Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

I_Abibde posted...

I never did play the L5R CCG, but I still have several of the Rokugan sourcebooks for 3rd Edition D&D.

I have 40 books from all editions 1e to 4e. I actually have the very first 1e rulebook ever released. And I've got every 1e and 2e clanbook from each clan (and the minor clans, and the monks, and the ronin).

I also have Legend of the Burning Sands (which is like L5R, except to the north of Rokugan, in a desert which is basically fantasy Arabia, and with influenced from even farther north into fantasy Egypt), and about 10 7th Sea (which is like L5R set in fantasy swashbuckling Europe) books.

L5R is basically the system I'm most financially invested in other than White Wolf (where I have closer to 250 books).


EDIT: Oh, and for reference, of those 40 books, 7 of them exist more or less solely to sum up events from the CCG tournaments and card set metaplot, and have ways to integrate players into campaigns based on the events of the card game. Which was always the coolest part of that particular system for me.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I_Abibde posted...

I know for certain that I played a sohei for one campaign, though that class only exists in Oriental Adventures, not Rokugan itself, IIRC.

Sohei are a class from the original Oriental Adventures supplements (ie, they were from Kara-Tur, in Faerun, circa AD&D 2e). When Wizards of the Coast got the rights from AEG to publish L5R material during the d20/3e era, they basically retconned the Oriental Adventure setting to Rokugan (the default L5R setting) instead of Kara-Tur. Sohei just got carried over and grandfathered in, even though it wasn't really a class in L5R before that.

It was really odd how they handled it - AEG had published L5R first edition and second edition themselves, then came out with the Oriental Adventures version of the rules, so most of the 2e sourcebooks for L5R wound up having rules for both the d10 drop/keep mechanic of the L5R system as well as the d20/D&D-based rules of Oriental Adventures. Which was kind of awkward.

It didn't really work well as an experiment, so AEG took the rights back and published L5R 3e and 4e themselves (and completely dropped all support for d20 rules). But they officially sold off the rights in full to Fantasy Flight Games now, who are supposedly working on a new 5e version of the RPG (though it seems they were far more interested in the CCG more than the RPG, so they may never get around to releasing the RPG).


Back to the original point, though - you could easily play something like Sohei in vanilla L5R, even if it wasn't originally native to the setting. Sohei are mostly just warrior monks, and there are rules for playing Brotherhood of Shinsei monks in L5R, who use Kiho (monk magic) and Kata (unarmed maneuvers) in combat. "Sohei" is actually used in the original edition as a term to describe the more militant monks in the order, though there isn't explicitly a mechanical distinction between them and other types of monk (Shinmaki, Questioners, Yamabushi, etc) - they're more distinctions between what sort of duties a given monk take upon themselves, and monks can switch between different factions over time as they feel their talents are required in other ways.

Which temple you were trained in makes more of a difference - a monk trained in the temple dedicated to the god of storms tend to be more physically bad ass, but are seen as being somewhat less honorable, while monks trained in the heart of the Empire are more focused on being political advisors and courtiers. There's also a hermit temple with the highest honor and a lot of introspective skills, a temple that focuses more on Kiho over physical combat (ie, they start with extra Kiho), and a couple others.

Some sample Kiho include stuff like being able to cleanse your body of poisons, hitting someone with a paralyzing strike, healing via pressure points, shattering solid objects with a single blow, making yourself effectively invisible as other people all ignore your presence unless you do something extremely blatant, and the ever-tradition DIM MAK (death touch).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

At any rate, I *think* most CCGs do starter or theme decks so in theory it's not that hard for a casual to get into the game (especially since they tend to avoid obscure mechanics).

Oh, definitely - I actually bought a starter set like that for Magic, to play with my nephew.

And then when he kicked my ass when we had relatively equal pre-made decks, I went and got my actual deck built with cards from multiple sets and annihilated him, because I am evil and joy must be crushed.

But ultimately, CCGs that intend to encourage players to buy booster packs tend to have less robust rules (necessarily to prevent synergy conflicts) and don't necessarily have as fun an experience in and of themselves versus a game which is specifically built to be played with very specific cards.

It's like in video games, where sandbox games have a harder time establishing strong narrative because they don't know what order players are going to finish certain objectives in, as opposed to more linear games where the developers know exactly where you're going to go and what order you're going to do things in. When you know exactly what cards every player is going to use, it's easier to set up specific combos, synergies, or established ideas than in a game where you come out with a new set of 200+ cards every few months.

Magic with only starter decks is possible, but feels way too vanilla. But fully committing to boosters can make it harder to engage with.



Zeus posted...

Kind of a neat concept for a RPG. tbh, I always found character creation the most interesting part of any RPG. The rest always started to bore me.

I always used to love playing around with character creation. It's why I used to have like 100+ NPCs for White Wolf games that I knew I'd probably never use in an actual game. I just enjoyed creating new personalities and coming up with names and pictures to help define them.

(This may also be why I wind up taking like 2 hours at the beginning of any RPG video game with a robust character creator, to work out a perfect character design before I'm content enough to play the actual game.)

I also like the idea of games where character creation is a major part of the system, or there's a heavy emphasis on narrative over mechanics (like the aforementioned Once Upon a Time game, or games like Talecraft or Fiasco). Or even incredibly freeform stuff like Story Cubes:

http://www.storycubes.com

Plus, stuff like the cubes, or card decks with an abstract narrative focus or archetypes can also be pretty useful even in more traditional RPGs, to introduce a random element into plotting, or add some symbolism into a story (like using the Ravenloft Tarokka deck to alter allies or secret artifact locations in the setting).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

I liked the look of L5R and I *think* I picked up a starter deck or something like that (apparently relating to the Unicorn Clan)

~spit~ Filthy horsefuckers!

I still have a deck SOMEWHERE in my house (Scorpion Clan), but I probably couldn't even find it if you held a gun to my head and gave me an hour to find it or get shot.

I also can't really remember the rules beyond very vague overtones, because it's been pretty much forever since I played.



Zeus posted...

Looks like they do a little of everything? I see miniatures games, board games, and RPGs there. Not seeing that many CCGs, but I guess they're probably buried in the other products section.

Yeah, they're probably second only to Wizards of the Coast in that respect - they put out a lot of stuff.

Technically, they don't sell CCGs at all - they refer to their stuff as "Living Card Games" - it's sort of a halfway between CCGs (wherein you buy starter decks and blind booster packs) and "Dedicated Deck Games" (where you buy/use a specific deck with pre-established cards).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Flight_Games#Living_Card_Games



Zeus posted...

Entirely self-contained sets sound a little boring, unless it's a shallower game like Uno.

I think it depends on the game, and on what you want out of a game. And who you're playing with.

Sometimes, you want to play a complicated game like Magic, where everyone has a radically different deck and you're never entirely sure what an opponent might be playing. But sometimes you want to play a game like Cards Against Humanity or something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_(game)



Zeus posted...

Are most of those built around two themed decks? Do they pool cards together during the game (a la Uno)? Or do the cards get shuffled, split, and separated into two decks? Because that last idea is intriguing if they also incorporate resource management.

Depends on the game. Some games actually do come with different decks for different players (like, one playing might have a "good" deck while the other player plays the "evil" deck (the Star Wars CCG back in the 90s actually came as a set like that, and Magic regularly releases paired off starter decks you can play with without adding any boosters, but those are both technically CCGs).

