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Post by Stormcrow on Jul 21, 2018 18:18:08 GMT -6
I don't see the problem.
You've got to be at least a 3rd level magic-user to cast the spell. If by this time you haven't gathered enough treasure to buy a bunch of lantern oil and a hireling to carry it, you've got bigger problems than a light source. Plus you have to actually HAVE the Continual Light spell; not every magic-user does. And finally, surely one of the benefits of gaining levels is not having to worry so much about niggly little things like your light source.
Breaking the game into "the light-resource management game" and similar is over-analyzing the system. There is no requirement that each "subsystem" of the game maintain equal importance at all times. The spell is there precisely to give players the option of using it. If this "breaks" the "light-resource management system," maybe that isn't actually such a useful concept after all.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jul 11, 2018 21:20:38 GMT -6
Good heavens, don't watch it in internal chronological order. You get massive spoilers that way. Watch it in air-date order.
Good luck with Crusade. It has some good stuff, but it hasn't aged well at all. The pilot episode is really awful.
The thing is, you don't really need to go outside of Babylon 5. You don't really need to go past season 4, to be honest, but if you just can't stop you can certainly do season 5.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jul 8, 2018 14:13:09 GMT -6
Babylon 5 was very strong as a series-arc show, but not so much as an anthology show. The first season is infamously rough. But if you can get through it, you'll be rewarded by seasons-long story-arcs that reach mythic proportions. The end of the series is a bit rough too: they weren't sure they'd be renewed for a fifth season, so they shortened the main arcs and wrapped them up by the end of season four, then when they got a fifth season after all they wrapped up all the dangling bits they didn't have time to cram in. It's still worth watching the last season, but it'll seem a bit of an anticlimax.
The mid-series changes they were forced to make (typically by actors leaving the show) aren't as bad as you might think: they work them into the stories pretty well.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 19, 2018 15:25:48 GMT -6
But there is nothing in Chainmail for how to string together a campaign. That is what D&D does. It gives suggestions for use of Chainmail for the wargames themselves. There is not, because wargamers were already doing that, and had been doing it for ages. The idea of campaigning did not come from D&D. The innovations over wargames were to have the player use a character-avatar in the game instead of being the general that commanded armies and to codify the ability of each player to attempt anything at all, regardless of what the rules say. That is why I put it in terms of D&D adding a new dimension to wargames campaigns. It didn't invent the campaign; it added new depth to it. Whether the rules of D&D grew out of Chainmail's rules or not is almost irrelevant. The exact form of the rules isn't what's important. I would avoid the word simulate, and I wouldn't compare the D&D world to those literary settings, except to show that D&D took elements from all of them. D&D doesn't simulate any of these very well, because it's really a pot full of all of them. Why even bother? It's not important that Gygax decided to say that characters would tend to find secret doors on a 2-in-6 chance, just that when players asked to search for hollow spaces and hidden latches in walls, Gygax decided on a chance of success and threw the dice, and this is what he did for just about everything.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 17, 2018 11:38:14 GMT -6
A brief history of D&D (where we compare editions by their development in time in a TOTALLY nonpartisan way, just concluding by saying why 0e is still appealing to some Riiiiiiiight. Nonpartisan, from a highly partisan original D&D group. If you were going ahead with a real project, this is the angle you should start with. Everyone has "What is D&D?" "What are role-playing games?" videos. Don't copy them. Your audience isn't people who have never heard of D&D or RPGs, but people who know other RPGs but don't know the appeal of the original D&D. What original D&D has that nothing else does is the story of how wargamers transformed wargaming into role-playing gaming, and how D&D was written to teach wargamers how to make this transformation happen for themselves. And I don't mean you should talk about how D&D rules grew out of Chainmail rules! I mean how the D&D campaign