Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

wah_wah_wah posted...

He knew how to spot talent, is basically the extent of the genius of George Lucas.

He didn't, though. That's more on his casting agent who picked actors for him and on studios that saddled him with better screenwriters and directors early on. If Lucas had had his way 100%, a lot of the people who absolutely contributed to Star Wars' success wouldn't have been part of it.

Arguably his greatest talent was knowing enough to retain the merchandising rights to the franchise and then aggressively pursuing them far more than the studio itself ever would have. Regardless of whether or not we want to admit it, a large part of what made Star Wars into the juggernaut that it is is the constant barrage of toys and tie-ins.


---

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

OhhhJa posted...

Currant_Kaiser posted...

The concept of time travel is way too destructive. You'd have to be a complete moron to consider it. Even doing seemingly harmless things in the past could produce the butterfly effect and drastically change the future and prevent the time traveler from even being born in the first place. Never mind the fact that people would use it to go to famous events and meet famous people, thus guaranteeing that some massive changes occur.

Honestly, I think the butterfly effect idea is pretty unrealistic. One person has relatively little effect on the grand scheme of anything especially if they aren't trying to drastically change things

It's the cumulative effect, though.

Say I go back in time and erase some nobody from history. But in his future, he was going to get into an argument in a bar and piss someone off, who in turn was going to drive home mad and hit someone in his car. In turn, that person was going to die, sending their wife into a depression. And so on, and so on, because every human is interconnected in some way (no matter how slight), and because our present is very much the sum total of all past experiences.

That much is almost indisputable. The REAL question becomes just how strong that chain of causality really is, and how likely it is to end up at something major and significant. To wit, by killing that nobody in the past, the chain of events eventually leads to the man who was eventually going to invent the cure for some major disease never being born, and millions die. At its most extreme, even minor changes can lead to major consequences. On the other side of that spectrum, most interactions will be minor at best, and over time and distance will sort of "smooth out" (like ripples in a pond), until your changes no longer have significant effect (unless you do something incredibly major, like publicly shooting Lincoln in 1857 or giving plans for nuclear technology to Hitler in 1934).

You'd also have to worry about potential conflicts with the Grandfather Paradox - if your tampering interferes with history enough to prevent you from ever being born, meaning you could never have come back to make those changes in the first place, what happens? Does it create an alternate timeline? Do your changes persist, and the future is radically different, but you remain the same because of some sort of temporal inertia - becoming a person without a home time? Or do you basically just break the universe as all causality shreds and history unravels?


---

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

Zeus posted...

although, quite honestly, I was more let down by his work on Star Wars than Star Trek.

Well, so far we've only really seen one movie from him when it comes to Star Wars.

Which I was fine with, because Star Wars was never sci-fi in the first place (regardless of what stupid people on the Internet think, it's "Fantasy in Space" or "Space Opera" - there's almost nothing sci-fi in it, and a lot that is more or less anti-sci-fi). And fantasy tends to work better with mindless action than sci-fi does.

(As I used to put it, "Star Wars has more in common with Lord of the Rings than it does Star Trek".)

Or to put it another way, a lot of sci-fi's core appeal is rooted in cerebral experience, while fantasy is more visceral. If sci-fi works by stirring your brain, fantasy works by stirring your heart. Sci-fi is logic, fantasy is emotion. Sci-fi wants you to think, fantasy wants you to feel.

(If anything, most of my utter distaste for the old Star Wars EU was that most of the writers wrote it as if it was sci-fi, not fantasy, which made for jarring genre dissonance to the movies. I might even be willing to argue that part of the reason why everyone hated the prequels so much was because they actually felt like Lucas attempting to make a more sci-fi flavored version of Star Wars.)

So action and nostalgia work fairly well when you're trying to build a visceral response to your work, which makes them a good fit for Star Wars (part of why so many people have said that Episode VII "felt" more like Star Wars than the prequels did), and it's easier to forgive stupid plot holes or unexplained weirdness than it is in sci-fi. But building an entire Star Trek movie around action and nostalgia jars with the original appeal of ToS (to some extent) and TNG (very much so), which is why so many older Trek fans were kind of turned off by Abrams' Trek.

(I'd also argue that the reason why there was always a strong divide between Star Wars and Star Trek fans was because both sides were looking for every different things from their space adventure, and tended to look at the other through that lens. Which kind of helps explain why a lot of older, more traditional Trek fans disliked the new reboot, while a lot of the people who actually liked it seemed to be newer audiences who never liked Trek in the first place, or Star Wars fans who finally saw Trek starting to look more like what they actually wanted out of a movie. In the same vein, there's a reason why so many people disliked Star Trek 1 (which was probably the Trekkiest of the Trek movies) but it seems like everyone loves Wrath of Khan (which managed to balance Trek-ish motifs and themes with more mainstream action and drama).)


---

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

adjl posted...

"Americans who shoot lots of other Americans" is about as concrete an enemy as ISIS

Actually, that's sort of the opposite of concrete.

With ISIS, you can theoretically point to a group with professed goals and a sense of shared identity. Yes, someone in ISIS can theoretically pretend to not be part of ISIS, but they're still motivated by and connected to that group identity.

Whereas "people who shoot people" is an amorphous collective of radically different people across almost the entire spectrum of human existence doing what they do for entirely different reasons. There's no core identity, no real sense of purpose or ideology that can be addressed or predicted. Whether it's the kid who got picked on, someone with a political agenda, or just some guy who went off his meds, they're not so much a concrete group as much as they are a list of people with a similar methodology.



adjl posted...

The only disingenuous thing here is giving up on the gun control issue because it's hard, while promoting hasty, superficial "solutions" to other issues that are no less complex.

Considering giving up on issues because they're hard, and instead pursuing easier superficial "solutions" is basically the entire modus operandi of the US government when it comes to nearly every major issue, it's hard to call bullshit on gun control as an issue specifically.

I've used the phrase "like slapping a band-aid on gangrene" way too many times over the last decade or two, and it's never been in reference to gun control - but it's always been appropriate. The way the electoral system in the US is designed and the fact that it is mostly populated by career politicians renders almost any difficult long-term solution to any problem nearly impossible to implement, because the moment you ask for personal sacrifice without immediate gratification you aren't getting reelected.

And that applies to politicians on both sides of the aisle. It's not a Democrat or Republican problem, it's a politics problem. And even if you gave total control of the entirety of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency to a single party (either one), very little would change for the positive.

If anything, a huge part of the problem for gun control in the US is that most previous "solutions" HAVE been simplistic as fuck (because the real issue is incredibly complex and interwoven with other issues). A lot of it boils down to passing knee-jerk laws that don't necessarily solve the problem, then not enforcing those laws effectively anyway. The end result being that there's an illusion that government is attempting to solve the problem, while not actually doing a single thing that actually solves the problem - and creating entirely new problems for law-abiding citizens to wade through that repeatedly fuck them over in various ways (see also, the health care debate, border and travel security, economic bailouts, educational standards, poverty, etc).


---

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

The Wave Master posted...

Bank Robber, who is a much bigger Star Trek fan than I ever will be, agreed with me that The Orville is a better Star Trek show than Star Trek Discovery. My lovely wife agrees with him as well. (She too is a huge Star Trek fan versus my love for Star Wars.)