Other games just have all of the players draw from a single shared deck, even if resource management is a factor in some way (again, games like Munchkin or Illuminati from Steve Jackson Games probably fall into this sort of category).

If anything, I think I tend to prefer LGCs or DDGs these days, if only because they don't cost as much or require as much player investment as a CCG does. It's part of why I've mostly stopped caring about CCGs entirely other than Magic.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also, my brain keeps tickling around the idea of a game that used to have Tarot-ish cards and an elemental theme, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called (I keep thinking "Ever-something", but I'm not sure that's right). I remember someone jury-rigged it into an Amber DRPG campaign they ran, but I'm pretty sure there were ways to play it stand-alone.

Just figured it out - it was called Everway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everway


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

After talking about CCGs in that other topic, currently trying to look up games with really unusual mechanics. However, there are no good resources for it. Wikipedia has a flat list, most of which don't have entries for the games and many of the ones that do don't provide much invo. There's a wikia I found but, in addition to being hard to navigate, most of the entries are blank.

I always loved L5R, but that was less about the game itself, and more about the community/environment around it. I just thought it was absolutely awesome that the results of tournaments would in turn alter the future plot of the setting (ie, in the original Day of Thunder event, a Lion player won the tournament, so in-game the Lion Champion became Emperor. But if the Crane player had won, the Crane Champion would have assumed the throne). And then events that were shaped by the game and embellished by canon short story fiction posted on the website or released in newsletters, and ultimately integrated into the RPG based on the setting.

They also had a LARP once a year where they'd hold "Winter Court", and players would take on the roles of major characters in the setting, and their interactions in the session would bleed back into the game as well. And other meta-game sort of competitions on the official website that would influence the direction of events.

Just from the mechanical side, though, L5R was kind of cool for being a game you could win in ways other than combat - some decks would win by achieving "honor", others would beat their enemies by "dishonoring" them, you could (with difficulty) win via "enlightenment", and

Aside from L5R, I've also played the Star Wars card game, the Highlander card game, and the Jyhad/Vampire: The Eternal Struggle games enough to have opinions of them, but most of them felt like relatively mediocre games that I enjoyed more because I already liked their settings/franchises beforehand more than because of the game itself.

Fantasy Flight Games is a big presence in CCGs these days - you might want to check out their website to see if you can find something that might catch your fancy. They're the ones who just picked up and rebooted L5R, but they've got a few other games of their own as well.

Another big trend in card games these days is trying to release games that are more self-contained as opposed to collectible deck-building (like Magic or Pokemon). Where you just buy a set and play off of that (like Coup or Fluxx), though that's hardly a new idea (because games like Uno have been around forever). Those can actually be much better to play for casual players who don't want to devote tons of time or money to playing, and can often have unique rules or complex interactions that other games don't necessarily use.

Also, my brain keeps tickling around the idea of a game that used to have Tarot-ish cards and an elemental theme, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called (I keep thinking "Ever-something", but I'm not sure that's right). I remember someone jury-rigged it into an Amber DRPG campaign they ran, but I'm pretty sure there were ways to play it stand-alone.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I still like "Mr. Geek, I Don't Feel so Good" as a topic title, but have we ever done a title that looked back instead of forward?

We do nostalgic or referential stuff a lot.

With that one in particular, it's almost better to do farther on, because it's slightly less spoiler-y that way.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Wave Master posted...

You skinny geeks out there let me know how it's like.

I've never really been FAT, per se, but it's been a long time since I've thought of myself as skinny.

I'm a pretty good example of "dad bod" at this point. It's sort of the destiny of most older men, unfortunately.

BMI has always been absolute bullshit for me and my body type, though. When I was close to what BMI says I should be, I looked like I was dying of cancer/AIDS/TB/etc. When I looked my absolute physical best, I was technically 25 lbs "overweight".


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Wave Master posted...

Granted Hydrox does sound like something you put on wounds, Hydrogen Peroxide

It's the same base. Hydrox stands for HYDRogen OXygen.

I used to have a factory that made Hydrox right around the corner from where I live:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/12/realestate/in-the-region-new-jersey-transforming-a-plant-from-hydrox-to-high-tech.html


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

The Wave Master posted...

We are on the second to last page, the penultimate page, if you will. Which means it's time to start talking about the next topic title.

Page 23 out of 25 for me.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

What is even just around the corner for geekdom? I'm having difficulty coming up with Venom based puns and I can't really think of much else on the horizon.

No Star Wars until next year, still no official name for the next Avengers movie yet (and that might be too far off regardless), no impending major sci-fi I can think of...

Time to do my usual trick of looking up near-future movies!

Geek Fest
The House with a Geek in Its Walls
Geek Rhapsody
The Geek in the Spider's Web
Fantastic Geeks: The Crimes of [insert regular poster's name here]
Wave Master: Into the Geek-Verse

...man, that's not really a ton of major movies, is it? Bleh.

Well, there's always my other alternative, old book titles!

All's Well That Ends Geek
Much Ado About Geek
The Taming of the Geek
The Merry Geeks of Windsor



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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Metalsonic66 posted...

IIRC Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham are a couple.

They are. Which is what made it amusing when she was playing Catwoman and he was playing Harvey Dent in the Telltale Batman game, and their characters were dating.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Oh, and on the subject of what does and doesn't matter in video games:

I just learned today that Yuri Lowenthal is doing the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the new PS4 Spider-Man game, and that Laura Bailey is the voice of Mary Jane.

That knowledge alone has actually made me slightly more interested in the game than I was before.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Yeah, but that's sort of my point. For all that people tend to compare the two "because building", they really don't have a ton in common. And most of the things that make Terraria Terraria aren't things that appeal to me in the slightest.

In the same vein, I don't play Minecraft to slowly upgrade my armor and weapons, go to the Nether, and eventually take out the Ender Dragon and a Wither. Those are things I might do (mainly because I HAVE to in order to make certain things), but I don't enjoy doing them, and would happily give up fighting things entirely if I could build potion labs and beacons and other things without having to fight.

In Terraria, fighting pretty much IS the entire point, and building just facilitates that. In that sense, it honestly has more in common with Fortnite than it does Minecraft.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I played it, but it skews the wrong way for me.

With Minecraft, I can mostly turn off the monsters and focus on creativity (though I usually stay in Survival over Creative because I feel like the limitations make creating things more interesting, whereas when I build things in Creative I get bored easily and lose interest because I don't have the patience for massive-scale art projects, but anything less than a major project feels pointless and unearned).

With Terraria, it feels very obvious that their motivating principle WAS the combat, and that building things was more of an afterthought/secondary feature, and there's far less you can actually DO with it, so I got bored of the game extremely quickly.

I probably wouldn't mind a new game similar to how Populous worked, though, with landscape shaping and being able to establish villages and the like. I've tried to set villages or cities up in Minecraft before, but they keep changing the rules to make villager breeding more and more difficult and annoying, so in the end I usually wind up with all these buildings but a world that feels totally empty. Being able to add people/NPCs to the world (without having to resort to Creative) would be a nice step-up.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I screwed up a bit in posting that last string of replies - I don't think anything got lost in the mix, but if it did it got eaten by technical glitching.



Zeus posted...

Why would that give you any reason to care? It's an absolute trifling. However, the new GoW is a great example of a game where I'll just watch cutscenes and boss fights (usually fast-fowarding through them) instead of actually playing the game.

