Post Mortem & Results

[squeen]

It looks very cool.

I agree that there's something very tedious and time consuming about 3D modeling. That's why I decided to learn traditional drawing over 3D-sculpting and ray-traced rendering, and also stick with 2D CAD for map-assistance.

Power on man, you'll get there.

 

[Beoric]

This stupid thing. That's 20 levels piled on top of each other. All I did was build the framework and resolve to fill in all those little buildings and spaces with rooms in 2D. ... Almost immediately it became clear that it was going to be slow going in 2D, so I went back to build the rooms in 3D.

That took months.

Then when I started rendering the new more detailed levels out and bringing them into 2D, I found that the resolution of the camera needed to be changed and now everything had to be resized before it could be brought into the original file. Bla bla bla. So much grunt work added to the process. Anyway, I got that done and started cleaning everything up again at which point I started to encounter render artifacts; missing linework, weirdly tapered lines that made whole rooms disappear, little bits of geometry poking through from the level above etc. I had to go back in to 3D and clean up a ton of geometry and rerender it. Gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair out the whole time.

A sane man would have realized how fucking pointless this is ages ago and binned the whole stupid thing. Honestly this was just supposed to be a bonus boss-monster fight with a mountain-sized bio-construct, with a little bit of running around inside the thing to get it to power down or something. I pictured a couple of key set-pieces inside and thought I'd mock them up real quick in 3D. Here I am almost exactly ONE YEAR later. If I quit now, it's all meaningless!

Oh how I cackled while writing that last sentence!

Here's a couple of the new levels to give you an idea of the detail of the undertaking:
View attachment 1241

All those large blank areas needed filling in don't you see-yeeeheeheeheeee gneeeeeeee

My perfectionism runs to setting building, but I recognize your obsession.

 

[The1True]

It's been a summer. International moves are such delight.

Anyway, it's not just me, but this project that's been in limbo since we wrapped the playtest back in the Spring.
So why am I not finishing this thing? It basically just needs formatting at this point and some minor rewrites and edits.

Definitely, one of the problems is that, though I'm not a perfectionist, I keep adding things; fleshing out the dungeon of the Tesseract, fleshing out the Rot Crawl in the darkness beneath the mushroom mountains, stuff like that. But that's just a symptom; like if I'm legitimately working on something, then I don't have to feel guilty about not formatting the final draft, right?

This is pretty new for me. I've never had trouble wrapping up papers for school (as a student and a professor). I literally work on final polish for an animation studio. If I couldn't wrap up scenes there, I'd be out of a job, so I don't think this is an inability to see something through to its completion.

I'm starting to wonder if it's a fear of finishing.

Like this whole NAP thing has had a real chilling effect on me. I mean, hats off to the guys who contributed, that's some great game design and some fun scenarios. No shade from me there. It's the negativity; the rejection of a whole chunk of the community implied by the title. Like, when I first got into the blow-SR and reading the reviews, the stuff that was carrying this hobby forward was artpunk. Reviews on this very site put me onto stuff like DCO and the wild experimentation coming out of LotFP. I myself have shilled for Luka Rejec's trippy UVG. I'm sorry that people's personal politics are conflicting, but S3 is hands down the best thing ever written, fight me. The weird is right there in the foundational DNA of the game!

I've written/compiled/synthesized this whole weird, Wild-West/Gamma World mini-campaign out of our crazy ideas and now I'm obsessing about the conservatism and hate in the community I've chosen. I mean, there's a tiny audience for this, and if the prevailing attitude rejects anything but the driest of low-fantasy, medieval simulationism, then what the hell's the point?!

So that's the first thing.

The second is, the more I playtested this, the less I riffed off those super-simplified stat blocks. They were frustrating to me as a DM rocking a 3.5 game with a bunch of players who use the system to its fullest extent and require fully fleshed out monsters for a challenge, and right here in my list of edits, I can see Malrex confused by the half-assed compromises I baked into those blocks, (like saying a monster was "+6 to hit". What does that even mean to a referee using an earlier edition? I could maybe get away with "to hit: as Clr lvl 6+2" or something equally correct but unsatisfying for all editions.) I'm not sure there's a way to make everybody happy. I fucking love this community. I love old school games. I want to sit around talking about them all day long, ad nauseum. I convert and run classic TSR adventures all the time. I'm running a 3.5 Barrowmaze campaign on the side. My bookshelf is full of Bryce's The Best and Prince's ***** reviews. I love this shit, and the edition war makes me fucking sick to my stomach. Like the shear vitriol and intolerance coming out of some of these crusty old douches is so depressing. Only the most reactionary are disagreeing with these guys, which makes me wonder if this is the prevailing attitude in what remains of the scene...

