Poll of the Day > Netflix seriously pulled the D&D episode of Community

(+) Yeah! (+)

EvilMegas posted...

Are you gonna stop crying over nothing anytime soon?

Well I'd have to stop cutting these onions so probably not.

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EvilMegas posted...

Homebrewing is limited only by how good a DM you are.

I feel home homebrewing is kind of different than just normal DMing, though. Its seems like it would be on another whole level. Especially when trying to keep things fair and stuff. Especially since youd have to tweak a lot. I mean, even the creators had to tweak pretty often. But since lots of people had the same version, it was much easier to see what needing tweaking. Making your own would be harder as you only have your own group to go off of. It might be easier on reddit since
You could probably get some help there. But still... It would be nice to just have two versions, though... Or just release the version with race advantages and disadvantages. But not use them if you dont want to. But I think that can cause other problems and would require different tweaks...
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LinkPizza posted...

I feel home homebrewing is kind of different than just normal DMing, though. Its seems like it would be on another whole level. Especially when trying to keep things fair and stuff.

Honestly I've seen DMs that do better with homebrew, and ones that are great with source but shouldn't touch homebrewing with a 10 foot pole.

I think it has more to do with how someone's mind works and general strengths and weaknesses than a flat good/bad DM issue.

And I've seen some bad DMs, genuinely bad. Fuck you for knowing I'm trying to screw/railroad you (or anything about the game) and fuck you I'm trying to get into this player's pants bad.

I've also seen learning DMs, they aren't exactly good but they're not fingers in ears bad. Green.

At this point most of my experience is coming second hand from spouse playing like 4+ RPs because the DM either dropped the games repeatedly (spouse ) or it was obviously balanced to whoever the DM was or wanted to sleep with. Was ignored repeatedly, turns skipped, hours spent on that one person.

Never again.

My spouse sure didn't shower favor on me like that. And I'm more than fine with that.

ChaosAzeroth posted...

Honestly I've seen DMs that do better with homebrew, and ones that are great with source but shouldn't touch homebrewing with a 10 foot pole.

I think it has more to do with how someone's mind works and general strengths and weaknesses than a flat good/bad DM issue.

Yeah. Thats kind of what I mean. I dont think its really as easy to say home brewing is fine if you have a good DM. Like you said, some are amazing with a source, but horrible at home brewing. And some are great at DM, but not the best when it comes to trying to homebrew race differences... I think its a different skill set. Like, maybe on the same skill tree and different skills...
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LinkPizza posted...

Yeah. Thats kind of what I mean. I dont think its really as easy to say home brewing is fine if you have a good DM. Like you said, some are amazing with a source, but horrible at home brewing. And some are great at DM, but not the best when it comes to trying to homebrew race differences... I think its a different skill set. Like, maybe on the same skill tree and different skills...

Yeah I thought so and was backing up what you said with my own observations and experience.

Not all DMs are created equal, but not all DMs are bad for not being able to use every tool in the belt.

You don't have to start from scratch.

You just tweak a few things from whatever version you're playing and it's a homebrew.


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ChaosAzeroth posted...

Not all DMs are created equal, but not all DMs are bad for not being able to use every tool in the belt.

I haven't played tapbletop in a long time, but one DM I knew would get mad and punish you the more rules you knew. For example somebody wanted a Two-Handed sword because "it deals 3D6 damage" vs. a Hand Axe that deals "only 1D4+1" and the DM would get mad because the character the person was playing wouldn't know something like that.

Or the classic DM eff you of making that inescapable room with the collapsing spiked ceiling nobody survived because he was pissed at you haha.

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EvilMegas posted...

You don't have to start from scratch.

You just tweak a few things from whatever version you're playing and it's a homebrew.

That's true, but some people's brains still don't allow proper balance between the old and new stuff.

Technically anything that's not strictly book stuff is homebrew isn't it? I've seen different people define homebrew slightly different tbh.

EvilMegas posted...

You just tweak a few things from whatever version you're playing and it's a homebrew.