To be fair, I've never given a single shit about the God of War franchise at any point in the past, no matter how much people have praised it. But adding a level of character, a stronger plot, and a voice-actor I like from other media has made me more likely to buy the game than any other game in the entire franchise previously.

Granted, I'm almost certainly going to wait until it's cheaper before I buy, but that's partly because I already have a backlog of games I haven't played yet, and partly because predatory market practices have trained me to always hold off on buying games until I know whether or not they're going to release DLC for it, which will then get repackaged into a GotY Edition later. I absolutely loved Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I still waited a year to buy it.

Sure, I COULD just watch online, but I usually reserve that for narrative games I know I'm never going to buy (like Shadow of War, because fuck WB Games and how they handled the microtransactions). Once I watched a bit of God of War early gameplay/cut sceneage on one of the channels I watch regularly, enough to know it looked like a game I'd be willing to play, I generally stopped watching videos so I could go in mostly fresh when I eventually play.

My standard for games is that a game with mediocre gameplay but strong narrative will always carry me through, while games with mediocre plot and strong gameplay will mostly start to bore me long before I finish them (see also, my general disgust with Destiny in spite of really enjoying the combat).

There ARE exceptions (I may have sunk more hours into Minecraft over the last few years than any other game, and more than a number of other games combined), but for the most part, if a game doesn't have a strong narrative, it never engages me enough to want to play it in the first place.

There's a reason why I own multiple Telltale games, but have zero interest in things like FIFA, Knack, or Call of Duty/Battlefield/etc, no matter how popular they are overall.



The Wave Master posted...

"I hate people, but I love gatherings."

Gets me evey single time be amuse it's true. I just think I'm done with Hero Shooters, team shooters, and definitely MMO's.

I lean more towards "I hate people, and also hate gatherings, because of the aforementioned hating people thing."

It's not universal (if anything, I probably hew closer to "I like individual people, it's people in general I can't stand"), but even with friends I tend to enjoy hanging out with a couple people rather than a massive group of people (which starts to feel more like social obligation to me than it does just hanging out).

That's definitely part of why I distance myself from most online multiplayer games, though the other part is because I don't really enjoy competitive gameplay as much as I do co-op with people I actually like (versus with total strangers), so there really isn't a ton of appeal there. And the fact that online multiplayer tends to weaken the potential for narrative is part of why I view the recent trend towards online multiplayer (and monetizing it) rather than solo play to be incredibly annoying.

My ideal game is one where I can make my own character, then play them through an interesting story. With bonus points for branching choice.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

And, thanks to social sharing, people are able to get jokes from shows they never watched.

Yes, but without the context of those shows, it tends to be less memorable over time, and doesn't necessarily translate to an overall pop culture experience. Especially if it's reduced to a 15-second clip on YouTube or a meme.

Someone may remember the meme of a character's face with a quote written under it, but they don't even know if the character really said that, or it's just a joke someone else added.

And even then, most memes never really become universally shared or distributed, so you still wind up with tons of people who've never seen the meme at all. Especially when you have a growing mentality online that memes are stupid, and a lot of people go out of their way to avoid them or just dismissively ignore them.

Zeus posted...

...because those are on HBO. You do realize that this directly undercuts your argument about the availability of media diluting a shared pop culture, right? The stuff that's big is -- as it always has been -- things from mainstream media outlets.

ONE of those is on HBO. The other is on a common cable service available to tons of people.

But even if we flip it to something like Big Bang Theory (in spite of the Internet hating it), which is immensely popular AND available on network TV (ie, the most freely available media), you still top out at 20 million on the best day.

(And on this board alone there are dozens of people who've never seen it, and know very little about it other than vague allusions to characters or the fact that a lot of self-professed nerds find it kind of insulting.)

But all you're really doing is proving my point again. If popular media is spread out across multiple platforms that aren't necessarily directly accessible (agreed, not everyone is going to have HBO, Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access, etc), then that makes it harder for the majority of the population to ever really experience the same things, creating an overall shared experience of pop culture.

Zeus posted...

That and initial viewership numbers also don't mean much in an age when people tend to binge shows after the fact.

I'm not sure I'd agree that a majority of people binge after the fact, but even then, you're not getting massively huge exposure beyond the people who actually care enough to watch on first view.

But regardless, even with the most popular of current shared media, you're far more likely to interact with someone who hasn't seen it than you are someone who has if you go up to a random person (even one in a shared cohort) and ask them about it.

And again, we're in more of a transition point right now. I'm not saying that pop culture IS dead, as much as I'm saying it's a weaker influence now than it's been in the past, and will likely be even weaker, if not outright dead in the future, as media continues to expand, content continues to be gated off to multiple different distribution platforms, and people tend to indulge more in their own interests rather than simply consuming whatever is available.

In a way, it's an expression of the usual concern about Internet culture becoming an echobox where ideas become balkanized, except applied to popular media rather than ideologies and world-views.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

However, it's also because children are more group-centric than adults.

I agree. But peer groups don't necessarily span millions and millions of people.

If anything, what you're pointing out would suggest that in the future, we may have thousands upon thousands of smaller pop culture nuclei that overlap and interact occasionally, but which are mostly self-contained.

In the same way my nostalgic stories of ridiculous things that happened in my high school that everybody knew about and still remember (ie, the sort of stories that get brought up at high school reunions) mean absolutely nothing to anyone in this topic (or to anyone in general outside of the 300 or so people I went to school with), the content that smaller peer groups latch onto as kids won't necessarily overlap with the content other smaller peer groups latch onto halfway across a continent.



Zeus posted...

And, in general, there's *always* been choice. Even the major fads from earlier decades had lots of competitors, but that didn't stop the hits from being hits.

Yes, there's always been choice.

But there's never been as MUCH choice as is available today. And odds are, there'll be even more in the future.



Zeus posted...

And in the 50s and 60s, some homes didn't own a tv.

True. And it's very telling that the shared pop culture experience didn't really start to incorporate TV (as opposed to radio or cinema) until a significant majority of the population DID have TV. TV as pop culture is something that really didn't peak until the late 50s/60s, with the 70s -90s being the major peak period so far.



Zeus posted...

The "dozens of different social media sites" argument is a little insincere because there are only a handful at any given moment that are truly relevant.

Ehh. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all major communities. Sites like Tumblr serve as lesser communities, and there are people who spend almost all of their online interaction time in places like YouTube comments or Twitch chat. So you're already fracturing the online social network to some degree. People who aren't online (at least in the social sense) or who gravitate to smaller sites (like GameFAQs) only split it even more.

And like I said, even if everyone in the world was on Twitter, it wouldn't mean much, because the nature of Twitter means that people split off into smaller subgroups and communities without any specific connection to the overarching whole. Things like Gangnam Style going massively viral are the exception, not the norm.



Zeus posted...

Trending features tend to give exposure to those things even if you aren't consuming the same actual content. There's countless entertainment I only learned about via Youtube, etc.

Yes, which itself sort of supports what I'm saying. You're consuming content you might have otherwise missed, which plenty of other people almost certainly did miss, and which may never reach a wider audience. And the time you spent watching it was time spent NOT watching something else, which might be the thing I was watching, or the thing Wave was watching, and so on.

And trending lists only really help create a shared culture if people are already on the same site you are to see the same things trending. And if they're willing to check out those things, rather than dismiss them based on a 3-second glance at a thumbnail. And if they even remember watching it a week later, because they never developed any meaningful connection to the content. And so on.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Children growing up today are most likely going to view and engage in much of the same content as their peers.