So I'm stuck wondering if I'm going to get a fair shake publishing this thing with the stats that I used in my game, or if I need to convert everything to a ruleset I haven't used in 21 years so I don't get reviled or worse yet, ignored by the people I'm writing this for.

So insecurity or procrastination? A little of A and a little of B?

 

[Malrex]

Hoo boy...I get it man. I hate the hate! This hobby has been a fight the whole time most people got into it in my opinion.....from devil worshipping/book burning, bullies in highschool, and now finally as an adult, I get to enjoy being called a 'racist' because I like playing a certain edition and the company is now a big asshole. Or immediately lumped with more vocal people and cancelled---because I play a certain edition or because I like someone even though they have different opinions/beliefs than I do. Cancellation is all pretty shallow in my opinion. It's cause people are on social media too much, have way too much anxiety due to that, and now have no idea how to communicate anymore, so they just lump ya in and cancel you or swipe right for something better.

I disagree with a lot of people on forums, I think disagreements can be healthy and mind opening, but I know that I could play a fun game with probably 98% of the people on the forums I visit. And the way I grew up, you sit down and play the game and not worry about someone's politics or bs or what gender they are....instead you focus on your characters working together (or rping against) and play a game with each other. So I say focus on that.

"...then what the hell's the point?!"
Well, the point of it all is to share something you are passionate about and that you enjoy doing.

I've done all kinds of different rulesets--OSRIC, OSE, FG&G and even DCC and what I learned is-- who gives a fuck. Work with the rules that YOU want to work with and make a product that YOU are happy with. Is that 3.5?...then cool, do it! People know how to convert. Is it inconvenient? yes, but it's usually pretty doable. At this point in time, you could probably just say screw the statblock and just say 5 orcs--please look them up in your preferred ruleset (because we have 5 million different retroclones anyways).

I'm rooting for you....YOU CAN DO IT!!!

Wow...what a soap box, stepping off now.

 

[Beoric]

Only the most reactionary are disagreeing with these guys, which makes me wonder if this is the prevailing attitude in what remains of the scene...

Mostly it just ain't worth the effort.

Although I have also experienced a chilling effect from a certain moderator (not Bryce) who, as a result of something I wrote on his site, not this one, heavily implied that I was in danger of being banned here.

Anyway, fuck the haters and their sock puppets, the opinions I care about are mostly on this site, and I suspect you are in a similar boat. I expect Bryce will give you an even shake sans politics. Ditto Malrex and most of the other regulars here. And I will give you my honest opinion (in advance, your maps are too complicated, your rooms are too complicated which leads to over-explaining, and your notations are too busy and too non-standard for me to process ).

So I say, go for it!

 

[The1True]

your maps are too complicated, your rooms are too complicated which leads to over-explaining, and your notations are too busy and too non-standard for me to process

Don't hold back. Tell me how you really feel though, lol

 

[The1True]

I'm rooting for you....YOU CAN DO IT!!!

Ha! Thanks man! I'll unbunch my undies and get back to it.

 

[squeen]

I'm starting to wonder if it's a fear of finishing.

This is different than work. It's something you love and want to be great. Part of the joy is working on it...so that immediately has negative repercussion if you finish it. It's a passionate thing, and I think you are having a natural struggle.

Like this whole NAP thing has had a real chilling effect on me. I mean, hats off to the guys who contributed, that's some great game design and some fun scenarios. No shade from me there. It's the negativity; the rejection of a whole chunk of the community implied by the title. Like, when I first got into the blow-SR and reading the reviews, the stuff that was carrying this hobby forward was artpunk. Reviews on this very site put me onto stuff like DCO and the wild experimentation coming out of LotFP. I myself have shilled for Luka Rejec's trippy UVG. I'm sorry that people's personal politics are conflicting, but S3 is hands down the best thing ever written, fight me. The weird is right there in the foundational DNA of the game!