The RedLetterMedia guys (two of whom are huge Star Trek nerds) said something I found interesting - namely, that Orville is basically capturing the spirit of old Star Trek far more faithfully, but sort of fails because it's a comedy written by Seth MacFarlane, so it feels more like self-insert Star Trek fanfic. But Discovery is very much in the vein of the JJ Abrams movies, which were barely Star Trek at all, as much as they were just mostly mindless action movies with the names of Star Trek characters in it.

I also saw another review where someone said that Discovery was a worthy successor to Gene Roddenberry's vision and he'd be proud of it if he were still alive (or something like that), and I was like, "Umm, no, Roddenberry's vision of the future was one where everything was mostly peaceful and the Federation were generally boring explorers, whereas this show has a captain who starts an intergalactic war mostly by being stupid and overly emotional - he'd absolutely loathe this show."

Fortunately, I've never really given much of a shit about Star Trek (it was never really my bag, because I was never into harder sci-fi, and I have a much more cynical view of human nature and what the future holds than Roddenberry ever did), so I have absolutely no horse in the current race. But even if I did, Discovery can go fuck itself because it will be a cold day in hell before I pay for a CBS streaming service just to watch it.


---

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

GanonsSpirit posted...

Tragedy should absolutely be politicized

That way maybe we could actually get some shit done.

I suspect you'd probably think differently if someone whose politics you disagree with attempted to politicize a tragedy that happened to you personally.



GanonsSpirit posted...

And anyway, what it really means when people say not to politicize tragedy is "Let's talk about this later, when my callous disregard for human life will seem less callous"

Or what some people might actually mean is "Maybe we should attempt to be sympathetic towards and supportive of people who have suffered a significant loss rather than immediately exploit their for our own purposes before the bodies are even cold."

Most politicizing of tragedy doesn't give a single shit about those people or what they think/feel, and is just attempting to score points with a convenient manipulable example. If anything, I find that FAR more callous than the alternative.



KevinceKostner posted...

Now is not the time to talk about gun control, then wheeeennn?

Maybe when people are actually thinking logically and rationally, and discuss the actual merits and flaws of a given issue, rather than reacting viscerally with knee-jerk emotional responses.

Unfortunately, American politics are almost entirely emotion-driven these days anyway, so very few decisions we make as a voting populace are sane and rational at this point. Especially with the Internet basically becoming a culture of outrage, where everyone is turning into a pitchfork-wielding mob just looking for things to be pissed at.


---

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

You give us nothing and expect miracles. Your bumps are futile.


---

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

mooreandrew58 posted...

as said batman's cape does at least have functions.

Yeah, but that was all added after the fact, by later writers, to try and justify why he still uses it in spite of it being an incredibly obvious tactical flaw (something multiple comic characters have pointed out over the years).

It's the same logic behind why so many superheroes wear tights that look like underwear on the outside of their clothes (including Batman, originally). It made perfect sense when Superman did it (it was a reference to early 1900s weightlifters and wrestlers, who wore similar tights), and Superman influenced most of the characters that followed, so other characters do it too. But then culture moved on to the point where most people don't get the reference anymore, so Superman's look makes less sense, so newer writers try to come up with new ways to justify it (like it being some kind of Kryptonian style or something), to ultimately having the recent writers be so ashamed of it that they redesigned the entire costume (poorly) to get rid of it.

But nostalgia and decades worth of experience tell us that certain heroes are supposed to look a certain way, so taking their capes away now just makes them look a bit lamer in comparison. So characters like the X-Men or Avengers can get away with more advanced-looking costumes or no capes, but characters like Superman and Batman are likely to have capes pretty much forever.


---

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

green dragon posted...

Except for the actual creation of star wars

ParanoidObsessive posted...

To be fair, a lot of the strength of the original films was rooted in him stealing a lot of ideas from other movies (like The Hidden Fortress and Flash Gordon), then running his rough draft scripts past other, much better directors (like Spielberg, Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma) so they could point out to him which ideas were incredibly stupid.

But, yeah, I mean, sure. I suppose Lucas was the only person on the entire planet who could have watched The Hidden Fortress and then decided to set it in space instead.

Oh, and to make the bumbling comic relief characters into robots instead. Genius!


---

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

InfiniteMick posted...

George Lucas did a great job creating the universe.
But as a director? Let's be honest here, he sucks.

To be fair, a lot of the strength of the original films was rooted in him stealing a lot of ideas from other movies (like The Hidden Fortress and Flash Gordon), then running his rough draft scripts past other, much better directors (like Spielberg, Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma) so they could point out to him which ideas were incredibly stupid.

It's also telling that a lot of ideas that wound up getting removed from the original scripts during that process wound up getting put back into the scripts for the prequels after everyone had helped convince George Lucas that he was actually a genius, and he stopped listening to everyone else's advice.

And then you have things like other people coming in to write better screenplays or being better directors, and actors ad-libbing better lines while filming.

Basically, Lucas has always been vastly overpraised for the success of the original films, and it seems like the more control he had over the franchise at any given point, the worse it was.



InfiniteMick posted...

During the filming of the first Star Wars, everyone else on the set thought it would flop.

So did most of the executives at 20th Century Fox when they saw the preliminary cut of the movie.

And it probably would have, if his wife at the time hadn't gone into the editing room and re-edited it without George getting in the way and continuing to ruin things.

Again, it seems like almost every good thing about Star Wars only happens when people take control away from Lucas.


---

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

EightySeven posted...

There's also zero replay value in The Phantom Menace

There's actually negative replay value in The Phantom Menace. Every time someone watches it, it actually siphons hope and joy out of the universe.

If someone ever sat down and watched it 100 times in a row, it would magically bring Hitler back to life.


---

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

BlazeAndBlade posted...

i think shadow hearts 1&2 did bittersweet stuff right even made me feel sad

that game desensitised me to any other game or movie that takes the bittersweet option

To be far, those games DID technically have "happy" endings. They just weren't the canon endings that carried on into the next game.

Shadow Hearts (and Koudelka before it) might be the only franchise where the "bad" ending is always the official canon ending, because the people at Sacnoth apparently hate joy.



Mario_VS_DK posted...

I defend ME3 as a great game. But the ending still sucked, just not enough that I didn't greatly enjoy the rest of the game.

It was a relatively uneven game. There was some great stuff in there, but it also had its flaws, and there were definitely parts where the narrative starts to have problems long before the dick-punch that is the ending.

The real problem is that the ending itself is SO bad, it not only retroactively ruins most of the game that comes before it, but reaches back in time to kind of shit on the first two games as well.

I've never really had a problem going back and playing ME3 again (or doing an ME1-3 full run), but at the same time I absolutely understand people who say they basically can't play ME3 - or any of the games - any more because they know how ME3 ends and it basically ruins the entire experience. No matter how many people want to scream about how it's the journey not the destination, the ending to a given story being total crap can absolutely ruin the entire story leading up to it.


---

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

Because early superheroes were an evolution of the pulp adventure hero, and most of them wore capes, long trenchcoats, and the like.

