

I just looked at Mythweavers again. It looks familiar. I remember being unimpressed; every game there was low-powered nobodies doing nothing of importance, as is the norm almost everywhere. I find that terribly boring. Currently, that appears to still be the case. The posted recruitment for Vampire personally offends me.

Glorantha definitely has changed. King of Dragon Pass presented a world that was very Bronze Age Europe; the culture of the characters and societies you were controlling was Celtic in essence, with the blue tattoos, violent nature gods, lack of currency, and semi-democratic tribal government. The newest edition of Runequest has a lot of the idiosyncratic mechanics, but it's trying way too hard to appeal to modern morality and sensibilities of diversity and inclusion. They changed the Heortlings (a warlike people similar to ancient Celts) to Sartarites (multicultural scrappy rebels against the evil empire), the insular cultural groups that don't interbreed come in all colors of the rainbow, and the only god that's white-skinned is the evil moon goddess. The deities in Glorantha are supposed to be cultural, but they don't even vaguely resemble the people who worship them. It's like a standard Hollywood script writer got ahold of the game and did the usual thing they do, sacrificing the soul of the work on the altar of pandering.

The appeal of Glorantha was that it felt ancient and foreign, not modern displaced into a fantasy world.

Now, I had no idea about this:



They seem to have fu%$^-up Vampire.



Yeah. It's a bit complicated. Some games have quite a few lawyers looking at content and analysing the varied ways they can be sued for. Going vanilla is safest, so vanilla things go. We had similar discussions even in wargames. Believe it or not, even when portraying war there are some areas of war we need to remove for commercial games. Having said that there was always an issue of representation. Harn for example, bends itself backwards to introduce roles that are non-traditional in a medieval society because they went 100% for medieval realism and then realized the issues associated with it. Games, to one extent of another, always tweaked content to their target demographics. Even in silly ways. For many years the biggest marketing for Talislanta was 'no elves'. In the MtG background, the Elves were originally genocidal racist supremacists (a bit like the ones from Tolkien). These days you cannot even recognize them but, the demographics changed substantially from the tournaments you could see in the 90s to today. I think more than pandering they are taking their content to where they can maximize profits. Why sell only to 2 when you can sell to 10?

I like the new Vampire a lot more, because it's not all about how shitty and worthless you are as a PC and look at all these god-tier NPCs doing everything. I really loathed that crap.

The metaplot of oWoD was very PC-unfriendly in general. Vampire was the worst offender, but the other games were also quite bad about PCs not mattering and just getting to watch as the god-level NPCs did everything of consequence.

I'd have wanted to play a high-level character, but nobody ever let me. I think it would be really cool to play a super-ancient vampire who's Seen Some Stuff. However, it's always about low-tier PC nobodies doing nothing and being pawns in a game they barely know exists.

The newest iteration of WoD, by contrast - Chronicles of Darkness, CofD - doesn't really have a metaplot. The God-Machine Chronicle referenced there is a "campaign" of a sorts, a potential background to the game world. Most of the background material for each gameline in CofD is presented as in-setting potentials and uncertainties, mysteries, if anybody actually knows they're not talking.

As for games hiring lawyers, I don't know about how often they get sued. I do know that pandering to multiculturalism does not actually result in larger audiences or more sales. Other things might, like Critical Role boosting D&D sales a ton. New IPs can be successful doing that, but twisting established ones to pander to expanded audiences just alienates the established audience. Nobody new actually buys into it, or at least, not enough to beat the loss of the original audience. Disney in particular is eating the consequences of that fact.

Just shows how different the experience can be. every Vampire game I played the PCs were, now I know a bit of old pop culture, the equivalent of Klaus / Elijah in the Originals. They had been around for a looonnng time and they were powerful. Never actually been in a game with low power Vamps but, not quite my thing so I have not played in lots of them...





A lot. First big lawsuit, well threat it never got there, was actually in the 1990s and it change the face of racing games for ever. Need for Speed 1 was the last game where you could still race on a truly open road filled with road traffic. Some road users association of sorts in the US got so winded up that Electronic Arts had to change the entire set-up for NFS 2, now they are racetracks just looking like roads. Every single year FPSs have legal issues, I've even seen games having to be changed because they allowed 'too easy modding' and people were adding Ferraris and Porsches to the game and they both threatened to sue. In fact, Ferrari is notorious for chasing even modding sites.

But you can go even back to the 80s and the whole 'D&D is satanic we need to forbid it' thing.



I would say that MtG has been quite successful in that, heck, even D&D I would say has been quite successful at that. Football Manager has defo been successful at that.

I would argue Disney is a different can of worms. They are suffering from overextension, market saturation, and trying too hard to change everything to fit something. It's not that people don;t like the new Star Wars things, it's just that there's too many of them. Same with Marvel superheroes. It was great, up to a point, now every obscure Marvel char seems to have a TV series. Same with Star Wars. I think the biggest issue with Disney is that they found a formula that seemed to be working and someone decided to press the mass production button. That's when the clown car hit against the wall.