Yeah. But thats why I said it might start to feel stagnant. With other editions, they probably tweak more often. Which can help it feel fresh. Even if its just constant tweaks every like month or whatever. Maybe add something new here and there.

Not only that, but tweaking is easier when you have a bigger pool to pull from. Is there really a need for a tweak? Is this only happening in a small amount of people or to like most of the players and such. Idk. I personally never had a problem with race differences. It also actually helps me pick a character most of the time. I can be indecisive sometimes, But having those advantages and disadvantages can help. And can say some stuff I should be working to/on...
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EvilMegas posted...

You can literally just homebrew it back it instead of whining about it lol.

Ah, the D&D 4th edition credo whenever there was a complaint!
How'd that work out for WotC?

We don't buy the game to do all the work ourselves anyway.
Thank the Great Wheel for the OGL, the best edition of D&D will always be accessible as WotC continues to destroy the modern product.

Now that I think abut it, couldnt they just home brew it the other way? Like keeping all the race differences and home-brew it put themselves...
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LinkPizza posted...

Now that I think abut it, couldnt they just home brew it the other way? Like keeping all the race differences and home-brew it put themselves...

Not only could they homebrew the racial modifiers away, it'd actually be way less work to wipe the slate clean for everyone than to add in unique differences for every race.

streamofthesky posted...

Not only could they homebrew the racial modifiers away, it'd actually be way less work to wipe the slate clean for everyone than to add in unique differences for every race.

So, it would probably be easier to keep doing what they're doing and let others homebrew the modifiers away if they wanted to do so?
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Does this apply to Pathfinder as well? Cause if not then I may switch to it.

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Thats it Im gonna homebrew the game super racist now

dwarves now commit crimes 1/day, its just in their blood


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"I open the chest and loot its contents"
"Twelve slaves and one bottle of Aunt Jemima are added to your inventory."

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Isn't the point in real life that humans of different races are so similar that the differences are negligible and only really cosmetic? Fantasy races have non negligible differences so it makes plenty of sense for them to have racial advantages and disadvantages. That said it is annoying for how it restricts character creation but thats a gameplay issue, not an immersion one.

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Mead posted...

Thats it Im gonna homebrew the game super racist now

dwarves now commit crimes 1/day, its just in their blood

I wonder if we should actually do this. Like, make a stupidly racist version that conforms to every stupid sterotype even if it makes 0 sense and then have a bunch of characters from the actual D&D setting try to survive it.

Blightzkrieg posted...

"I open the chest and loot its contents"
"Twelve slaves and one bottle of Aunt Jemima are added to your inventory."

Like that.

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Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole were ahead of their time with their character creation bits.

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EvilMegas posted...

There really doesn't need to be racism in DnD though.

If you want it so bad, homebrew.

Stat advantages based off race only really hurt character creation. Want to make a barbarian, half orc or dwarf, those are the only good choices. Wanna be a elf? Ranger or mage.

This opens the role playing aspect up more without feeling like you aren't as strong as you could have been.

Only if you're a power gamer who doesn't actually care about roleplaying.

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Black_Crusher posted...

I've seen more than a few people complain that any given game doesn't have the option to be both male or female (or neither) as the reason why they won't purchase it. Times they are a' changin'.

Yeah, but there's a trick to this.

You will HEAR people say "I'm not buying [insert game here] because you can't pick your own gender/lack of gender/gender-queer/non-binary slider option/etc, but then when games come out that allow you more freedom no one ever really seems to use it anyway.

It's like Bioware kind of underlined when they tracked analytics on Mass Effect - no matter how much people praised the fact that you could play as FemShep, or complained that FemShep didn't get to be on the cover (so much so that they released ME3 with the reversible cover), or otherwise demanded alternative options, something like 85% of the playerbase just played as default male Shepard anyway. And that's even in spite of the fact that FemShep's voice acting is like 10x better.

There's a similar trend for races (fantasy/sci-fi races, not human ethnicity). People whined because Dragon Age 2 forced players to be a human character only, and demanded options for elves/dwarves/Qunari/etc, but in almost every scenario where you're given the option to play different races, most players pick human anyway.