is a wargame campaign with a new dimension added. You'd have to start by setting up "What is a wargames campaign?" and get the viewer settled into understanding that, then spring "Look what happens when you become a single character instead of the general in command!" Introduce each element of D&D as an expansion of wargames campaigning rather than as a game from scratch. The underlying game mechanics aren't all that important, because for almost everything they're just "set a probability and roll some dice." For virtually everything else, they're "roll on this arbitrary table." What you DO want to do is produce that example of play, with players around a table. You especially want to show dungeon exploration, NOT combat, and not character generation. Everyone always demonstrates combat, and let's-make-a-character videos are common. What you need to do is show how the caller works. Everyone thinks the caller gets to do everything while all the other players are bored. Show them otherwise. You also want to show just how little dice-rolling there needs to be: a die should be rolled ONLY when the referee honestly can't make a better decision him- or herself, not every time the referee has a decision to make. You want to show theater of the mind, not staring at figures on a table, though this doesn't make for very good viewing. Oh, and no modules. They should be in a homegrown dungeon. Don't call it a megadungeon. Get rid of the retronym "Original Edition." Explain that it's the original Dungeons & Dragons, but for heaven's sake don't call it OD&D or 0E or any other idiotic abbreviation like that. Once the viewer knows what version of D&D you're talking about, just call it D&D. Don't insert your house rules. By all means explain that D&D is meant to be customized by the referee, but don't try to push your opinions on what rules are good. That's for the prospective D&D referee to decide, and it just muddies the waters for viewers who haven't necessarily learned that customized rules does not equal changed rules. While campaign maintenance may not be a very interesting or useful thing to depict, it does suggest that you can make a show of how D&D doesn't have to be constant nail-biting action. A more relaxed D&D is fun and more sustainable. Specifically, how wilderness exploration is as simple as dungeon exploration, and how non-encounters go by really fast: "Day 3: You go north 30 miles. The forest continues. No encounters. Day 4..." Don't do this. You WILL be making an argument, and your goal here should be to make the original D&D rules appealing, not to claim an objective assessment of every version of D&D. If you make the original D&D appealing on its own, people will choose it.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 12, 2018 5:17:00 GMT -6
Good grief! It's the contemporary internal memo telling writers what Star Trek is all about, and it's not fundamental enough for you?
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 8, 2018 18:51:10 GMT -6
The original D&D was written for experienced wargame campaigners who hadn't yet heard the Good News about focusing your campaigns on the beyond-warfare adventures of individual characters. It's a set of beginnings, designed to get you into the general idea of how a this new form of game works, where you can then do what you always do with your wargaming campaign: make everything up.
People who call the original D&D rules incomplete are those who are expecting the game to furnish you with a system or systems to resolve everything. It wasn't written to be that. Presumably, these same people would complain that the booklet that comes in the glove compartment of their new car that tells them all about the airbags and how to change the oil is incomplete because it doesn't also tell them how to replace the engine or transmission. That's not what the book is for.
So, sure, call it incomplete if you like. By your definition, it wasn't SUPPOSED to be complete.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 4, 2018 9:39:08 GMT -6
What's up with that error? This isn't rocket science!
Oh, wait...
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 3, 2018 20:12:50 GMT -6
I think that the TM also was the first source that I can recall which tried to tie Warp Factor together with the speed of light (e.g. speed = [WF^3]*c so that WF 2 was 2*2*2=8 times the speed of light, WF 3 was 3*3*3=27 times the speed of light, and so on) and this potentially messed up any hex map campaign so we disregarded it and assumed that WF 2 moved 2 hexes, WF 3 moved 3 hexes, and so on. So clearly we didn't assume that the TM was gospel canon, either. This was established in the internal Star Trek Writers/Directors Guide in 1967.