Batman's cape is basically straight up just Zorro's cape.


---

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

Teledildonics.


---

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

If they're well-written, no.

But far too many people seem to act like "bittersweet" or "unhappy" endings are somehow more inherently "art", and thus above all criticism, and that anyone who disapproves of such an ending (even if for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not it was "happy") is basically a philistine that can't accept anything but happy sunshine and rainbows.

It's why I used to get annoyed at the people who tried to defend Mass Effect 3's ending by shitting on anyone who criticized it and strawmanning them all into not liking it because it wasn't happily ever after, when the vast majority of complaints were actually because of piss-poor writing and presentation.

Meanwhile, Dragon Age: Origins has multiple ending possibilities that span from about as happy as dark fantasy can get to downright depressing, and my favorite run of all time is the one where my romance tragically ended in spite of the fact that both me and my partner still desperately loved each other, and then I went on and died in the end (and worst of all, made an orphan out of my poor dog!).

(But conversely, Dragon Age: Inquisition - and it's DLC - mostly feels like it's trying to present as shitty an ending outcome as possible, solely for the sake of it - and to set things up for the inevitable sequel - which in turn makes ITS darker ending feel much weaker in comparison.)

A well-written ending should reflect the logical conclusion of the story as a sequence of events leading up to an inevitable climax, whether that means being happy or unhappy. An unhappy ending tacked on just to be pretentious is equally as bad (if not more so) than a happy ending tacked on just to be schmaltzy.


---

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

WastelandCowboy posted...

Honestly, I'm just hoping that we get some GTA V Story DLC.

They already confirmed those plans are straight up dead, and there's never going to be any single player DLC.

They openly admitted that the demand for online content (and people willing to buy Shark cards) led them to readjust their entire plan and start churning out more online DLC than was originally intended (if I remember correctly, we've already had about 7 online updates that weren't originally planned), which meant reassigning most of their staff to work on that instead of on single player DLC.

At this point, the plan is to do about another year or so of occasional updates (mostly weekly/bi-weekly drip-feeds of new clothes and vehicles with periodic larger updates like Gunrunning and Smugglers' Run), and then taper off as they reroute all of their resources to development on GTAVI.


---

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

Yes, but then again, I've freely admitted multiple times that if I was ever in charge of a country I'd run it like a comic book supervillain anyway.


---

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

FinalFantasyIV posted...

that's not a flaw in logic.

I was never referring to those sexless dweeb forums

I said Facebook, not the general internet.

No, you said "social media".

But the point that you're blatantly missing is that there were plenty of young racists on the Internet (which includes Facebook) before the old racists came along and found Facebook. Because racism isn't really an age-based thing.

Generally speaking, for every form of social media that's ever been invented, shitty people were posting on it 20 minutes after it first existed. Because humans, in general, are terrible. And the Internet tends to bring out the worst in everyone.


---

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

Zeus posted...

Also, wouldn't it be less "officially gone nuts" and more "officially gone senile"? =p

Personally, I blame Jenny McCarthy.

I think some of the brain parasites she has eating away at her must have crossed over to him while they were boning.


---

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

Considering how many dead IPs seem to be getting sucked up and rebooted these days, there's always a chance Space Quest 7 will happen eventually. And the writers are all still in games, so you could even theoretically get a restart by the same people that actually addresses the cliffhanger.

Though they already pushed a Kickstarter to make a Space Quest-esque game that apparently went nowhere, so that door might also be closed for good.



ernieforss posted...

Odd Gentlemen's King Quest also didn't feel right either.

To be fair, King's Quest VIII (Mask of Eternity) didn't really feel like King's Quest either.

Though apparently, The Odd Gentlemen are kind of shitty people behind the scenes, and their version of the game was kind of crap, so I was mostly hoping for them to tank anyway.


---

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

WastelandCowboy posted...

I hope Rockstar learns from Red Dead Redemption and releases this on PC

The lesson they learned from Red Dead Redemption is that the game is going to sell incredibly well even if they only stick to consoles and shun PC.

What you should actually be hoping for is that GTAV's sales on PC were high enough to encourage them to release Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC.

But what you should be dreading is that, because it's much easier to implement microtransactions and restrict mods on consoles, they may be relatively sour on GTAO's performance on PC, and be even more likely to blow off PC entirely to concentrate earnings.


---

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

The flaw in your logic is that it ignores the fact that places like LUE and 4chan were phenomenally racist right from the start, and those were originally almost entirely populated by teenagers.


---

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

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/6-gamefaqs-announcements/75819799

Yep, there is it.

Learn to code, fuckers.


---

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

Raganork posted...

What sort of janky-ass formatting are you using?

The awkward compromise format I've been forced into using because GameFAQs keeps constantly breaking line spacing.

Originally the site allowed for easy spacing between the body of text and your sig line, but that was ruined once they separated signatures out of the text field and make them an automatic attachment. Then I switched to using <br> to make the space, until they fucked that up as well. For a while a simple <P> worked, then I eventually had to start using <P></P><P></P> to do it.

Now I'm apparently going to be switching to using italics with a space (so basically {I} {/I}{I} {/I}, except with brackets), because that still seems to work (though I'm sure they'll fuck that up eventually as well). Except now I also have to add it between separate sections as well, because it seems like the board is now incapable of seeing anything resembling a double line break without deleting the excess.

(so on a site where character limits are a thing, now every post I make is likely going to have at least 16-32 worthless extra characters forced into it)

Though on the plus side, I suppose all of these code updates have led to wonderful site-wide advances, like all of the shitty features I don't actually use, and style formatting that I've been deliberately blocking for years now. Oh, and I suppose it apparently makes the site look better on mobile, except I wouldn't know because it will be a cold day in hell before I ever actually come to this site on anything resembling a smart phone.



Raganork posted...

See, this is why we stopped putting two spaces after punctuation back in '70s <_<

I still do it. You just never notice because the site automatically deletes out the second space.


---

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

Thanks for letting me know, so I can ignore your new account instead.


---

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

Entity13 posted...

I'm not seeing the problem here.

<P></P>
<P></P>
.
.
That's the problem. They've ruined line spacing for like the fifth time.
.
.
---

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

shadowsword87 posted...

Quickly! Post while PO is in the middle of a rant!
It will never go away!

Fortunately, I'm not QUITE OCD enough for this to bother me.

So suck it!
.
.
---

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

(cont)

Finally, you're assuming that the growth of the development of magic automatically translates into more spellcasters. Which likely isn't the case, since most settings seem to assume that the capacity to become a truly significant spellcaster requires some inner spark or innate talent as well as access to research material (ie, you can build the greatest magical library ever in the middle of a podunk village in the middle of nowhere, but you're never going to turn the entire population of that village into competent spellcasters - at best, you might manage to snag a couple who had potential but who would otherwise never have had a chance to express it).

This limiting factor is the main reason why, in a universe where everyone KNOWS that magic exists, the vast majority of people are still normal non-spellcasters. If it were simply a question of learning, almost everyone would try to learn at least SOME minor magic, but very few settings allow for that.