Arguable. Yes, small scale peer groups will certainly exist (and always have - when I was a kid, I talked my friends into watching Doctor Who, at a time when the average American kid didn't give a shit about Doctor Who), but that doesn't necessarily extend to the population as a whole. What a group of kids in one school clique up and watch as a peer group that can discuss and share content won't necessarily be what kids in another school, another state, or on a different coast are latching on to.

Yes, there will still be overlapping clusters - and like I mentioned, content itself is currently starting to create cultures around itself wherein diffusion can still occur (ie, people watching Critical Role and hanging out on the Reddit might mention how they also enjoy other online D&D games like Dice Camera Action or High Rollers and encourage others to check them out as well), but ultimately we're likely to reach a point where any given piece of content never has more than a tiny fragment of the total potential audience even aware of it, let alone a large enough fan to fully engage in it.



Zeus posted...

For starters, there's less overall content available -- because the vast majority of entertainment is geared towards adults

The dozens of channels on my FiOS, the hundreds of shows available on services like Netflix, and the millions of videos available on YouTube (even if you only limit it to YouTube Kids) would seem to disagree with you.

At least, compared to the seven or show channels I had as a kid, none of which were 24 hours (not even Nickelodeon), and most of which only really had a few hours of total content available in a given week.

Or the three channels that my parents had, which maybe had a total of 10 hours of kid-centric content in any given week (at best).

And again, that doesn't even get into video games. When my niece is playing Minecraft, my nephew is playing Smite, or my friend's daughter is playing Mario Kart, those are hours spent interacting with media other than TV.



Zeus posted...

They also have greatly diminished access to alternative media sources (because they rely on adults).

Every child I've known of for years almost always has their own TV. Most of them are fully allowed to use On Demand or Netflix-type services in a family room (so their parents CAN occasionally check in and see what they're watching), and most of them have access to either tablets or phones that allow them to watch whatever online content they want (even if they're limited to YouTube Kids or some other kid-friendly monitoring software).

Almost none of them get sit down and told what to watch by their parents, nor do their parents limit them to content or a schedule even remotely restrict their access to the levels I experienced as a kid simply because the content wasn't available in the first place.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Sure, and there were also people who didn't see Star Wars. You're overstating a lot of the shared pop culture in the past while understating the shared culture today.

Not really. Because while I agree there are people who didn't see Star Wars even at the height of its popularity, I would still argue that Star Wars had more accumulated eyes on it than pretty much every movie released today that isn't a Marvel film.

The era of "must-see" movies is pretty much dead, and in turn, it's extremely difficult to say "a majority of people have probably seen this film". Whereas 20-30 years ago, it was much easier to reference Star Wars or Die Hard or LotR or whatever and have a very strong likelihood that the person you were talking to had probably seen it.



Zeus posted...

While there are certainly more *options* than ever before, that doesn't mean that all media is being consumed equally.

I agree. But it does mean that even the most popular media is being consumed to a much lesser degree than previously (which is why TV execs keep panicking because ratings keep dropping), and online even some of the more popular channels tend to be lucky if they draw more than a million views on a video (and that's without discounting multiple views per person).

Effectively, if "pop culture" is what you get in the overlapping Venn Diagram of what people are watching, then current culture is basically taking all of those sets and drifting them further and further apart, so there are fewer and fewer overlaps - and what overlaps there are involve fewer sets.

Eventually, you reach a point where the overlap points are either too shallow or almost non-existent for there to be anything resembling universal shared culture.



Zeus posted...

And you're wrongly attributing your past and current media consumption patterns to changes in overall media availability, overlooking that child *always* have relatively limited variety in media consumption while adults have vastly greater variety.

Children HAVE always had limited variety in media consumption compared to adults, but the factor you're overlooking is that children today also have vastly expanded variety in media consumption compared to children 30 years ago.

I've pointed this out in the past, but this is one of the major reasons why the entire concept of "Saturday Morning Cartoons" died out - because kids have very little impetus to get up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons when they have dozens of channels offering them content 24-7 365 (and often their own televisions to consume it on, whereas kids 40 years ago were more likely to have to watch on a "family" TV). Once you factor in Internet videos and video games into the mix, the average child today has more content available to them in a month than I had in more than a year as a kid.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Even without an increasing number of options, popular movies, tv shows, etc, still stand out and social media has kinda picked up the cultural slack.

Not really. For all that there's a perception that everyone is plugged in and constantly, there's still tons of people who aren't really all that overly engaged in social media as a whole. Or who are spread out across dozens of different social media sites with different cultures and different focuses and different shared experiences.

Even as a simple example, Reddit is a very different place than Twitter, which is different from Facebook, which is different from 4chan. Even here on GameFAQs, there are major differences between PotD, CE, RI, and various gameboards - and it's easy to stick to just one of them while never interacting with anyone on any of the others.

And even for people who ARE engaged in the exact same social media experience (for example, let's say Twitter), you can spend the entirety of your life never interacting with tons of people, never experiencing whatever content they're consuming or memes they're passing around, or having much of a shared experience with your entire generational cohort. Sure, SOME of your peers are going to have shared experiences, but more likely, you'll have less and less in common with everyone, at least in the sort of ways that build pop culture as a phenomenon (and which fuel in-jokes and references in future media).

If anything, this might be part of what's behind the growth of online communities over the last decade or so, where fans of specific content wind up hanging out in forums/chats dedicated to that content, or going so far as to have real world conventions or meet-ups - the only way to have someone in your life to talk about specific content with is to go out of your way to find people who share interest in that content and trying to relate to them via that lens, rather than simply interacting with people in your life and trying to find shared experiences to compare.

Also keep in mind that the Internet tends to give an illusion of popularity via the artificial "loudness" of voices. Even the most popular of media that constantly gets praised (giving the impression that literally everyone is watching it) rarely pulls ratings beyond a fraction of the greater whole. Game of Thrones? Around 10 million viewers, tops. Breaking Bad? Never drew more than 2 million until its final season, once the hype got so huge that people tuned in more to be part of a "phenomenon" than to actually watch the show. And most other "iconic" shows are way less than that.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

Which is a strange observation, since I *thought* you had previously argued that movie theaters were becoming increasingly less diverse which *should* be supporting a shared pop culture.

I don't recall saying anything specifically along those lines, but if I did, I'd argue that for all that the modern cinema is becoming more homogeneous (in the sense that blockbusters are becoming the norm and there are people who only see 1-2 movies a year so they just stick with Marvel movies or one or two other major franchises), there's still a metric shitton of people who simply don't see those movies, and will lack the capacity to wax nostalgic about them 20 years from now (and that's not even getting into arguments about a lot of modern media being inherently unmemorable, and thus not even inspiring personal nostalgia in the individual, let alone culturally - I watch tons of stuff on a regular basis I'll probably barely remember a month from now).

When there were only three TV channels, pretty much everyone was aware of the given hit show of a specific period, even if they didn't really like it themselves. Even after cable came along and we all had 36 channels, there was still a shared spectrum of experience (ie, 80's kids had a limited palette of shows they could watch, and almost all of us watched Transformers and GI Joe).

Now we're in a world with hundreds of cable channels, dozens of streaming services, and billions of Internet videos. People effectively exist within their own personal entertainment bubbles, and while it might overlap with other people from time-to-time, there really aren't all that many "universal" shows or experiences that everyone within a certain age group share.