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Post by Stormcrow on May 28, 2018 18:26:52 GMT -6
By the late '80s, when The Next Generation first aired, nobody was watching westerns anymore. There was no reason for them to return to Wagon Train. There have always been westerns on TV, even in the '80s and '90s (Lonesome Dove, The Young Riders, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, a Zorro reboot, among others.) Yes, yes, but TV audiences were no longer obsessed with westerns the way they were in the '50s and '60s. Westerns were a novelty by this time, nothing more, and they didn't last as long as the fourteen seasons of Bonanza or the eight seasons of Wagon Train, etc. Yes, this happened, but the format made this switch in large part because viewers were no longer interested in the lonely-do-gooders-wandering-the-dangerous-frontier format; they wanted more complex characters and more detail in, as you say, the show's own canon. They wanted to know more about Klingons and Romulans and so on. Or at least, the executives thought they did. I think they did. Television as a whole had changed in the twenty years between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.So just make up your own universe from scratch the way you like it, and forget trying base it on something else. Do what the creators of D&D did: steal ELEMENTS from various sources and mix them in. Gygax et al stole Tolkien elves and Anderson trolls and Howard superheroes and so on and just threw them all together without regard for their original stories. You can go ahead and steal Star Trek Vulcans and Star Wars Wookies and Lost in Space robots and Heinlein Space Cadets or whatever else floats your boat, completely ignore the fact that these things don't have anything to do with each other, and declare it a game. You want fundamentalism? That's fundamentalism. I don't see the point in complaining about how Star Trek fails in something it never claimed to be doing.
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Post by Stormcrow on May 28, 2018 12:17:00 GMT -6
By the late '80s, when The Next Generation first aired, nobody was watching westerns anymore. There was no reason for them to return to Wagon Train.
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Post by Stormcrow on May 27, 2018 9:28:16 GMT -6
The Articles of Federation are just a recast version of the United Nations charter.
The Star Trek format was famously modeled on Wagon Train. This meant the ship was traveling through the frontier, coming upon frontier towns (planets), dealing with frontier peoples, everything far, far from help "back east." Even the phrase "back east" gives you a clue: the place the main characters come FROM doesn't have to be fleshed out, just the place they're currently AT. The Federation as we understand it was an entity that emerged from the various stories that talked about "back east," not something that was deliberately added to the show's mythology. Likewise with the mostly human Star Fleet: it's only an emergent fact that the Star Fleet isn't an Earth organization; it wasn't thought up this way from the beginning.
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Post by Stormcrow on May 24, 2018 20:12:31 GMT -6
"There were no wolves living near Mr. Baggins’ hole at home, but he knew that noise. He had had it described to him often enough in tales. One of his elder cousins (on the Took side), who had been a great traveller, used to imitate it to frighten him."
"Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures? Anything from climbing trees to visiting elves—or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores!"
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Post by Stormcrow on Apr 18, 2018 17:43:32 GMT -6
- Class and Level
- Skill and Talent
I haven't read the whole thread, so my apologies if I repeat something someone else has said. I see a third category: "genre applicability." An example: in an amateur game called "Have-A-Go Heroes," a quickie based on Mystery Men and which I now only vaguely remember, the player-characters get a number of dice to roll based, not so much on what they can do, but on what type of scene it is and how well the player describes what he does. Sure, characters ostensibly have talents and skills, but they're not necessarily stats so much as they are narration hooks. If it's the climax scene and you describe a plan in accordance with your character's powers, you get to roll more dice to accomplish your goals. If it's a scene of exposition and your plan does not accord with your character, you get few dice. How well you do depends on scene and narration.
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Post by Stormcrow on Apr 16, 2018 15:12:45 GMT -6
"Yeah! I just rolled the tenth 20 in a row! You believe me, right?"
"I totally believe you. Oh dear, a boulder just fell on you!"