Which also touches on something else common to nearly every fantasy setting - the reason why so many powerful magic items always seem to be ancient, as opposed to created just last week. There's an unspoken assumption (mostly from Tolkien's influence) that modern magic simply isn't as GOOD as the Old Magic used to be, and that while the Ancients may have been able to build floating cities or establish vast networks for teleportation and communication, modern wizards can barely churn out a few trinkets and novelties while adventurers are pulling powerful relics out of ruins. Whether there's a metaphysical reason for it (like Mystra changing the rules of magic in Forgotten Realms) or just the implication that magic is a finite resource that gets "used up" over time ("We've hit peak mana!"), there's usually a limiting factor that prevents fantasy settings from becoming magitechnological wonderlands.

And even beyond all that, even if we assume a world where thousands of past magi have created hundreds of teleportation circles all across the world, teleportation circles still require a caster to ACTIVATE in most cases (as opposed to fixed portals), so the number of people who can use them is still going to be limited (even aside from the innate limitations of time/quantity built into the spell at base level).

Again, a DM who WANTS to homebrew their own setting where everything is high magic and everyone lives a fantastic modern life with magic being a metaphor for our current level of real world technology can easily do so by changing the rules to allow that sort of thing, but very few established fantasy settings really ALLOW for that sort of thing, and most have explicit reasons why it absolutely wouldn't work that way, and why, for the vast majority of the population, life is going to be exactly the same as it's always been, medieval as fuck and with magic being a rare (or rare-ish) wonder. And yes, there's still going to be farms, villages, aqueducts and sewers, beasts of burden, and walled cities that are fairly confident they're not going to be invaded by teleporting armies of magical assassins.
.
.
---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

"Well there you have it. There's no casters who can cast Wish and Teleportation Circle." Wrong! We only accounted for the living.

On Earth, they estimate about 100 billion people have ever lived. So that 0.0001 people who can cast Wish and Teleportation Circle just jumped up to 0.01. Hm, still not enough. Except, once people start creating magical services that people can rely on, that's less people who need to work and more who can start learning magic.

There are a LOT of flaws in this logic.

First, it assumes that the past population of any given fantasy world would follow similar patterns to the real world, and again, also assumes a much higher global population than is even remotely realistic for a medieval fantasy setting. Worse, because population over time is mostly logarithmic, the majority of those hypothetical people would be from the immediate past (ie, on Earth, while there may have been 100 billion humans who've ever lived, about a third of those people have only lived within the last 500 years or so). It also ignores the fact that, once you take mortality rates into account, a LOT of those people died relatively young.

So realistically, in the average D&D world, you're probably talking 50-75 billion people all time, tops (but with only about half of those living to an age where they'd be useful as resources), with about 400 million currently alive. All told, that probably only gives you a 100x multiplier to the sum total of all possible spellcasters ever.

The second flaw kicks in because you're assuming that magical knowledge is universal across historical time periods, which it almost certainly wouldn't be. First, it would likely take time for magical understanding to evolve, for more complex spells to be created, and for knowledge to disseminate to the point where spellcasters can learn from what others have done before. Second, it would likely be concentrated in certain locations and historical periods, while others would be less enlightened (think of the scholarly output of ancient Rome compared to an English village in 1300 or the Siberian tundra in 2017).

Or to put it another way, there are 7 billion people alive today, and about 34% of those people have/use the Internet, but that doesn't translate into 34 billion of the 100 billion humans who've ever lived being Internet users. Nor does it mean that every country on Earth currently has 1/3rd of its population using the Internet. Statistics can be misleading.

So take that 100x multiplier we mentioned earlier, and drop it a bit.

Then consider that some of those spellcasters will be alive during times of great abundance or availability of resources, while others will likely be living in the aftermath or some magical catastrophe or other (common in D&D worlds). "Golden Age" spellcasters are likely to be more prolific when it comes to creating magic items than "Dark Age" ones are. So for the purposes of magical item creation, lower that multiplier even more.

Then drop it even more, because not every spellcaster capable of crafting is going to be willing to craft (in fact, if most D&D settings are anything to judge by, it seems more like maybe 1 out of every 100 AT BEST will bother for anything other than the most selfish of reasons).

Furthermore, those same aforementioned magical catastrophes are far more likely to destroy or render inaccessible any number of magical items, so even if tons of past spellcasters WERE endlessly crafting magical wonders, a lot of them won't last until present day (ie, this is why adventures keep having to salvage this crap out of ancient ruins - and for every +1 sword or daylight stone you find there were probably a thousand that are lost forever).

(cont).
.
---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

And now it's pretty likely that at least one of them can start crafting create food and water items to help provide for big cities.

Again, in most settings, magic items require some degree of magical aptitude to use (ie, items that cast spells can only be used by a spellcaster, or a Rogue with the ability to use magic items) - meaning you can't just create millions of "Magic Meal" stones and pass them out to every third villager.

So even in a setting where you had millions of magical items that can cast Create Food and Water (unlikely as fuck), and even assuming the most generous numbers for magic users in the general population (say, one out of every 1000, by your own numbers), you're still in a scenario where nearly every magic user in the world would have to cast the spell about 100 times a day to feed everyone. And that's not taking into account factors like items having spell charges or casting fatigue.

And in a more realistic setting (ie, the estimates I tossed out earlier), you're actually getting closer to every magic user in the world having to cast those spells about 5000 times a day to feed everyone.

Farming is NEVER going to stop being a thing. Especially when the rich and powerful (ie, the people most capable of paying for all the necessary enchanting) aren't going to be willing to make that investment when just having peasants farm is so much cheaper and easier (see also, how 10,000+ years worth of technological advancement in the real world still hasn't eliminated the need for basic agriculture on a massive scale).
.
.
---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

And finally, you can quite easily make items that cast the spells for you. (Well, I say quite easily, but obviously it costs an enormous fortune. But when it ensures your city's future, it's a small cost to pay)

Once they're made, they're permanent until someone sabotages and destroys it

This also assumes that wizards have nothing better to do than constantly make magic items for "commoners" (unlikely), that people wealthy enough to bankroll such creation would be willing to fund it solely for the common good (extremely unlikely), and doesn't necessarily take into account the fact that most magic items ARE at least somewhat limited, in the sense that they can't necessarily be used by laypeople at all (ie, why you can't just give that wand you found to your party's Fighter), or have a limited number of charges (and often the potential to eventually "wear out").

Yes, players constantly find legendary magical items that have lasted for thousands of years, but again, the point is that the players are also insanely statistically unlikely heroes who break most of the rules. There's a reason why so many people hoard magical treasures in most settings - they're relatively rare.

.

Mario_VS_DK posted...

Even if only 0.1% of the population can cast magic, in a world of 1 billion, that's still 1mil people who do magic.

So then the solution is that maybe 1% of the NPC casters can make it the 9th level so that the players at least have access to magical services. Well, that's still 10,000 casters. And now it's pretty likely that at least one of them can start crafting create food and water items to help provide for big cities

A population of 1 billion is generally unlikely - most fantasy settings are rooted in pre-industrial medieval standards, which probably gives you about 400 million, tops (with the world's largest cities not managing to hold more than 50-100k at a given time).

