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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Camion

NP: Friday February 10, 2017

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7 minutes ago, ijuin said:

A limit of one character per campaign might make some sort of sense, but never ever being able to play again if your character dies is completely ludicrous.

This truly massive and execrable joke had so many bad things about it that it still astonishes me that there is something out there that qualifies as 'much, much worse.' One of the tables was a radiation-caused mutation table. From this you could get uncanny results such as: "Good Housekeeper."

I can just see the latest mutant to join the X-Men, the amazing Lysolator. He can sweep through any home and in a matter of mere hours clean it so it sparkles, reorganise the kitchen more efficiently, organise all the books according to the Dewey system and do all the laundry, and best of all, even get rid of the dust in hard to reach places like behind the kitchen hardware or beneath bookshelves and armoires.

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17 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I can just see the latest mutant to join the X-Men, the amazing Lysolator. He can sweep through any home and in a matter of mere hours clean it so it sparkles, reorganise the kitchen more efficiently, organise all the books according to the Dewey system and do all the laundry, and best of all, even get rid of the dust in hard to reach places like behind the kitchen hardware or beneath bookshelves and armoires.

Heh.  He'd be my hero!  Where do I sign up?

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6 hours ago, ijuin said:

A limit of one character per campaign might make some sort of sense, but never ever being able to play again if your character dies is completely ludicrous.

Yeah, that's a rule I would remove via "Rule zero"
Side note:  I did not know that both the NFL and MLB had a version of that in their official rules.

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10 hours ago, ijuin said:

But what if I want to organize my books according to the Library of Congress System?

Say, then, you might know the answer to a mystery. Every college library I've ever visited uses the Library of Congress System rather than Dewey Decimal. Why?

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1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

One wild guess.  The Dewey system is used in Public and High School libraries because those institutions are more likely to be used by people who would be offended by the LC system which lists the Bible as BS.

Just beneath my apartment lies a store owned by a gentleman with the unhappy initials of B. S. He decided to name his business after himself in such a way that it is known as BS Furniture Polishing. I can only assume that the poor man is not really au fait with Internet lingo.

Or possibly he is, and this is his way of giving it the middle finger.

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21 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

It featured such brilliant rules as "each player could only create one character ever" and it was possible to die during character generation.

... at least by combining two so absurd rules we don't need to compare which is more absurd.

On 02/13/2017 at 0:35 AM, Don Edwards said:

Yeah, I've seen FATAL before. Calling it the worst RPG ever written is an understatement. I don't know how that's even possible, but it's true.

I had mercifully forgotten about it, and wouldn't have named if it I had remembered it. Like I won't name the web-so-called-comic that treats rape and mind control as spectator sports.

Considering the hills of dead pilling up as every second RPG hero, I fail to see why featuring rape would automatically classify RPG as worst ever. (Although I'm not going to search for details, the TVTropes article mentions enough other reasons why it could be worst ever.)

Also, if settings feature mind control, it makes sense it would be used for rape, although one would expect it would be by villains, not the heroes.

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2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... at least by combining two so absurd rules we don't need to compare which is more absurd.

Considering the hills of dead pilling up as every second RPG hero, I fail to see why featuring rape would automatically classify RPG as worst ever.

It would not, certainly not automatically. And I have in fact seen both good games and good webcomics in which sexual crimes and offenders played a part. What is important is how the subject matter is treated. If it is treated with respect for the victims and with a careful examination of possible causes and consequences, it can actually be a good thing. Mind you, it should probably feature an advance notice and taken in manageable doses.

The problem arises when a serious and potentially life-destroying topic is treated with unironic levity and disdain for the victims, as a mere source of entertainment or worse yet as something good to be emulated. And yes, you could certainly call out games that feature mounting hills of corpses for falling into that category. It does depend on how it is treated, mind. I will agree that most MMOs and the like I have seen have a somewhat disturbing tendency to feature the killing of enemies as at most an occasion for a climbing kill counter.

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5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Also, if settings feature mind control, it makes sense it would be used for rape, although one would expect it would be by villains, not the heroes.

One would expect that, indeed....

... and one would be mistaken.

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13 hours ago, Don Edwards said:
19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Also, if settings feature mind control, it makes sense it would be used for rape, although one would expect it would be by villains, not the heroes.

One would expect that, indeed....

... and one would be mistaken.

The thing about tabletop RPGs is that while the player characters are supposed to be the heroes, they don't necessarily have to be heroic, especially when dealing with character creation that uses a perks/flaws system where the player can give their character some flaws in order to get more points to spend elsewhere, so you get kleptomaniac or lecherous or worse flaws on a character and they have to role play those flaws or else the GM can deny xp or special bonuses, or even have that character removed from the game in creative ways. There are some systems, or at least house rules that allow for players to pay off flaws over time to simulate character overcoming those flaws and becoming a better person, one GM I knew would only allow 1 or 2 XP per session so that a player couldn't just remove a flaw after 1 or 2 games. Downgrading flaws might also be doable, like if someone had a character that had a habit of murdering a random townsfolk every so often, they might be able to pay to downgrade to punching a random person in the face or something.

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20 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

The problem arises when a serious and potentially life-destroying topic is treated with unironic levity and disdain for the victims, as a mere source of entertainment or worse yet as something good to be emulated. And yes, you could certainly call out games that feature mounting hills of corpses for falling into that category. It does depend on how it is treated, mind. I will agree that most MMOs and the like I have seen have a somewhat disturbing tendency to feature the killing of enemies as at most an occasion for a climbing kill counter.

Well, I'm not sure about MMOs but FPS games already got to the point where both killing enemies and BEING killed is source of entertainment instead of being a serious and potentially life-destroying topic :)

It's more the single player games where you leave hills of corpses. Usually they are not human, which makes it racism or speciesism on top of that. Except ... you may not like it but it's the majority and therefore, by definition, average. It's disturbing, indeed: it shows that humans are not as moral as they claim to be. On the other hand, character trying to follow current moral code would end up dead quickly: maybe we should abandon the idea of absolute moral openly and not just pretend we don't see where it fails.

Not sure how it translates to the rape situation. Especially in fantasy, where the targets for rape may not be human either. I would definitely say that if we decide it's ok to brutally kill someone, it's hard to argue against being ok to rape him. On the other hand, there is lot of space for handling rape incorrectly if you do it to people who are not "ok to kill".

(EDIT: Actually, even the GAME can do some deciding if it's ok to kill someone. People already complain about guards in stealth games being able to ignore someone killed their colleague. And there are NPC guards in MMORPG who respond to some rule violations. There is definitely place for killing having consequence even in computer games, more so paper-and-pen RPG games. And similarly, rape should ; then we can compare those two.)

3 hours ago, Scotty said:

The thing about tabletop RPGs is that while the player characters are supposed to be the heroes, they don't necessarily have to be heroic

True. After all, most heroes were not as heroic as legends make them either. And some are not as heroic even IN the legends.

 

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