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Post by Stormcrow on Apr 10, 2018 12:44:08 GMT -6
I thought you were talking about Space Quest, and I was wondering what the fuss was all about.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 21, 2018 10:45:42 GMT -6
When you're learning a new skill, your teacher will tell you, "Don't do such-and-such; it's not effective." The Chainmail jousting rules let you learn for yourself what is effective and what isn't. If your teacher told you, "Don't hold your shield too high; you'll be vulnerable," it would be no surprise if the Chainmail matrix reflected that. Listen to your teacher and don't choose that defense on the matrix.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 17, 2018 11:23:05 GMT -6
What's Google+, said the old grognard in the corner. It's Facebook for Google hipsters.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 17, 2018 11:21:38 GMT -6
Which is not to say that players have no responsibility for their own actions. I think Gygax is suggesting that if your party of first-level characters can't avoid getting slaughtered on the first level of the dungeon, you've made the level too hard and should do something about it, not that if your party of first-level characters goes down to the sixth dungeon level you should pull your punches and give them extra chances to escape or win.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 17, 2018 10:17:16 GMT -6
It's not that you're assumed to be using Chainmail. They are assuming the referee can either adjudicate the differences between weapons, or can find rules with which to do it, like Chainmail, or whatever else he wants.
The attack tables aren't calibrated to produce realistic results when taking weapons into account. Nobody worked out that a third-level fighter realistically hits a leather-armored fighter 70% of the time, or whatever. They just made a general "how often you should be able to hit" table, and apply it generally. So if you want to apply it to something other than weapons versus armor, go right ahead. Punching? Use it for punches. Spitting? Use it for that. Whatever.
For non-lethal combat, I suggest using the normal system, but counting lost hit points against consciousness instead of life. Maybe one point of real damage if hit.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 16, 2018 12:29:38 GMT -6
I think you're defining "wargame" too narrowly. Wargames include more than just the tabletop battle; they include the diplomacy, intrigue, characterization, communication, reports, economics, disasters, weather, families, and more of the wargame campaign.
Both the D&D referee and the wargames referee are expected to set up all these things for the players and then dispassionately ask what the players want to do and tell them what happens when they do it. Their jobs are not identical, but I don't think the wargames referee is more hands-off than the D&D referee.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 18:29:21 GMT -6
Will just point out that, as a Roll20 GM myself on occasion, I have never used the "map" for mapping with player icons. It's useful for showing large-scale maps of the neighborhood or countryside, charts relevant to the current mode of play, and so on. For D&D, a nice use would be to arrange various marching orders. Or you could keep track of time, torches, spells, and whatever using tokens or even the turn tracker. Or the players can do their own mapping there. The point is it's much more flexible than just throwing up a photorealistic combat grid.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 17:12:28 GMT -6
If you reeeeeally want me to continue to argue the point, I will. But I offered to stop.
I was referring to the pedantry of analyzing how the rules work. In that thread, Gronan was referring to the pedantry of second-guessing what the writers SHOULD have done and what their intentions were in doing what they did. These are miles apart.
Whether you think Gronan was rude or not, he was not telling anyone to stop analyzing the rules.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 13:12:36 GMT -6
I'll say one last thing on this topic, half tongue-in-cheek, and no more. Those of you who see a grand design behind the given rules, you're just making up s*** you think is fun.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 13:02:45 GMT -6
I also understand the annoyance of those here who resent being told that their analysis of the logic of the game (and why it should have come about that way) is mere pedantry simply because it was not a conscious design. Except no one is telling anyone that. I've said many times: Analysis? Fine! Good! Fun! Knock yourself out! I'll do it too! Learn the origins and reasons for given decisions? Interesting! Tell me more! But denying the repeated insistence of the creators that it was a ground-up design instead of a top-down design? Foolishness! Analysis of the game is not pedantry—or if it is, I'm guilty of it too—and no one is complaining of anyone being pedantic. The problem is basing the analysis on the false assumption that because there must be a greater design behind it all, we can stretch anything we find in the text to fit that perceived greater design. Starting with a false assumption, you reach false conclusions.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:51:03 GMT -6
My guess is that understanding jousts by watching Hollywood stuff is like understanding boxing by watching Rocky movies.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:43:57 GMT -6