I think you need to take a step back and realize that the OSR was founded by a bunch of folks (@DF, right?) that were protesting against the dominate game-of-the-day, i.e. 3e/Pathfinder. They felt (and I agree) that looking at adventures written for that system was completely alien, and not at all the hobby they enjoy playing. That group is never going to embrace anything except the game they love---it's in the "charter" if you will.

What more, I am very sympathetic to (us) OD&D/AD&D folks having a niche on the internet that can unabashedly say we think that the early version of the game was in fact also the very BEST version of the game. There is no greater joy for me than seeing some of these B/X-file Europeans (like Prince) slowly realize that AD&D is actually a superior/advanced game, and witnessing a glacial migration away from "D&D light" towards the "real deal".

That's just a personal vindication/pleasure. But just because some old-timers are entrenched with their classic game is in no-way the same as thinking we (lazy) graffers are going around, kicking in doors of Pathfinder forums, and screaming insults around wildly that your late editions "suck". We are soooo smugly confidence, insular, and bunkered at this point, there's no reason to sell or crusade against later editions.

Like the shear vitriol and intolerance coming out of some of these crusty old douches is so depressing.

To be honest, this I haven't seen. Only folks I seen worked up is over about thinly disguised politics (e.g. "woke" cancel-culture, blow-back from knee-jerk "nazi-branding", and other cool-crowd hit-job attempts).

Prince has some of the exuberance of the "newly converted", and combined that with the Dutch's tendency to announce their opinion loudly and his generally joy of internet combat---NAP posturing is the result.

NAP is not explicitly against 3e (even if it does exclude later editions, that's tertiary). NAP is against style over substance. Full stop. "Artists" tend to get wrapped up in appearance/innovation, while historically D&D was played by mathematically minded, fiddley, war-gamers. These two groups have very different ideas about "fun". NAP is simply saying you don't need to be flashy to be good. What more, if you are all fluff, Prince is going to point out there is no substance to what you are selling. His claim is that it's all about PLAYING not BUYING/READING.

It's an honest point. And if you are into churning out flashy 'zines/adventures that do not hold water---you will most likely be hurt by it. (And let's be honest, art-types are far more socially attuned to criticism than traditional war-gamey nerds.)

You in particular are a fish out of water in an around the NAPsters because:
a) you are a visual artist
b) you traditionally have really enjoyed consuming products that have been aesthetically exciting but also slightly impractical for real gaming (e.g. Planescape).
c) you play a later edition

What to do?

To please yourself, your adventure has to be usable for the game you play (3e), that few (if any) in this small Bryce-Prince-Melan review circle/cult is going to appreciate.

To please yourself, it needs to be exotic and wild (genre-bending). This is anti-NAP because of the rules, but not anti-OD&D.

To please yourself, it needs to be visually impressive (allowing you to use your professional expertise). Again, not anti-NAP...so long as there is clever game-able substance to back it up.

The only problem is going to be if you need the opinions of others to justify the effort. I suggest that you should not. You will be happier if you make the adventure to scratch your personal itch and ignore the world.

I say this as someone who is dropping (intentionally) useless art weekly on the internet. I do it because I feel compelled to chase that muse and I enjoy sharing the results even if it noiseless goes "kerplunk" into the void. I want to make something that I'd love to see---even if mostly it's something only a parent can love. We are driven to create for our mental health. The act of creation is a thousand times more rewarding than consumption. It's as simple as that.

Don't justify it. Artists are generally not appreciated in their lifetime. Don't let the lack of a target-audiencet stop you. Just make something you think is awesome---ultimately your opinion of it is the only thing that matters. (i.e. It will never make you rich or famous---that was porno/artist Zak-Black's thing. Did I ever mention that his name is on as producer of the latest Frazetta book?)

 

[Beoric]

Don't hold back. Tell me how you really feel though, lol

That's why you pay me the big bucks!

But note I didn't say anything about your discomfort with abbreviated statblocks. That's because I don't know enough about how 3e/PF1 runs to know if you are, in fact, losing something important in doing so. I dunk on 3e modules, but I can't re

Its also why I don't dunk on Planescape; the brief review I have done hasn't grabbed me enough to actually learn it. I know enough to have a (possibly rebuttable) assumption that it won't interest me, but I certainly don't know it well enough to criticize it.