I'm also not sure I'd use 0.1% as a solid rule of thumb - White Wolf always used 1/1 million (or 0.0001%) for their standards for "our" world, but that's admittedly low for a higher fantasy setting. D&D is probably closer to 0.002% (1 out of 50k), with 0.01% (1 out of 10k) probably an absolute upper limit - again, the PCs are incredibly statistically unlikely in most D&D worlds, unless you're deliberately brewing a rampantly high-magic setting.

Realistically, the average D&D world likely has about a few dozen or so extremely high-level wizards in it at any given time (most of whom will know each other, either personally or by reputation), a few hundred middle-tier wizards, and maybe a few thousand minor wizards who will never be much more than average spellcasters (and maybe a few thousand hedge mage types who master a few weak spells and who can operate as task mages). Then double those numbers for empowered clerics, who likely follow a similar breakdown (with a few dozen high priests, a few hundred middle tier priests, and a few thousand lower level acolytes), acting as the core backbone of much larger, mostly mundane temples and churches.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the average powerful spellcaster can live for hundreds of years, which means that, while there might be a dozen high-level casters in the world at any time, some of them have been around for centuries. Most of the turnover happens more often at lower levels than it does higher ones, with truly powerful wizards really only coming into their own maybe once or twice a century.

So, if anything, I'd lean more towards saying there's maybe 10,000 casters at any one time total, and only 100 or so who can use the sort of world-breaking magic that is the stuff of legends (which is why those casters and their spells become legends in the first place, and not just ho-hum common business as usual).
.
.
---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

Also, teleportation circles are one way. So they aren't a security issue to the people controlling them, only the people on the other side.

Another thing is, even in a low magic setting, this can happen. Once they're made, they're permanent until someone sabotages and destroys it.

And yes, teleportation circles would be heavily guarded, but it's pretty hard to guard against an unknown wizard in a far off land making another one that is directed right into the middle of your city, which only takes an hour to create.

The problem is that teleportation circles can only link to other, preexisting teleportation circles, so you aren't going to be teleporting into the middle of any cities, unless said city has specifically set up a receiving circle for you to connect to. And if they have, that circle is almost certainly heavily guarded, if not warded or otherwise barred in some way. Other, secondary circles may exist which are more secretive, and thus less guarded, but those are also almost certainly nor public knowledge, and it would be extremely difficult to get the activation sigil necessary to access them.

Then, even if you DO have access to a publicly open receiving circle, you can only really open a relatively small gateway to it for about six seconds per casting, meaning even if you completely deplete the magic of every caster available to you, you probably aren't going to funnel more than a few dozen troops through before you can't send any more, so any strike team you send in is going to be limited at best. And if you assume that they can be loaded to the gills with magical weapons and items, then the converse to that is that most of the guards who will be waiting for them will ALSO have similar items and likely countermagic options, thus rebalancing the entire equation. At that point, teleportation magic doesn't give much more of an advantage than you'd have casting spells like disintegrate on a city's wall to open up a narrow opening to send troops through (or, you know, using the ancient tactic of having traitors or operatives in the city help open the gates at night or sneak you in via ropes extended out windows, which doesn't require magic at all).

The teleportation spell (which is different from teleportation circle) does let you target locations specifically without having to lock on to an existing circle, but it's also a more powerful spell (meaning you won't be able to cast it as often), can only transport about 8 individuals or a large item (meaning it isn't cost effective for moving tons of troops or cargo), AND it has a significant chance of failure that will land you some distance away from your initial target (possibly to the point of being mostly useless, and possibly to the point of getting you killed).

Granted, these are the rules for those spells in D&D, but in pretty much every setting ever made, there are almost always restrictions on magic use or fundamental aspects of how magic works that make impractical. Even if teleportation magic doesn't work exactly the way it does in D&D, it still isn't going to let you open gateways into cities and pour entire armies in to conquer anything.
.
.
---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

Oh, what do you know. I randomly stumbled upon the post that I was talking about earlier where the teleportation circles and such are what made the world.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy

I'm not going to read it, but I'm already typing a pretty huge rebuttal to your first post.
.
.
---

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

MotherFUCKER.

I'm pretty sure GameFAQs just changed their coding again, fucking up my ability to properly format posts YET AGAIN.

At this point, I'm starting to feel like we could put a chimpanzee in front of a computer and it code code better than whatever minimum wage assholes this site hires.
.
.
---

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

shadowsword87 posted...

I just need to make sure to remember that the enemy plans keep on chug'n, and it feels perfectly reasonable for the players, a bit videogame-y, but I think that's a fair tradeoff.

I kind of like how Mark Hulmes seems to handle this sort of thing in his Lightfall game. Namely, it seems like he decides in advance what the nearest couple of locations are to where the players are currently, drops hooks or rumors that could lead the players to go to any of those locations, and he decides in advance what plot-relevant events are going to take place in those locations. Then, once the players decide where to go, he advances events in the other locations without them.

Early on in that game, the players skipped over one town entirely, only to find out later that it had been taken over by an evil organization via political shenanigans, and a friendly NPC who went there without them wound up being killed off-camera. And Mark said straight up that if they'd gone there, they could have prevented the bad guys from taking over (though presumably, the place they DID go instead would have suffered, since it was under attack when they got there, and they'd had to save the people there).

I used a similar system in an Amber game I ran pretty much forever ago. There were about six different concurrent plot threads and antagonists doing things, and they had a set schedule for what they wanted to do and where they were going to do it. The players were free to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and could pick and choose between which mysterious events they were going to look into and which they were going to ignore, but the bad guys were still doing stuff regardless of whether or not the good guys even knew about it.
.
.
---

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

Dynalo posted...

The biggest complaint I got about Curse of Strahd is that it felt too "confined". The campaign I wrote went over much better (despite the incredibly weak ending because I just didn't have time to finish it properly)

My biggest complaint about Curse of Strahd is that it sort of collapsed the entire Ravenloft setting back to its roots, with it being mostly Barovia and nothing else. Though I understand why they did it that way, especially for newer players who've never played Ravenloft before.

But I like the idea of multiple interconnected domains with different Dread Lords in charge, at least in terms of running a game where you don't feel compelled to go after one specific villain as the culminating goal. Don't feel like fighting Strahd? Just head north and eventually you'll wind up in someone else's lands, where Strahd has no real power, and there's an entirely different set of Gothic problems to deal with. If nothing else, I feel like that makes it feel less like a distinct story and more of a setting where players have more flexibility.

.

shadowsword87 posted...

Yeah, I prefer the "points of interest" style of campaigning.
Basically I have a series of plot hooks, then wherever the PCs want to go, that's what the session for the day is.

Yeah, that's how a lot of the current D&D books seem to work. They're basically like a list of locations, and each location has a couple of hooks tied to it. So, say, your players start in Town A, where they decide to accept a job that takes them to Town B. Once there, there are a few more things they can do, and rumors they hear about other places. While on the road, they may come to a fork and take the wrong turning (or just decide to detour deliberately) and wind up at yet another location, where they'll encounter some other puzzle, threat, or scenario. And the DM can still throw in whatever random (or not-so-random) encounters they want along the way in any given location if they want to try and spur a specific event.