Even anecdotally, I can easily say that about 99% of what I watch online on a regular basis means almost nothing to my best friend, who watches almost none of it. And even where we overlap on the 1% or so, most of our other mutual friends would be completely clueless about it. Meanwhile, my friend watches shows on Amazon Prime (which I don't have) and Netflix (which I don't have), while I have channels on FiOS that he doesn't have on Optimum. I go to movies that he doesn't because he has kids - he watches sports that I don't because I generally loathe sports. And when I choose to go to websites or social media that reinforce my existing interests, they are entirely different places from where he chooses to go, and we have almost no interaction or overlap in social media as a whole.

While we still have common ground from stuff we watched in the 80s and 90s, more recent times are a huge cultural divide. And kids today are growing up with that vast gulf but without the prior connections to ground them. Yes, they WILL occasionally have things in common with some of their peers, but there likely won't be massive things that they share in common with most of their peers simultaneously.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.

To be fair, humans basically have to have SOMETHING going for them, since they're the main characters in most stories and settings that have humans in them. Yes, we KNOW this is because the writers are human and find it easier to write about characters that are basically "us" as opposed to fictional beings that wind up more being metaphors for different aspects of human personality or experience, but narratively, there still has to be a REASON why humans seem to excel, even when stacked up against other races that seem CLEARLY superior in every way.

In a similar vein, it's like when you hear parables or the like about how strange it is that humans rose to the top of the food chain, when we're basically pudgy meat blobs without fur or claws or fangs or scales or any of the other adaptations that other animals have (often presented as a council of animals talking about how humans suck because we don't have whatever "gift" they themselves possess). When you think about it in that sense, it IS kind of crazy that we managed to win out in spite of being weaker and more fragile and having to invent things like tools and clothes and houses to compensate. But being able to invent things to compensate basically IS our superpower.

Depending on the setting, the explicit thing that tends to separate us from other races is almost always either our excessive inventiveness and adaptability, our constant desperate striving and incapability of ever actually being satisfied with what we have, or our raw stubborn refusal to ever give up in the face of opposition and basically headbutting our way through every obstacle via sheer will and determination. This is usually true for sci-fi settings with aliens as much as it is for settings with elves, dwarves, and the like.

The only other thing you usually see in really depressing and cynical settings by jaded, bitter authors is that the thing that separates humans from every other race is our willingness to fight, die, and kill for even the most minor of things, and our endless history of constantly fighting each other to hone us into efficient killing machines that no peaceful race can stand against (or even understand). But that's much rarer in High Fantasy settings.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Dwarf or an Elf the lifespan of a Man, and they'll be a demigod before they die.

Ehh. If you fundamentally rewrote every aspect of their culture or upbringing - and even then, still probably not. When you're dealing with races that are pretty much designed to be eternal (dwarves less so, but they're still living a couple hundred years), they tend to lack the dynamic spark that makes humans so innovative/destructive. In most settings, it's kind of explicit that it's our own fleeting nature that makes us so desperate to strive for more, and take risks other races consider borderline insane.

In RP terms, it's why humans can hit max level in classes over a period of decades while it might take centuries for an elf to reach the same levels of skill. And the most skilled elves tend to be adventurers, who travel with humans, and thus start to adapt the human mindset while retaining their own longer lifespans and supernatural potential.

If you reduce it to classical elements, dwarves have the strength and durability of stone, but also possess the inflexible and unchangeable aspects of stone. Elves are more air - their biggest weakness being their inability to ever really focus on a single goal, or to commit to things wholeheartedly, as opposed to mostly drifting through life. Humans are like water - flexible enough to adapt to almost any container, and also able to slowly erode almost anything given enough time (and potentially able to become a raging torrent under the proper conditions).

(And to complete the metaphor, the race that fits fire is probably something like the orcs, who ravage and plunder like locusts rather than creating anything on their own, acting like a raging destructive force that sweeps across the land like a wildfire.)

In most fantasy settings, an elf with a human lifespan basically dies while still mentally and emotionally a child, and a dwarf with a human lifespan dies as the equivalent of a teenager or young adult. Neither achieves anything of note, and their peers only really see them as examples of lost potential.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Man the lifespan of a Dwarf or an Elf, and they'll waste 700 years trying to find the secret to immortality. I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.

In most settings, the humans with extended lifespans either wind up being walking gods, or wind up being the sort of people who bemoan their immortality and regret that they didn't live a normal life and live, grow old, and die with a loved one.

Again, it's a question of keeping that same "never satisfied, always striving" mentality but giving the human centuries to master their craft. That master wizard who managed to reach the apex of their arts in a hundred years is going to go straight past archmastery and deep into shattering the fundamental nature of reality itself and winding up on a first-name basis with gods if they live to be a thousand.

And when you take non-magic humans and give them 400-year lifespans, you get the Numenoreans in Tolkien. Whose downfall was explicitly the fact that their lives kept getting shorter and shorter.

If we're assuming a setting where humans stay mostly young and vital for the majority of their extended lives, you're likely getting epic backstory and people focusing on perfecting their craft (or you get vampires obsessed with power and control, and constantly nostalgic about the past). You really only get an obsession with prolonging that already-prolonged life even more if there's a constant encroaching decrepitude, where the human can literally feel the inexorable approach of death with every second that passes.


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That's not really being fettered, though.

But I specifically meant in the sense of being unbound by fate. Your destiny is your own to make, etc etc etc. Free will is the measure of a Man, and other such cliches.


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Blank Scrabble tiles? The mutable? Wet clay?

If I was going to go that route, I'd absolutely use "Tabula Rasa".

Which is actually a pretty damned good suggestion, honestly.

Along those same lines, something like "The Unbound" or "The Unfettered" could easily work as well.


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Oh, and here's yet another RP-ish question for y'all.

If you were trying to come up with poetic-sounding descriptions for various races (like "The Stoneborn" for Dwarves or "The Fae-Blooded" for Elves), what would you use for humans?

As previously discussed, humans are sort of middle of the road and bland as fuck compared to other races in fantasy, so it's hard to pin them down with just one title. I was thinking of something revolving around either "resilient" or "adaptable" (or some fancy synonym of same), but I couldn't really think of any good phrasing for it.


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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I get what you're trying to say, but this is false. Text base games have plots, and they predate Mario by a decade. Even then, Zelda and Metroid came out right after Mario.

Yes, and text-based games also didn't have platforming. Or graphics, in their earliest versions.

The point is that, when you have limited technology, you are forced to choose which aspects matter to you and which you're willing to do away with to free up space/resources. But we now live in an age when those limitations don't exist for the most part, so now it's more of an aesthetic choice than anything. And people who want specific things are less likely to tolerate those things being absent because they KNOW they COULD have been included, whereas in the past, there was more leeway because the medium as a whole was capable of less.

In the same vein, we don't judge movies today by the standards of the silent film era, nor do we judge books by the standards of the time when everything was written in cuneiform on clay tablets. The capacity to do more tends to go hand in hand with the expectation of doing more.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

The issue is, you're looking for Mario games to provide something it never did

Not really. But what I am saying is that someone who DOES want games to provide more than they do is not inherently wrong. And if that's the reason why Mario games don't appeal to him, then he's perfectly justified in feeling that way. Wave is basically ranting about why he doesn't like/care about certain games, and venting over it.