Wait, would this now be called a subX?

 

[The1True]

This is different than work. It's something you love and want to be great. Part of the joy is working on it...so that immediately has negative repercussion if you finish it. It's a passionate thing, and I think you are having a natural struggle.

Thanks for the well thought out response! The above is definitely part of it. The Angry GM (who I refer to way too much for a guy I claim to disagree with) coined a term 'mapsturbation' that can probably apply to writing as well. Writing and drawing is a recreational activity and indeed finishing a work means that I have to go back to the agony of STARTING something new, which I absolutely hate. To be clear, brainstorming is easily the funnest part of a project. It's the next part. The blank page. uch.

That group is never going to embrace anything except the game they love---it's in the "charter" if you will.

Hey man, that's cool. I realize us later edition nerds are guests here. It's the intolerance I hate. You can celebrate you're own older editions, and that's what I'm here for as well, cuz I loved playing DnD in the 80's too bros! I'm sorry 3 and 4e was loitering on your front lawn listening to that newfangled boom boom music. Maybe they were hanging out there because they were hoping to hear some cool stories from the old days? This metaphor is officially out of control. The point is, I'm all about the love, it's the hate that gets me down.

NAP is not explicitly against 3e (even if it does exclude later editions, that's tertiary).

I feel like this is a contradictory statement? Historically, exclusion has implied prejudice. Let's not get into it though, since I'm firmly on the 'there shouldn't be girls in the Boy Scouts and vice versa' camp. There's a reason you don't see me on Knights and Knaves. We can go back and forth on where to draw the line and the thousand exceptions and shades of grey between common sense and bigotry. I get what you're saying, I think, and in this instance I'm not going to take issue with Prince's rules. It's his contest; he defines the terms. I think it gives a platform to and emboldens some less pleasant commenters (who I should really just ignore). If I want to be forgiving, I would even say that at least the initial contest was a thrown gauntlet, a genuine challenge. The problem is, I suspect, that to the other side it a) doesn't look like a level playing field and b) looks like a festering political debate. It looks like a trap.

you traditionally have really enjoyed consuming products that have been aesthetically exciting but also slightly impractical for real gaming (e.g. Planescape).

How DARE you! Once again, I get what you're saying, but bad example. I got a solid 5-6 years of gaming out of Planescape products with very little tweaking necessary. I would happily go back for more if they don't turn it into an unrecognizable bag of RPG Skittles. We also got a solid 3 years out of Dark Sun and 2 out of Spelljammer. Some gamers imaginations don't extend much past a Conan level of one monster/adventure because the real monster is humanity etc. Cool bro, but don't yuck my gunpowder-obsessed, hippo-headed Giff. That shit is hours of fun. And yes it IS still D&D. My group is crunch-focused and has very little patience for off-the-cuff story gaming. A lot of these 'artpunk' works are more concept than crunch. Delicious food for the imagination, but useless at the actual table. That doesn't make them irrelevant and certainly doesn't mean they should all be thrown together in a box and labeled as a political faction.

I do it because I feel compelled to chase that muse and I enjoy sharing the results even if it noiseless goes "kerplunk" into the void.

Hey, thanks for putting that in perspective. We're all watching you improve day by day.

Anyway, good one man. Hope you see this as discussion and not debate on my part!

 

[The1True]

I dunk on 3e modules

Everyone does. It's fair. I still think good adventures can, and have been written using 3e rules. The risk is always the slow creep into crunch. i.e. Skill Challenges and page-long stat blocks.

 

[squeen]

Some gamers' imaginations don't extend much past a Conan level of one monster/adventure because the real monster is humanity etc. Cool bro, but don't yuck my gunpowder-obsessed, hippo-headed Giff. That shit is hours of fun. And yes it IS still D&D. My group is crunch-focused and has very little patience for off-the-cuff story gaming. A lot of these 'artpunk' works are more concept than crunch. Delicious food for the imagination, but useless at the actual table. That doesn't make them irrelevant and certainly doesn't mean they should all be thrown together in a box and labeled as a political faction.