Suffice to say, without going much into detail, I think that people expressing pessimism about the hobby are woefully misguided: We have the OGL, we have POD, we have heroic fantasy being represented in state-of-the-art movies and entertainment, and we have a gamer culture that is thriving independently from the content providers. If anything, I think we are in the middle of a Golden Age, and one that is bound to continue. That nobody will always get ALL that he wants, and that new people will usually bring new ways, that, my fortune cookie says, is just the way of the world. I think this is correct. There is so much choice out there, there's no good reason you can't find exactly what you want (if, for some reason, you're unwilling to do it yourself). I never thought we'd see the day when the owner of D&D would make every frickin' edition of D&D available simultaneously, let alone that they then compete with legal near-copies of each of them. If modules are your thing, there's no end of them. You have your pick of preconfigured settings. As far as product choice, what's not to like? The only problem we have is that we wall ourselves off into camps. I only play OD&D. I only play Mentzer D&D, but not the Immortals set; that's for stooges. I only play games that have a certain number of E's. I only play Holmes, and I'm angry that I don't have my own PDF, and that there was never anything official for me beyond level 3. I only play D&D in the Arnesonian fashion, because Gygax stole the credit for D&D from him. We have only ourselves to blame if we find our walled-off communities getting smaller and smaller. The solution is to drop the walls and stop worrying so much about editions and credit and minutia. REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... . . . PLAYER: What are my chances of finding a trap in that wall? REF: They are what they are. You wanna search for traps or not?
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:31:05 GMT -6
Stormcrow , I worry that your response here is exactly the kind of "talking past one another" that @dungeonmonkey was getting at. If we posit only two things, viz. (a) making things up and (b) a grand structure according to plan, then we have failed to grasp how things work in life, not just D&D. What dungeonmonkey wanted to remind us is that there's a world of difference between someone with a lot of experience in the kitchen just "making up" a recipe along the way and someone who has never cooked before trying to do so. Since I never said that "making things up" is done by someone who has never done so before, or is done at random, or is done without considering whether the end result is good, this is a straw man argument. I think people around here just don't get it when Gronan says "made things up" (or variations thereof). They're imagining "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning! Have some spells! The first spells that come to mind! Have whatever you want! LALALA!" instead of "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning. Have some spells out of Dracula and Christianity. What? The cleric is too weak? Okay, let's try bumping up the number of spells you get..." (That may itself be a straw man argument, but it's what I'm hearing.) Seriously. They just made it up as they went along. They tweaked it when it didn't work right. It evolved organically. When the book says "roll one die to determine if you find such-and-such," it says that because it seemed good when they thought of it, and it seemed to work when they tried it. Not because there's an overarching system of when to roll this or that. I'm sorry I sound frustrated. It's just that besides the guy who was there telling you that's how it happened, it also defies Occam's Razor to assume all this unconscious, higher-level intention behind everything.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:16:22 GMT -6
I have no idea what you think I mean. Snarky one-line posts often have that effect. Your audience is more likely to completely read those than snarky essays of ten postulates that your opinion is objectively correct. Your listed ideas do not demonstrate objectiveness.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:10:04 GMT -6
Could you please show me where I told "the guy who was there that what he says he was thinking isn't what he was thinking" or asserted that he was "slowly developing a grand structure according to a plan"? I don't think those views can be reasonably read into what I wrote. I didn't say YOU did these things. I'm talking about a common theme on this forum of people imputing greater realities underlying the game than were built into it. Brian is just trying to remain unnoticed by the guards, but his listeners believe he is telling them the One True Way (and can't agree on what it is). He was just making stuff up, but he had a purpose, and adjusted his made-up stuff according to the reactions of the crowd and the guards. But there was no higher truth or grand scheme behind his words. How many times do I have to say that "making things up" doesn't imply "at random" or "without review"? This particular straw man is getting silly. The game was designed. It was designed by making stuff up as you thought of it and tweaking it until it worked. That's called "making it up." It was not designed by creating a blueprint and adding pieces that conformed to that blueprint until the whole was completed.
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