Though to be perfectly honest, considering "narrative" is pretty much my #1 selling point for games these days, and I play very few games that DON'T have one (other than Minecraft, I have a hard time thinking of ANY recent game I enjoy without at least some solid narrative or characterization), I have a hard time disagreeing with him. In the absence of narrative, Mario gives me almost nothing worth caring about.

But really, there are multiple reasons why Nintendo hasn't made a single game in the last 25 years that I've even remotely given a shit about. Lack of narrative is really just the tip of that particular glacier. I can't say there's ever been a point where I said to myself "I won't buy the new Mario game because it lacks story". I have countless OTHER reasons why I have no interest in ever buying a new Mario game. Or Zelda game. Or Metroid game. Or...



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Hence my post-I would HOPE there's more to it than that, since in the grand scheme of all that is the game, that is pretty minute.

And hence my post, where I very strongly disagree with you about it being "minute".

It's a significant issue. Whether you consider it a major problem or not says more about you than it does about the game, but it's very much integral to multiple aspects of gameplay in ways that can't just be handwaved away. And if someone says "Yeah, it's annoying enough to be a dealbreaker for me," they're not wrong to feel that way.

Keep in mind, a LOT of people - including people who otherwise love the game - freely admit that the weapon degradation has a significant impact on the experience. It's not really a minor aspect of the game or something that can be completely ignored or bypassed (even the unbreakable Master Sword has a cooldown mechanic that means you can't use it 100% of the time).


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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

As for BotW, it seems it does/would have your interest, but it hinges over one relatively minute game mechanic?

Also to be fair, weapon degradation isn't really a "minute game mechanic" in BotW, it's a key design choice that influences a lot of gameplay.

ie, the entire point of it is to force you to use weapons you wouldn't otherwise use, so you have a more varied experience, which ties into the philosophy that exploration and discovery are/should be the core motivating principle of the game. But while that will certainly appeal to a lot of people, its also going to be something that pisses other people off.

The real problem is, no matter how much people like to think that the things they love have universal appeal, there will always be people who don't like the same things you do - and indeed, most things are only going to appeal to a smaller subset of potential audience. Even the best-selling games of all time tend to only manage a small fraction of the overall market-share.

(For reference, people act like BotW is the best Zelda game for years and is almost a reason to own the Switch in and of itself, but for all the praise it's only 10 million sold copies - in a market where individual consoles have sold more than 100 million units, and PC gamers make a very large separate demographic entirely. Realistically, less than 10% - and possibly even less than 5% - of all current gamers have ever played it. Part of this is the aforementioned flood of competing media issue, but part of it is that, for all that people who love the game might not want to admit it, there are a lot of people out there who took one look at the game and went "NOPE".)

For one person, weapons degrading might be acceptable because it's what the developer wanted, and because it forces them to experiment with other weapons and not just rely on the most powerful sword all the time. They might even feel like it ultimately makes the experience more enjoyable for them. But for other people, it's going to be an unnecessary pain in the ass, which takes good weapons away from them as soon as they start getting used to them, and which may encourage them to hoard good weapons "for future use" rather than "wasting" them on weaker enemies (see also, the JRPG plight of never using potions and having hundreds of them unused at the end of the game). And even for people who agree that they don't like the concept, there will be some who see it as a minor evil that can mostly be ignored or worked around, and others who see it as a far more significant problem that makes the entire gameplay experience frustrating and annoying.

(See also, the previous comments of how timed pulse gameplay in Legend of Dragoon was a positive for some people, while for me it was the single biggest problem with the game and the reason why I never actually finished it.)

Also worth noting is that the rest of the game certainly plays a role in just how intolerable something is. For someone who loves everything about BotW except weapon breaking, they'll likely be willing to overlook it in favor of everything else. But for someone who is already ambivalent about most of the rest of the game, weapon breaking may seem like a far greater sin, because the rest of the payoff isn't worth the annoyance.

(See also, why I wasn't willing to put up with combat timing bullshit in Legend of Dragoon, but why I was far more tolerant of it in Stick of Truth, in spite of still disliking it. Because Stick of Truth was tickling my fancy in so many other ways on a near-constant basis, while Dragoon's plot never really won me over.)

In the same vein, the magic draw and junctioning mechanics in FFVIII would probably bother me less if the plot of the game wasn't kind of shitty and the main character wasn't a repugnant loathesome little shit.


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Metalsonic66 posted...

Mario never had a plot. And Mario Kart Double Dash was definitely different from MK64.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Complaining about the lack of Mario plot is just silly.

Ehh. To be fair, the original games didn't have a plot because they were released at a time when it was almost impossible to integrate plot into games due to technological limitations. And we as an audience accepted that lack of story because we understood there really wasn't much alternative, and we'd never really seen story-intensive games to contrast it against.

But that was 30+ years ago. Since then, games have evolved, technology has improved, and plot has become integrated into most games to at least some degree. We've grown more sophisticated as an audience, and we tend to expect more out of games than we did in the past. We demand they do better because we've SEEN other games do better.

And to pull out my personal favorite cliche when talking about entertainment media, we live in a time when alternative media options are more prevalent than ever before in the entire history of the human race - there are now more worthwhile media options than any single human being could ever hope to experience even across multiple lifetimes. So we tend to specialize - we expect more from each individual piece of media because it has to EARN our attention. And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

I was willing to dump dozens of hours into a game like Super Mario Bros as a kid because I didn't have all that many alternatives. Today, I barely have enough time to play half the games I want to play (watch movies I want to watch/read books I want to read/etc), a game which doesn't hit all of my major expectations isn't even in consideration. And if that's the reason Wave can't justify playing those games, then it's a perfectly valid expectation.

Though personally, I gave up on the Mario games decades ago because I thought the platforming went to absolute shit since the franchise went 3D. And at this point I'm so far out of practice and old enough for my reflexes to start slowing down a bit, to the point where I derive almost no satisfaction from platformers as a genre at all anymore.


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

On the one hand, people are greedy, entitled assholes when left to abuse a service. This is hardly shocking.

Hence why Communism doesn't really work long-term on a large scale.


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Metalsonic66 posted...

If it wasn't for the fun battle system I probably never would have finished it.

The battle system is pretty much the reason why I never finished Legend of Dragoon. I hated it so, so much.

Adding timing-based bullshit to turn-based games is pretty much the worst of all worlds.


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shadowsword87 posted...

You get both bonuses, because otherwise it would be silly to have some races get +2, +1 on stats, and some not.
There is a subrace of dwarf that gets +2 str, +2 con though, and those guys are awesome!

And of course, humans get +1 across the board, which is 6 total. Though the argument there is that humans are compensating for not having specific awesomeness or extra abilities by being slightly good at everything (though a lot of settings wind up swinging that back the other way by having "demihuman" races suffer social bias outside of their own communities).

But like I said, the question mostly occurred to me because the book suggests that choosing a subclass is optional, but why would you NOT take a subclass? Not only are you usually giving up at least one +1 ability mod, but usually at least a couple of other benefits.

I forget which online game/character sent my brain down this path, but I think I saw someone playing a character who didn't seem to have a subclass, and I started wondering about it.



shadowsword87 posted...

It depends on how I want the feel to be, high powered/low powered. Right now I just use the character array, it forces base abilities to 15, but that's fine. 5e is a low number game.
I have actually come around to 4d6d1 or 4d6k3 and then down the stats list, but that's because I've played everything and I want to force myself to try new stuff.

