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?