It also makes it so that, when you're watching streams of different groups playing through the same adventure, they don't necessarily take the same paths or do the same things. And it can make it an interesting sort of parallel universe sort of deal, where you see similar heroes on similar quests for very different reasons, and solving them in very different ways.
.
.
---

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

wolfy42 posted...

Yeah, I have so many games like that to play already, I think getting the whole series would be a waste.

To be fair, most Assassin's Creed games can be played relatively quickly. I rented the first few games from my local library and still 100% perfected them even though I only had them for about a week each. If you skip trying to get every single collectible you can work through them pretty quickly.

That being said, I wouldn't say they're so great that you should absolutely rush out to get them if you've already got dozens of other games you still haven't gotten around to. You're not missing a life-redefining experience or anything.


---

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

shadowsword87 posted...

Dynalo posted...

I'm gonna be starting up the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign here soon. Hopefully it's good. Need to read through it this weekend and prep for it though.

Apparently it's more sandbox-y, so have fun running that one.

That seems to be the case for most of the newer adventure modules they've been putting out, at least from what I've seen.

ie, they basically give you a book full of encounters set in a specific location, and leave it up to you to string them together in whatever order you (or your players) wind up taking. And while each seems to have "end game content" that all of those smaller encounters are eventually leading up to, it would be entirely possible to play in one of those storylines and just tick off the minor scenarios without ever really interacting with the overarching metaplot.

Like, you could easily run Tomb of Annihilation as a tour-guide of Chult without ever using the Death Curse storyline. Or use Storm King's Thunder as a general "dwarves and giants in the North" adventure but never really deal with the backstory reasons for why the giants are all getting uppity.

Curse of Strahd seems like the only one where you kind of NEED to have that final confrontation eventually, but that's mostly because locking the players into Barovia and having Strahd be the magical god-king of the land who pretty much sees everything that happens everywhere kind of precludes just having general unrelated adventures - everything is ultimately connected directly to Strahd one way or another (and he WILL see you as a threat at some point).


---

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

The best of them all are 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations. I'd probably rank Syndicate right after as "must play".

1 is a bit rougher, but it does tie into the overarching story of the games that runs from 1 - 3, so if you care about that, you should probably play 1 and 3 (though 3 is probably the weakest game in the main franchise).

I have no opinions about 4 (I avoided it like the plague because I hated the ship combat in 3), but I did enjoy Rogue (which also had ship combat, which was much better than what was in 3). I also skipped Unity, because of the massive clusterfuck of problems it had when it first came out.


---

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

Zeus posted...

Which is also a gender issue, because the WWE -- like wrestling promos before it -- generally don't like depicting male wrestlers beating up female talent. The only recent times I can recall anybody getting her back was when Vickie shoved her in a vat of mud and when Brie slapped her.... although that didn't really end the feud and things continued to go quite a bit longer.

Oh, I agree.

But that's sort of the point. When you KNOW that you can't do inter-gender angles because you're terrified it will hurt your PG status, then you shouldn't be booking storylines like that in the first place.

If anything, the best scenario there would be to book Steph as more of a face (see also, Shane), and have her actively praise and put over wrestlers, so there's no NEED for anyone to get payback against her. If you feel like you still need a foil for them to play off (though as Cornette has pointed out, the evil management figure is neither necessary nor necessarily the best idea creatively anyway), you could always have the dynamic where Triple H is the heel who can be actively fought, while Steph is always the more understanding face side of the couple. Or you could just do the thing they're doing now, where each show has an active GM and a more distant Commissioner role, and have Steph be the face Commissioner who occasionally appears while also having a more blatant chickenshit slimy heel in the GM role, who can screw people over (and get the crap beat out of them), but who has to become servile and put on the more respectable face when Steph shows up.

Conversely, you could be a bit more nuanced and just have Steph as a face who puts over and has open respect for faces and who is a bit more annoyed with heels, but with the heels still being able to "win" by exploiting loopholes or breaking rules, so they aren't constantly entirely emasculated by her with no recourse. ie, basically playing the management role that nearly every company (even the WWF - see also Jack Tunney and Gorilla Monsoon) had before Vince became a supervillain.

But none of this happens because Steph is the one in charge of creative, and she doesn't actually care about putting her talent over, as much as she likes going on the occasional power-trip and showing off a bit.


---

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

Oh, also -

A lot of what I was talking about applies mainly to higher magic settings like the Forgotten Realms, but even D&D has "bleaker" settings. Greyhawk is based more on old-time sword-and-sorcery, which means magic is mostly concentrated in mysterious (and generally insane) hermit-wizards, and has far less impact on the average citizen than magic does in a setting like Faerun. Dark Sun is even worse, where magic is generally outright malevolent at best, and the world itself is pretty much broken because of it, so no one is really benefiting from spells to alleviate their hellish lives.

Again, a lot of this does depend on which setting you choose to play in, or how you craft your own homebrew world, but there are almost always reasons provided for why magic hasn't radically reshaped every facet of life into something almost unrecognizable. Magic is almost always presented as being something relatively rare and mysterious, even if it doesn't seem like that to players who are in a group of people who can all shake the very pillars of heaven even at relatively low levels.

The thing to remember, though, is that PCs are literally one-in-a-million heroes (or villains).


---

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

(cont)

Granted, you COULD have a high-magic setting where literally every citizen owns a wand of fireballs and can regenerate severed limbs or fly from place-to-place if you like, and where wars are fought more with teleporting assassins casting disintegrate than with soldiers or swords, but that's rarely a default setting for anything (unless it's being used as a metaphor for modern technological society, in which case it almost always winds up being destroyed at some point anyway).

(And I will pause here to suggest imagining a setting where literally everything is exactly the same as the modern world we all live in, except everything is magic. Soldiers have wands instead of guns, vehicles are self-propelled magical carriages and the like, the Internet is a network of sending stones, people keep food fresh via cold magic and cook it with fire magic, etc.)

The real way in which magic would likely change things for the average citizen might be health care, where sick or injured people who can afford it would be more inclined to go to their local church rather than a doctor for healing - but again, a limited number of clerics who can actually cast healing spells combined with a large population means not everyone is going to be able to benefit, so they'd still BE mundane doctors for more minor ailments and injuries (and resurrection magic is still going to be a somewhat rare thing limited to only the most important or powerful of individuals, while the average citizen is forced to accept their own mortality from the very beginning). If anything, the main reason for temples in a fantasy setting to charge for healing is to limit the number of frivolous requests to save magic for those who truly need it (and in a setting where religion is truly devout and good as opposed to corrupt or sinister, they likely repurpose most of that money into helping the poor and needy anyway).

Healing magic might also be able to head off the worst negative effects of plague before it can really become an epidemic problem, though again, limited healers means a plague that spreads quickly enough can rapidly outpace the ability to magically deal with it (forcing healers to prioritize who to save and who to sacrifice, with the nobility likely benefiting most). You also open the door to another real world-inspired problem - in a world where disease is constantly being healed via magic, is it possible that some disease or another will eventually evolve that is resistant to magic, and thus becomes a far worse pandemic than it would otherwise have been?