One could even argue this applies for replayability/story variance. A lot of players online vocally demand branching narrative, story structure, New Game+ options, and other aspects of gameplay that encourage multiple run-throughs... but something like half the players of any given longer story-heavy RPG don't even FINISH the damned game once (look at story completion achievements for games that track the percentage of people who have the achievement). And even people who do finish often don't bother with a second playthrough. People complained that Telltale Games mostly just give you the illusion of choice but always railroad you to the same outcome, but who cares if you're never going to play it a second time to actually see that for yourself?

The sad part is, -I'm- one of the players who generally plays as female characters, goes out of my way to play as other races, who is willing to play a good story-heavy game with choices multiple times through - and who loves when games allow those things - but I'm fully aware just how in the minority I am, and understand why so many developers don't really give much of a shit what I want.

Why bother to do way more work to satisfy only like 10% of your potential players, when you can half-ass the whole thing and throw in microtransactions and make like ten times as much money?



It also doesn't help that a lot of the loudest voices demanding diversity and options are the Tumblr/Twitter brigade, who generally don't buy the things they complain about even when those things DO pander to them.
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streamofthesky posted...

Ah, the D&D 4th edition credo whenever there was a complaint!
How'd that work out for WotC?

Quite well, honestly. 4e sold fairly well considering the entire RPG industry was in a massive slump period that could have killed tabletop gaming as a business. It meant WotC's sales expectations, really only slumped when Pathfinder came out as an alternative (and even then, 4e still sold well enough), and brought a lot of new people into the hobby (which is part of what laid the groundwork for the 5e resurgence).

I guarantee you there isn't a single executive in WotC who looks back at 4e and regrets what they did with it. If anything, they're more likely to regret 3e, because the OGL helped glut the market with so many competing products (of variable quality) that it helped suffocate it (similar to the Video Game Crash of 1983 and the Comic Book Crash of 1993). By the end of 3e, there was a very real perception from a lot of people that tabletop gaming as a whole was coming to an end (not helped by the complete collapse of White Wolf, which to that point had become D&D's main rival and which actually sold better than D&D for about a decade).

4e's purpose was to attract new players who really only played video games and had no real interest in tabletop gaming (because there was a perception that the audience needed to grow, because it would stagnate and die without a massive influx of new blood). It did exactly that. 4e brought in players who otherwise would never have played a tabletop RPG. And those players helped prime the pump for the next generation.

5e sort of went back to basics with a more simplified, streamlined version of older systems that would still appeal to the new audience while pulling back some of the old grognards who weren't irrevocably welded to their old editions. That balance of old and new, combined with the rise of online media and gaming streams, has effectively made 5e the most financially successful edition they've ever had.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

The sad part is, -I'm- one of the players who generally plays as female characters, goes out of my way to play as other races, who is willing to play a good story-heavy game with choices multiple times through - and who loves when games allow those things - but I'm fully aware just how in the minority I am, and understand why so many developers don't really give much of a shit what I want.

The first one I used to do more. I feel less inclined to as of late for personal reasons. I wouldn't say I've gone out of my way with either, but I basically pick what I feel like at the time. Having that choice is something I utilize when I feel so inclined to.

My spouse is the one who tends to play female MC in pretty much every game it's an opinion.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Why bother to do way more work to satisfy only like 10% of your potential players, when you can half-ass the whole thing and throw in microtransactions and make like ten times as much money?

And that's a shame. It doesn't seem to be too much of an issue with the games I tend to play at least. But I'm not huge in the AAA scene either, and truth be told in general the amount of console games that I want (which are the only ones I can play at this point besides phone) has grown mighty thin.

Mead posted...

Thats it Im gonna homebrew the game super racist now

dwarves now commit crimes 1/day, its just in their blood

No no, silly. Everyone knows the dwarves are secretly metaphors for jews. Their lust for gold, long beards, large noses, lack of dexterity, and secretly planning to control the world's media from their underground lairs is just obvious.