Personally, I prefer 17d6k3+2.



Actually, based on my own history with other RPGs I should probably prefer point buy (since almost every other RPG I've ever liked uses it or a variation of it), but I actually kind of like 4d6k3. It does allow the possibility of terrible stats (even if it's less likely than it is with 3d6), and Critical Role does a pretty good job of demonstrating that it can be fun to play a character with a really low stat (Grog's one of the most popular characters on the show with an Int of 6, which he really RPs, even when it's somewhat detrimental). But it also can give you the opportunity to have some truly powerful stats if you get lucky.

Considering my own terrible luck with dice rolls (which may be part of why I prefer diceless or freeform games), I'd probably allow a player who winds up with an overall total of 66-68 points or less (ie, slightly less than standard array) to either re-roll or just default to standard array/point buy, because I don't think a player should be punished just because random chance gave them shit numbers across the board. Especially if they're in a group where another player rolled really well and now have this over-the-top PC who's good at pretty much everything.


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Quick D&D 5e question for Shadow:

When dealing with subraces in character creation, do subrace bonuses stack with basic racial bonuses, or does specific supercede general?

As an example, Elves have a listed Ability Score Increase of +2 Dex. High Elves have an Ability Score Increase of +1 Int, while Wild Elves get +1 Wis and Drow get +1 Cha.

So that means a High Elf is starting with +2 Dex and +1 Int, right? Or does the +1 Int completely supercede the general Elf bonus, and all they start with is just the +1 Int?

I've always assumed stuff stacks (though that does seem to make it suboptimal to ever play any basic Race and give up the Subrace benefits), but it occurred to me earlier today that I might be doing it wrong and slightly overpowering starting characters (for what that's worth).


Also, on a slightly related note, how do you personally handle character creation in your games? The recommended standard of roll 4d6 and drop the lowest? Point buy? The more harsh old-school roll 3d6 and suck it up, junior? The really harsh, really old-school method of 3d6, plus rolling stats in order, and being forced to choose your class after you see what your stats wind up being, possibly getting screwed over if you're too weak in whichever specific stat you'd need to be effective in whatever class you wanted to play?


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

How does nobody know that Superman is Clark Kent? At least Batman's cowl like, covers his face and whatnot. Superman's disguise as Clark is just literally a pair of glasses.

Magic hypnosis.

No, really.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/Bdaaz.jpg


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Here's another RP observation for shadow:

It occurred to me today that it would be amusing to have a group of from 2-5 PCs, where each has to take at least one level of Bard (and preferably different Bard Colleges for each), with the end result being that they're basically a band that travels from town-to-town, performing, and solving mysteries in Scooby-Doo fashion.

I'm dead certain multiple groups have played this concept before, but I have no idea how survivable it is long-term for multiple squishy Bards. Even more so if they're pure Bards rather than multiclasses (which might change how effective their dueling Bardic Inspirations and the like synergize).


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Zeus posted...

Uh, oxidated? >_> tbh, not sure what that could have autocorrected from.

Antiquated?


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The Wave Master posted...

I read an article, that I now can't find, and don't really want to hunt down, about Microsoft looking at releasing a streaming only Xbox

I kind of like the idea. Mainly because if they do it, I'll never have to worry about choosing between Sony and Microsoft again... because I'd never buy another Xbox again.

Though Microsoft basically wanted to push their way towards an all-digital future THIS gen, until everyone shat all over it, so this is just them assuming the problem was that they were just being ahead of their time, and that people will be more open to the idea in the future. So this really isn't a new direction for them to be pushing towards. And for their sake, maybe next time they'll actually hire a competent marketing team rather than just letting engineers try and explain why everyone should love the idea (which is part of what fucked them last time).

To be fair to them, though, the company as a whole has been against making the Xbox at all for like 10+ years now, so if they're still even thinking about making a next-gen console, that's sort of a win versus the alternative.

Still, personally at least, I've said for years that the moment gaming as a whole becomes a digital-only platform is the point where I cease to be a gamer (or, at least, one who plays games on a modern console versus older games). Not that they give a shit about ME personally, because I'm not in the core "live-service exploitation model" demo anyway, but still.

It also doesn't help that I've basically shunned PC gaming for 20+ years because of all the frustrations and annoyances I hate versus the conveniences of console, but now console makers seem determined to add every single annoyance and frustration I've ever had with PC gaming to consoles as well, while it's becoming easier and easier to hook a PC up to a TV to "couch game" or use controllers for PC games rather than being forced into mouse/keyboard controls. Which WOULD seem to push me more and more towards just saying "fuck it" and becoming a PC gamer... except a lot of the games I want to play aren't on PC, and a fair number of the ones that are seem to have terrible PC ports compared to how they run on console, so in the end I'd probably just give up on the whole mess entirely and just go play Minecraft.


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Oh, here's another one to bounce off:

If you were naming a gladiatorial arena in the same style as the above, which of these sounds better?

The Blood-Soaked Arena
The Blood-Soaked Sands
The Colosseum
The Dark Colosseum (or something similar)



(Oh, and inspired by one of the above, would "The Wine-Dark Sea" be a more appropriate card for a shipwreck than "The Desolate Isle" or something like it? One describes where the catastrophe happens, the other describes where the victim ends up after...)


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

but if you're really expecting me to believe you could have forseen a modern cellphone back in the mid 90s, yeah, I'm calling hindsight bullshit on that one

Cell phones were already a thing then. And I'd already watched them evolve from massive bricks anchored in a car into something you could carry around with their own built-in antenna.

Smartphones, no, but it wasn't entirely out of the question even then to put 2 and 2 together and potentially see how the various elements mind wind up getting integrated. Even harder sci-fi was already coming up with examples of that sort of thing, and cyberpunk had pretty much gone even farther than where we are now.

Someone in 1995 might have laughed at you if you tried to sell him an modern iPad or iPhone, but he wouldn't necessarily have thought you were insane if you predicted we'd have those sorts of things 10-20 years later.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

since even a powermac still had what amounted to a box the size of 4 or 5 pizza boxes under a 12" tube TV.

Older than most PotDers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Siemens_PCD-3Psx.JPG

Came out when I was 21, almost the same size as the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compaqarmada7800.jpg

Also older than most PotDers, and also not much larger in most dimensions than the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Outbound_Systems_Inc._Model_2000.jpg

Came out when I was 17, and could easily be confused for a laptop you could buy today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:540c_open.jpg

Laptops weren't universally huge and ridiculous at that point. There WERE smaller models, and they were getting smaller every year. Again, not hard to predict a future reduction of size of 200% when you'd already seen a reduction closer to 1000%.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I see what you're saying, don't get me wrong but we both came from a time of tube TVs PO, and saying that you could really grasp a high definition display device as thin as a sheet of paper is bullshit and you know it.

By the time I was 18, I'd already played Duck Hunt in its own appropriate era (ie, the mid-80s) on a projection TV, where the screen was very much flat (even if it required three huge projection lens in front of it to put the picture there). I'd also seen LCD technology evolve from its most simplistic form in shitty handheld games in the late 70s/early 80s, to becoming more and more refined until there were things like the GameBoy in the very late 80s, and the GameBoy Color was just over the horizon (though we already had the Virtual Boy).

Laptops were probably the closest to what you're talking about, though. Paper thin? No. But certainly flat, and relatively crisp, and imagining a world where an inch-thick flat screen could become thinner isn't all that hard when you'd already seen computers go from being huge to being small enough that you could carry it in one hand.