Likely, the biggest change is that most "disasters" will be at least mitigated (if not outright prevented) before they can become as significant as they would be in the real world. In our world a major fire in a city like Rome (64), London (1666), Chicago (1871), or San Francisco (1906) can take out most of the city before it burns out - in a city like Baldur's Gate or Waterdeep, magic will likely be used to contain and snuff it out in a much smaller area. Quick disasters like earthquakes will still be just as bad (because it will be over before anyone can really react), but repairs will likely occur faster.

And on the negative side, attacks by monsters or "evil" races become a worse threat than animal or bandit attacks were in the real world, but that's more a matter of scale than one of type.


---

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

Mario_VS_DK posted...

And the biggest factor in that was teleportation circles (also also wish traps that continuously pop out money, food, and other resources).

Farming towns die off first, due to easy access to spells like create food and water.

Then cities start making teleportation circles to transport resources. This means a lot of the smaller towns along the roads no longer get traffic and have difficulty staying alive until they finally move off to the cities or die.

The problem with this is that it assumes that you're dealing with an extremely high magic setting, but that applies to very few fantasy novel settings and even fewer role-playing settings.

Even D&D, which can occasionally feel overpowered in terms of magic, is supposed to be a place where magic is relatively rare. Magic users in general are pretty much the 1%ers of their world, and full-on adventurers are even rarer than that. While magic (both in terms of modern goods and services as well as ancient relics being dug out of old tombs and ruins) would absolutely affect the economy and social dynamics of a fantasy world, it wouldn't necessarily impact as much as some people think.

Using "Wish" spells as the basis of anything is radically flawed, because they're insanely high-powered spells (we're talking maybe one in a million people be able to cast them, if they're even THAT common) that also take a toll on the caster (in older editions each use would age you significantly, even at their most accessible they're still somewhat limited). NO wizard would be casting it frivolously, which means you really aren't dealing with a constant influx of material into the environment.

Even lower-level spells like Create Food/Water can only be cast so many times per day, and affect a specific number of people, so even if every empowered cleric in your entire world did nothing but cast those spells, you'd still only be feeding a tiny fraction of the population.

As for teleportation circles, the sheer amount of effort involved in their creation limits the number any one area would ever have (as does security issues, which I'll get to in a moment), and any individual circle would only be able to transport a limited amount of personnel or material over a specific period of time, which almost certainly would never be enough to meet actual demand. Much like in the real world, where we currently have tons of planes and trains for transport, but most product is still moved from place to place in simple trucks.

And as you pointed out, every teleportation circle is a potential security breach that can be exploited by enemies - which is why no city would ever create tons of them and leave them unguarded. The 5e DMG explicitly says that nearly every official circle that exists is generally going to be heavily guarded and monitored 24-7 to prevent exactly that sort of commando strike team insertion (which limits the amount you could move through them on a regular basis even more) - think how the US currently patrols and inspects cargo moving through ports for dangerous contraband or illegal goods (except in a fantasy world of city-states and more limited trade, assume they're actually going to be more competent about it than the US is).

Ultimately, you probably wind up with a scenario very similar to what we have in the real world - nobles and royalty benefit heavily from magic, while the average peasant farmer or minor merchant is living the exact same life they'd have had in real world Medieval times. Massive farms would still be necessary to support cities. Mundane caravans and merchants would still be necessary to move goods from place-to-place. Cities will still be strong points of defense, and forts will still be difficult to conquer, and warlords of all kinds will still have to build and field armies if they wish to defeat their foes.

(cont)


---

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

I_Abibde posted...

Considering that a subsistence lifestyle is measured in coppers and silvers, a single gold piece can make a big difference to a peasant, but that is only one threshold.

There's also the distinction between "set for a day/set for life" - giving a peasant a gold piece is going to be really awesome for them, but they're still going to be a peasant afterward. At best, they maybe get a few good days out of it.

But then there's the distinction of giving someone enough money that they're actually able to lift themselves into a higher socioeconomic bracket permanently.

When adventurers interact with ordinary people, I always sort of see it like going to the straw market in a place like the Bahamas, where the locals charge radically inflated prices for everything, and adventurers' perceptions of value are completely skewed, so they might not see a problem with paying 1 gold for something the average peasant farmer would pay 1 silver (or even 1 copper) for. People can take one look at the average adventurer and KNOW they're adventuring, and like a tourist, they immediately become prey.

If anything, I'm almost tempted to say that every tavern in a world with lots of adventurers probably has duel-tier (or more) pricing based entirely on who is buying. A local walks in, buys a tankard of ale, and pays 1 copper. An adventurer walks in, buys the same ale, and pays 1 silver (or even 1 gold).

I could even see a scenario (again, like in the Bahamas) where entire market economies spring up to cater solely to the adventurer business, where merchants are entirely focused on selling to adventurers flush with ancient gold coins from long-forgotten dungeons, and are almost disappointed if someone pays them in more modern, local currency (ie, the reaction you get in the Bahamas if you pay someone with an actual Bahamian dollar instead of a US dollar - they really don't like it. But they will absolutely give YOU all of your change in Bahamian currency).

Mario_VS_DK posted...

Knowing that sort of stuff can also go a long ways toward making your world a lot more believable to the players too. You can actually learn a lot from the world by knowing how much money is in it and how much of that money any specific person would have.

I'm always reminded of the one quote I love from Terry Pratchett, when he was talking about creating a believable and interesting fantasy setting city - he pointed out that most people like to start with the king and the nobles and work their way down, but what you should actually do is start with figuring out how they get all the sewage out of the city and work your way up from there.


---

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

Muffinz0rz posted...

(full PPR)

Prance Prance Revolution?


---

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

Zeus posted...

However, in general, face-feuds *have* to end with a sign of respect. It's part of the gimmick

Not really. Plenty of face feuds ended with both faces either just sort of moving on, or one face sort of drifting off without really acknowledging the loss. Arguably, the WWE has booked multiple face vs face storylines lately, and almost none of them have ended with the "HANDSHAKE OF RESPECT" spot.

But when you're dealing with a feud which is entirely built on the premise of "You can't carry the company without me," and you absolutely know the company is pushing the guy as the future of the company, it would have ended the exact same way even if Cena was a heel, Roman was a heel, or they were both heels. The entire feud existed solely for that payoff, so the WWE can go "See? Cena likes Roman now! He respects him! WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ROMAN?!"



Zeus posted...

Well, part of his gimmick is that he's an idiot... He's one of the few guys who can credibly sell whatever the writers put down on paper because their stupid and goofy won't hurt a deliberately stupid and goofy character.

Yeah, but "It's okay, he's SUPPOSED to be an annoying idiot!" doesn't actually make him any less annoying. If anything, it makes him worse, because I know there are people who consciously CHOSE to make him that much of a shitheel rather than him just not knowing any better.

And honestly, Enzo can't really credibly sell anything, apart from song lyrics or catchphrases the crowd can chant along with. Oh, and poop jokes. When they have him try to tell a story that's even remotely complex he starts to stumble over it and the crowd tunes out anyway, because they're just waiting for him to finish and get to the point where they can spell out SAWFT.


---

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

Zeus posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

because there's a perception (which is mostly accurate, honestly) that McMahons pop ratings.