For bonus points, Tolkien-flavored dwarves tend to revere their dwarven forefathers, tracing their lineage back to the dwarf lords of old and forming into clans, just like the Jews divided into tribes based on the 12 sons of Jacob/Israel.

If you really want to lean into hardcore bigotry in a fantasy setting, the elves are all camp gay, orcs are thinly-veiled African tribal savages (and probably all want to kidnap and rape human women), and humans are universally racist assholes (though if you like, you can always have a sub-group of humans who are blatantly Native American-inspired hippie druids/shamans, and just have all the other humans - who are white, naturally - be the racist terrible ones). If you have halflings/hobbits at all, they're exaggerated versions of the Tolkien ones, and sort of come across like fat entitled trust-fund kids, and represent all the worst aspects of Eurocentric consumerism and complacency.

There's actually at least a couple fantasy novels out there that blatantly do this as a sort of satire.
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ChaosAzeroth posted...

The first one I used to do more. I feel less inclined to as of late for personal reasons.

I mostly just go with the female option for characters because in voiced games, the female VA is almost always the better actor in terms of delivering lines.

At least for Bioware games, they also tend to be slightly less stereotypical. With Mass Effect, male Shepard is basically just "space John Wayne" and in Andromeda male Ryder is "space Nathan Drake". The females in each case actually have slightly more nuance, and come across more like actual humans.

Even in cases where the male actor is awesome (like DA2), they're often paired with a female VA who is just awesome in their own right (like DA2), so I wind up picking the female option anyway.

Plus in a lot of cases, the contrast of a female lead becomes more oddly striking, especially in games that were blatantly written for a male main character. In Saints Row, the Boss tends to have a lot of "masculine" traits and shows interest in female strippers, because the game assumes most players are going to be male and they're going to play as male characters. But a female Boss kind of becomes more interesting simply by virtue of being female. She's a crass, sexual, gratuitously violent badass, which goes against a lot of characterization stereotypes.

The same goes for GTA Online - you can pick up prostitutes (exclusively female), go to the strip club (exclusively female), and generally be an insanely violent sociopath shooting your way through heists, various crimes, and insane adrenaline-junky behavior... and you can do it as a man or a woman. Some players who play as female characters just go androgynous or full on riot-grrl where gender barely matters at all, but you can also play it as extremely feminine or even classy women, which then kind of juxtaposes against the nature of the game itself.

Conversely, sometimes the female option feels like it conforms to the expectations of a game. In Fallout 4, you're a parent chasing across the Wasteland for your infant son - Western culture tends to attribute that sort of nurturing instinct more towards mothers than fathers (and the game as a whole tends to transition that nurturing instinct from your child specifically to the Commonwealth as a whole, especially once you start establishing and protecting settlements). In that sense, it might feel more appropriate to play as the female character, and essentially become "Mother" to the Commonwealth (even as the Institute is literally led by "Father"). Sure, you can play as the male character (and in some ways, the game seems to assume you will - the male option is an ex-soldier, the female choice has no combat experience and a law degree), but you may get more out of the game as a female.

Some people have trouble playing a different gender in games because they try to project themselves onto the character, so the character is essentially doing exactly what THEY would do in that situation. But I almost never play games that way at all. I almost always sort of craft a character in my head, someone other than myself, with their own backstory and personality (often tied to their race/class/etc), and then play as THAT person. My multiple Dragonborns in Skyrim or Couriers in New Vegas or Wardens in Dragon Age or Gorion's Ward in Baldur's Gate were always very different people, and none of them were really like ME, per se.
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Its important to me to play as a character I can physically identify with, thats why I always choose argonian in skyrim

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

That balance of old and new, combined with the rise of online media and gaming streams, has effectively made 5e the most financially successful edition they've ever had.

I heard about this. They said it was very easy for new players to get into and stuff...
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Mead posted...

Its important to me to play as a character I can physically identify with, thats why I always choose argonian in skyrim.

That's the same reason why I'm mad Mass Effect wouldn't let me play as a Volus.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

the old grognards who weren't irrevocably welded to their old editions.

Sadly, this is me. I can't help it. I love me some 2nd edition!