The biggest issue we have seen in games it's not actually related to any of this but to the substantial changes in generational gaming patterns. And it's not a cultural or gender thing, it's truly a generational thing.

I've been told I'm uniquely cursed. This is the longest running game I've ever been a player in and the only one that didn't start at the equivalent of level 1.



Really? I've never been much for racing games, but that seems beyond silly. If someone can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, it's not the game's fault.

I bet the people making a fuss were in a similar camp to the same people who say (correctly) that guns don't kill people, people kill people, so taking away guns won't reduce homicide levels.



Excuse me.

What.

How can it be the fault of the game makers if a third party modifies the software themselves?



I don't know enough about MtG or Football Manager to comment intelligently.

When I said "pandering" in this context, I was specifically referring to the trend towards politically popular "inclusivity," the general cultural push towards androgyny, racial homogeneity, and overall "total sameness" where "everyone is included" but nobody actually is.



What changes do you mean specifically?

The legal reasoning was something along the lines of facilitating crime. In short, the game was F1 themed and, even if the base game was fantasy themed, the tools were there to allow it to easily replace with trademarked brands. Silly? Oh yeah.

Even Batracer, an online game done by one guy on his basement, was almost closed down due to this. They had to remove all of the user-created historical carsets after a 'cease and desist' order from Ferrari US.



The biggest changes relate to expectations and time usage.

For ex, wargames tended to be rather poor graphically. It did not matter, people played them because of the historical accuracy. These days, not any more. Eye candy MUST be present. Worse. New (as in age) gamers don't want historical patterns. Biggest example is Hearts of Iron / Europa Universalis. They had to completely screw the games (in historical terms) to make every faction able to win. Historically is, of course, bollocks. But that stopped being the point.

Players these days, expect to get a lot for nothing. In the new MtG online game you can play for free. The trade off is that you have to spend time. So, at the start, it was the usual thing time vs money, you had to spend either one of them. That's all ancient history these days. People want to progress for free at the same rate as if they spent money. And this needs to be accommodated. This has massively impacted even game pricing. For example, the top 10 selling games right now on steam include  4 free to play, 2 discounted, one under $10 and only one full price game. These days what players expect are micro-transactions, not full price games. Last game I worked on, when it was published, it was a veritable S^%& fest re the price. It was still only 50% as expensive as the previous flagship product from the same publisher and it was still trounced because of the price.

Time is another major aspect. The age of the time sink game is gone. Now all games need to allow dipping in and out as easily and quickly as possible. Games need to have special 'fast' modes, either fast resolution, fast matches, something like that. Don;t expect the majority of your players to have an attention span of longer than 3-5s and to spend more than 5-10mins a time in your game. This is largely because younger generations were raised on the age of immediacy. They expect immediate access to content, and immediate gameplay. Build-up, etc are all gone.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:37, Tue 14 Nov 2023.

The law, unfortunately, is a creature of power. In all societies and all times, you get the justice you can afford. A wealthy, famous corporation will use the law to crush those poorer and weaker than itself just because it can, and two wealthy corporations will sue each other and defend themselves against suit exactly and only to the extent it is profitable to them or makes the corporate officers feel good about themselves.



Those games have win conditions? I thought they just...went, until the player got bored, lost, or the time limit ran out.



I dunno about that; people love grinding in MMOs and Genshin Impact and the like. That's the whole game, really. Endless grinding.

That and microtransactions.



I don't know if that's really generational, at least in and of itself.

People have much less disposable income than they used to, in the USA. Inflation in core goods and necessities (housing, food, clothes, medicine, education) is monstrously high, good jobs don't exist unless you know a guy, and real income has been stagnant since 1975. Taxes also increase every year, especially property taxes. My own cost of living has tripled in the past three years, and I live in a very rural location. Groceries are up 500%, property taxes have doubled, income taxes are up 50%, clothes are triple or more, gas is double. The only thing I need to buy regularly that hasn't gotten more expensive is computer equipment.

I don't think it's that people don't want to pay full price for games, I think it's that they can't. At least not in the numbers necessary for a successful commercial product. The hyper-rich and corporate overlords are hoovering up every penny they can get away with and the government is taking the rest.



I have to disagree. At the very least, I play Escape from Tarkov a few times a week. It's at least moderately popular, and you have to play it quite a lot to stay competitive.

To be clear, the horde of people are basically stripping the land bare, right? Eating everything and then some, probably stealing from locals too.

That's what "forage" meant for a long time.

They will disagree with your definition but, the fact is that you are correct.

Yeah. People dislike refugee hordes for a reason. It's not an irrational hate of foreigners.

I'm travelling next week so no posting!

Booooooo

And back with a flu so will be another couple of days.

I hope you feel better soon. Thank you for keeping me updated.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:46, Fri 23 Feb.

Happy Easter! He is risen!

I think we should move on to the next level! the mountain pass or whatever is next!