Not sure Steph does any more =p

To be fair, that's a two-fold problem.

First, the effectiveness is muted by appearing on TV constantly. Vince got his recent pop (and upsurge of ratings) because he hasn't been on TV for a while. And Shane popped the crowd when he came back because he'd been gone for years at that point. But Steph was on TV every single week for an extended period of time, so people started getting sick of her.

And second, the real problem with Steph is that about 90% of the storylines she's involved in are basically her shitting on or putting herself over the wrestlers with absolutely no payback or comeuppance whatsoever, ever. Pretty much every time you see her she's being a grade-A turbo c***, yet almost no one ever really wins against her or shits on her effectively in promos, and she never gets the piss smacked out of her or gets thrown through a table or anything (and the one time she DID take a bump recently, it only happened "by accident", and when her husband was involved, so it had zero impact).

She doesn't actually seem to understand that even when he was at the height of his douchebaggery Vince was still getting Stone Cold Stunnered every other week, or having the shit kicked out of him with him blading after getting thrown off a cell or whatever (and Shane tends to benefit from similar suicidal tendencies). She's the only McMahon who gets presented as the untouchable golden girl who can't really be defeated. And since she's in charge of creative and her husband is the main wrestling guy, the fans are fully aware that she's responsible for her own Mary Sue presentation, and react more negatively because of it (ie, she might take less flack for it if it was at least someone else writing the script for her, and she had little say in how she was being presented).

But even Steph will likely pop a reaction when she inevitably comes back after being gone for a while. It's the end result of the WWE basically spending the last 20 years booking storylines that repeatedly tell us the McMahons are more important than any individual wrestler.



Zeus posted...

Well, they more need to develop actual talent who can sell tickets instead of sinking more time, money, and resources into a failed investment, but that's not going to happen.

I agree, but you can't really spin stars out of nothing in the short-term, so they still have to rely on established stars to carry the product until they can put new talent over enough to be strong draws, even if they started doing everything right tomorrow.

But because they've done such a shit job of MAKING new stars, they're running out of people to turn to as the older guys leave. With Undertaker being mostly retired, Angle apparently unable to wrestle, and guys like Jericho and Cena becoming more of occasional part-time acts, they're basically being forced to rely on guys who haven't actually managed to become significant draws (even the Internet darlings, let alone people like Roman).


---

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

shadowsword87 posted...

I'm not sure what the relevance is for any sort of game tbh.

Who said that any question I ask ever is meant to be relevant for any game at any point?

I like to brainstorm. Throwing out tons of ideas can help with inspiration.


---

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

Zeus posted...

I love Enzo the entertainer, but the guy has *never* had even passable in-ring and it's stupid to book him in a division that's pushing high-flying, nonsensical high-precision in-ring work.

That's the real problem I have with him, honestly - Enzo "the entertainer" is the ONLY part of him that's over at all, and I absolutely loathe Enzo "the entertainer". I find very little of what he says entertaining in any way, nor does it help that it usually seems to take him 5 minutes to say what anyone else could get across in about 30 seconds. Almost all of his crowd appeal comes from the "sing along" part of his act, and even that is waning (fans aren't as hot on him as they used to be). I find him awkward at best and stupid and annoying at worst.

I deliberately get up and leave the room when he's talking at this point, because his monologues are pretty much nails-on-chalkboard for me, and even in "dueling" promos he still tends to come across like an idiot.

I could probably overlook the fact that he's a repugnant little shit if he was at least a strong ring worker (though workrate has never gotten over with me as much as it does a lot of the smarks), but in the ring his only real strength is ridiculously overselling when he's getting a beatdown, which really isn't a recipe for being an over face wrestler.

I get that he's still strongly over with at least some of the audience (though again, that's waning, especially since the WWE keeps punishing him for being a dick backstage, and constantly getting shit on tends to be a heat killer). But I hate him so, so much.



Zeus posted...

Granted, Enzo has always been popular for his mic work and personality so... idk, maybe it can help the division somehow?

That's the general presumption behind the booking, in most people's eyes - the division isn't over, so put the belt on someone who IS over, and it will help the division get over.

The problem is, the division isn't over because of how they book it, and how they treat it like a completely unimportant afterthought in the context of the main product (because Vince doesn't give a shit about it), and that has absolutely nothing to do with who's wearing the title. Worse, because Enzo basically went from being an absolute 110% jobber in the main show to becoming the champ in 205 Live almost instantly, it just makes the entire Cruiserweight product come across as being even more meaningless and subpar than it already was.

Rather than elevate the division, putting Enzo on top just sort of buries it even more.

Again, it's a case of being able to UNDERSTAND why the WWE makes the decisions it does, but also being able to see just how wrong those decisions are because I apparently understand the audience way more than the WWE itself does anymore (which might be because things are still being run by a delusional old man who refuses to let fresher minds steer the ship).


---

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

Zeus posted...

Here's the thing, though -- and probably what Meltzer was getting at -- WWE *knew* beforehand how long they'd have Cena. There was no specific reason to just start a random feud now. They COULD have had a best of 3 had they scheduled things for a different time.

I'll grant that, though I think the problem there is that they're desperate to pop ratings and Cena seems to be the only one capable of actually doing that (which is why he's a "free agent" now, so they can use him on either show when they need to).

(It's the similar reason why Vince showed up on SmackDown - because there's a perception (which is mostly accurate, honestly) that McMahons pop ratings. And they are absolutely DESPERATE to boost ratings, because ticket sales are abysmal and renegotiation time for the TV deal is coming up again soon.)

And that was one of the problems with the lead-up to the Cena/Roman feud. Every time they had a back-and-forth, nearly everything Cena said was absolutely true, while almost everything Roman said was wrong. Ratings ARE down. PPV/Network buys are down. Live show attendance is down. Merch is down. The WWE does need Cena to keep coming back, even if only part-time (because he always pops ratings), while Roman is in no way capable of carrying the show on his own without better draws to help him.

As for why they pushed the Cena/Roman feud a bit prematurely, it seems like the common assumption in WWE creative is that Cena isn't going to be an active wrestler all that much longer (see also, the trajectory of The Rock), since he IS actually succeeding in Hollywood to some degree. So they have to get as many "Old guy jobs to put the new guy over" matches out of the way as they can before he leaves for good. And since they're not sure how many more feuds they can get out of him (or even potentially how long they're going to have him for even after he comes back from the Bumblebee movie), they felt it was better to get the Roman feud out of the way now rather than put it off (and potentially lose it entirely, or have to put it off until after Roman/Brock).

WWE logic actually makes perfect sense, IF you look at the world they way they see it (ie, that Roman is absolutely going to be "the guy", and that the audience will eventually accept him if they just keep pushing him hard enough and give him enough "moments". It also makes it easy to predict every booking decision they make (for instance, I ABSOLUTELY KNEW going in the Cena match was going to end with the "put the guy over handshake of respect" spot - and I also knew it was going to fail spectacularly because I understand the audience better than WWE does).

I'm not saying they're RIGHT (they absolutely aren't), but I do understand how they see the world, and it explains so many of their terrible decisions (like putting Jinder over to pander to India, even if that absolutely failed as well).


---

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