LinkPizza posted...

I heard about this. They said it was very easy for new players to get into and stuff...

My boss is way into 5e and from what I've seen (admittedly, not much) it certainly is. There seems to be a lot less restrictions for everything. Stuff like classic THAC0 is gone, there's... "threat level??" I don't know something like that. I guess it's supposed to act like Hit Dice where the higher it is the harder something is to kill. Not sure.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

No no, silly. Everyone knows the dwarves are secretly metaphors for jews. Their lust for gold, long beards, large noses, lack of dexterity, and secretly planning to control the world's media from their underground lairs is just obvious.

For bonus points, Tolkien-flavored dwarves tend to revere their dwarven forefathers, tracing their lineage back to the dwarf lords of old and forming into clans, just like the Jews divided into tribes based on the 12 sons of Jacob/Israel.

What's funny about this is one could easily argue that the elves are more analogous to Jews than dwarves, what with being the chosen star children of Illuvitar and all... they even have-leave the garden-familial betrayal-horrible period in wastelands-etc events in their history.

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Black_Crusher posted...

My boss is way into 5e and from what I've seen (admittedly, not much) it certainly is. There seems to be a lot less restrictions for everything.

I actually avoided D&D for years because the early systems always seemed so needlessly overcomplicated (and 3e expanded way too far and added too many "options" so it wound up feeling massively cluttered), and because I came into RP via other games that always seemed to have simpler or more effective systems.

I finally gave D&D the time of day during 4e, because it was different enough to get me to reconsider my apathy towards it. And then 5e came out, which feels like the best of all worlds, with the flexibility of earlier editions combined with the simplicity and elegance of better-designed systems.

Part of the success of 5e is definitely the fact that it's more accessible than most of the earlier editions, which makes it easier for newer players to just pick it up and play. That, combined with the rise in streaming games makes it more enticing to the "normies".



Gaawa_chan posted...

What's funny about this is one could easily argue that the elves are more analogous to Jews than dwarves, what with being the chosen star children of Illuvitar and all... they even have-leave the garden-familial betrayal-horrible period in wastelands-etc events in their history.

The elves don't really ping any other traditional Jewish stereotypes, though. While "dwarvish" is literally based on Hebrew.

The various elf languages fall more into what someone might classify as the Celtic fringe with a bit of Finnish thrown in for good measure. And their culture was always sort of influenced by that, with additions from a lot of Celtic and Germanic myth - they're kind of a deliberate fusion of the Tuatha De Danann and the "Light Elves" of Norse myth.

Other fiction or RPGs might change the inspiration for elves to other things (the elves are VERY MUCH a fusion of "gypsies" and Jews in Dragon Age, for instance), but Tolkien's elves really don't map to Jews all that well.

If you REALLY want to push the "Tolkien was racist, therefore all fantasy he inspired is implicitly racist" argument, Tolkien elves actually come closer to the racist ideal of the "Aryan". Which combines with the inherent "West versus East" motif to glorify Western European cultures against the rest of the world.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

If you REALLY want to push the "Tolkien was racist, therefore all fantasy he inspired is implicitly racist" argument, Tolkien elves actually come closer to the racist ideal of the "Aryan". Which combines with the inherent "West versus East" motif to glorify Western European cultures against the rest of th

I think that's more applicable to the Numenoreans, the literal "men of the west", especially with the Atlantis reference, which some morons tend to weave into their revisionist history as being some sort of White Utopia, lol.

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Gaawa_chan posted...

I think that's more applicable to the Numenoreans, the literal "men of the west", especially with the Atlantis reference, which some morons tend to weave into their revisionist history as being some sort of White Utopia, lol.

Yeah, they both apply. But it's worth remembering that the main reason the Numenoreans are the way they are is because they're the "elf-friends" (and they basically lose most of their specialness when they STOP being elf-friends). They may be the Men of the West, but the elves are (mostly) from even farther West.

Also, if you're going for the over-the-top racism argument, you can always point out that the "Black Numenoreans" are the bad guys "from the south", and then willfully misinterpret what that actually means.
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