Hell, 18-year old me had already seen and used touch-screen monitors (albeit with a stylus, not using fingers alone). So if you tried to explain the concept of a tablet to that guy he'd more than have the grounds to process the ideas of a thinner screen, that you can use by simply touching the screen, and with cell phone technology built in which can access the Internet. Yes, the idea that it would be so small might be surprising, but again, the idea that technology keeps getting smaller was already a very strongly established premise by that point.

I might be more floored by the sheer variety of apps we'd eventually see on an iPhone, and the idea that we'd essentially invent the tricorder from Star Trek (allowing us to do things like point it at the night sky and have it identify constellations by which stars it sees, or point it at foreign language text and have it real-time translate, or have it tell you where in the world you are at all times and real-world map your location and desired destinations well enough to give spoken directions). But the hardware would probably be less surprising.

8-year old me was playing Connect Four on a green monochrome CRT monitor built into the computer as a single solid block that had to be wheeled around on an A/V cart. High school me was playing games like Wolfenstein 3D and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within on a computer with more computing power than the space shuttle and a monitor with crisper resolution than any TV I'd ever owned (and then college me played wire-frame VR with a headset and a harness a few times).





Living through the 80s and 90s, you were almost primed to expect technology to keep evolving in ridiculous ways. If anything, I think the tech curve of the last 20 years or so has been more about refining and improving what is already possible in minor ways, as opposed to the reckless leap into the future the 80s-90s were.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

What's so fancy about it? Obsidian Glass crater in sand a half Mile high all around. Panopticon in the center observing all.

It's the name more than anything. It's not really a fantasy-flavored name. It's a bit too science-y.

Even if you build a prison out of raw magic that involved hundreds of scrying eyes and magic mirrors so the warden can watch everyone at the same time, I'd probably have to come up with a different name for it. Like "The Hold of a Hundred Eyes" or something.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Er, the classic tarot deck has this already. Whether the tower is reversed or not, its pretty much a dreaded card, it's just the degree to how dreaded given it's position.

Yes, I know. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs!

But honestly, when you're thinking about a monastery that's been ruined and visuals to represent that sort of thing, a collapsing tower is kind of ideal for imagery, so it works into the symbolism.

I'd be happy to loot any number of names/images from existing Tarot (or similar Tarot-ish cards, like, say, the Tarokka deck from Ravenloft), but most of those tend to default more to people specifically (The High Priestess, The Innocent, The Lady of Shadows), or concepts in general (Strength, Judgment, Death). There aren't a ton of actual "locations" other than The Tower and The World in standard decks.

If anything, the only fiction I can think of with multiple "location" cards in a deck is Amber, and that mostly because the cards literally allow you to magically transport through space and reality to wherever is shown on the card. But even with Amber Trump decks, "people" cards are more common than "place" cards.



Zeus posted...

While we're back to the topic of names, I recently came across a kickass-sounding name for a cool place which, naturally, translates to something underwhelming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmuborgir

Dimmuborgir, a large desolate area with rock formations and caves, literally translates to "Dark Castles." It sounds almost as bad as "Mount Doom"

Could be worse. Could be "Intercourse" or "Blue Balls" (damn you, Pennsylvania).

Though there's always place names like Teufelsgrund or the like.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

_PandaMaster_ posted...

I like Jennette McCurdy

YES, WE KNOW.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

For prison only themes, I've always been a fan of the Panopticon.

I like the idea of the Panopticon, but that always feels like a far more sci-fi or at least somewhat futurist concept, not necessarily something that would show up in high fantasy or gothic horror.

That being said, in my brain, White Wolf already laid claim to that one when they made it one of the branches of the Technocracy, as an outgrowth of the New World Order. My OCD always tends to steer me clear of fancy terms if they've been used for something in another system I'm familiar with.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

In the meantime, I came up with "The Desolate Isle", but I'm still open for alternative suggestions.

I also came up with "The Fallen Tower" for a card that represents a ruined fort/monastery/etc.

Incidentally, for more context, I'm sort of thinking about making Tarot-esque cards for the most cliched RPG campaign beginnings ever, but making them sound arcane.

At some point, I'll probably have to come up with something for "You all meet in a tavern" as well.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Had you shown 18 year old me a modern cellphone I'd have asked you where your flying car or hoverboard were parked before calling the Pope myself to bring back witch burning and I'm an atheist.

Had you shown 18-year old me a modern cellphone, I'd have been pretty chill about it, because when I was 18 I'd already seen more than a decade worth of computers getting more and more sophisticated over time, and this already existed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

When I was a kid the height of computing sophistication was an Apple IIc or a Commodore 64. By the time I was in high school I was playing Day of the Tentacle and 7th Guest. It's not hard to extrapolate that the next 10-20 years were going to bring even more advances, and that things in general would slowly get smaller (especially when you consider the original computers were warehouse-sized, and by the mid-90s we already had relatively smallish laptops) and more powerful (considering my calculator in high school had more computing power than most actual computers for sale in the year I was born).

Hell, can't even say I didn't see the Internet coming, because the first time I went online was when I was 17 (though I didn't really start using the World Wide Web side of the Internet until I was 19 and in college). That's right, I got my start on Telnet and BBSes, motherfucker.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Here's an odd question:

If you were trying to come up with something similar to a Tarot deck, and you were trying to think of catchy, fancy names for greater Arcana cards, and you wanted a word to represent a deserted island sort of locale, what sort of names might you come up with?

As an example, for a different card in the hypothetical deck, I decided one card would represent a "prison", and its name is "The Oubliette". Because "Prison" isn't cool enough.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zikten posted...

the person was dead by the time I noticed anything weird. I thought nothing until like the 3rd day.

...and if he was still alive then, but is dead now, then you effectively let him die by not helping him or trying to contact someone else to potentially get help.



Zikten posted...

and I guess the cops need to arrest all my neighbors too.

That would only apply if they also noticed something amiss and didn't react. It's entirely possible none of them noticed anything at all, and you were the only one who suspected but also did nothing.

And I'm pretty sure none of your neighbors posted on GameFAQs to establish a digital timestamp on precisely when they started to grow concerned, while simultaneously making no effort to do anything about it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

PoIl6177 posted...

Because that's the poll everyone lies in....

In which case, they're probably lying in this one as well, so we're right back where we started.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

LinkPizza posted...

Isn't this like the classic bystander scenario?

It is.



Zikten posted...

I wish I hadn't made this topic. I should have just kept this to myself

Cue the ultimate irony, where it turns out that the guy really is dead, and the authorities somehow find this topic, and then Zikten gets prosecuted for not acting to save him while he still could have.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

SpaceBear_ posted...

His friend said he was a cripple so he must be Captain Marvel JR.

Freddie was always crippled, though.

I was referring more to the New 52 version, where they basically went for a massive explosion of diversity by making up a ton of new characters:

http://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/4/4f/Shazam_Family_0001.jpg

So you've basically got Billy and Mary, but there's also Freddie (who covers the handicapped demographic), Hispanic kid, Asian kid, and little black girl.

Though if they DO put them in the movie, they may take shit from the PC/SJW crowd for the somewhat tone-deaf fact that the Asian kid is a nerd, the Hispanic kid is fat and turns into mister machismo when he transforms, and the black girl's power is that she runs really, really fast.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family