I imagine there are some, but I think a tiny minority, that refuse to budge from the medieval/S&S aesthetic for their games. But the 70's were a wild SciFi decade---the first decade of the so-called Space Age---and there were always wild, iconoclastic elements in almost all the early games. Gygax had his kids playing on Barsoom/Mars and in Alice's Wonderland. Our group did lots of cross-pollination with other fictional milieus (Dr. Who, Blakes 7, Tomorrow People, etc.).

Most the debates around "that's not D&D" are generally about rules/system alternations, because that's far more jarring and unbalancing. Where as the OD&D/AD&D rule-set allows for pretty much anything to happen content-wise.

Hey, thanks for putting that in perspective. We're all watching you improve day by day.

Anyway, good one man. Hope you see this as discussion and not debate on my part!

Thank you, and I most certainly do. It took me awhile to carve out some time to respond, but you've been a mensch from day one and I felt you deserved a considered reply.

 

[squeen]

If I want to be forgiving, I would even say that at least the initial contest was a thrown gauntlet, a genuine challenge. The problem is, I suspect, that to the other side it a) doesn't look like a level playing field and b) looks like a festering political debate. It looks like a trap.

This is a very interesting point. Is the contest really a contest for ArtPunkers?

My initial take is "no", it's just a demonstration in adventure writing-craft that attempts to hamstring new content creation (i.e. no new rules, few new monsters, few new magic items) in order to spotlight that part of adventure writing that is "missing" from ArtPunk. It's theoretically a bare-knuckle brawl that is trying to make a legit point about play-mechanics, without all the distracting pomp of presentation.

But your notion is intriguing. Was it ever really a legit contest between classic D&D and ArtPunk RPG? How would/could an ArtPunker participate?

It certainly ended up being more of a in-family talent showcase.

What has been cool is to see so many old-school creators come out of the woodwork. Seriously, we need to give old DangerousPerson some credit for first introducing the whole adventure writing contest notion on this forum.

Personally, I have an adventure I am toying with finishing for NAP III---but it's one that immediately self-disqualifies because it has too much new content (it's set in the Ethereal Plane). Since I don't really care about the "contest" aspect, I may submit it anyways.

 

[squeen]

Historically, exclusion has implied prejudice. Let's not get into it though, since I'm firmly on the 'there shouldn't be girls in the Boy Scouts and vice versa' camp.

I know you didn't want to dig too deep on this vein, but just let me add that I think you are right. There is 100% a prejudice against newer versions in NAP and the (original) OSR.

I just think that, like your example, there should be some corners of society in which those discriminants are considered non-toxic. A chess club does not allow backgammon, etc. NAP's rule are not "hurting" anyone in a meaningful way (beyond feelings). We have to allow folks, to some degree, to gather in small like-minded settings without smashing them on a pretext of some grand morale principal (when it's really that we don't like what they like and/or visa versa). That's true diversity (of subcultures). Similarly, it's not a hate crime that Nike only advertises shoes and not camper vans---it's just their thing.

 

[Beoric]

This is a very interesting point. Is the contest really a contest for ArtPunkers?

My initial take is "no", it's just a demonstration in adventure writing-craft that attempts to hamstring new content creation (i.e. no new rules, few new monsters, few new magic items) in order to spotlight that part of adventure writing that is "missing" from ArtPunk. It's theoretically a bare-knuckle brawl that is trying to make a legit point about play-mechanics, without all the distracting pomp of presentation.

But your notion is intriguing. Was it ever really a legit contest between classic D&D and ArtPunk RPG? How would/could an ArtPunker participate?

It certainly ended up being more of a in-family talent showcase.

What has been cool is to see so many old-school creators come out of the woodwork. Seriously, we need to give old DangerousPerson some credit for first introducing the whole adventure writing contest notion on this forum.

Personally, I have an adventure I am toying with finishing for NAP III---but it's one that immediately self-disqualifies because it has too much new content (it's set in the Ethereal Plane). Since I don't really care about the "contest" aspect, I may submit it anyways.

From Prince's new contest:

To all you Artpunkmen, who are not too cowardly, pathetic and morbidly obese to seethe on the sidelines this time: Prove that my words are empty. The last two contests saw only a single one of your kind elevated to the Anointed, a man, nay, a legend made manifest, who successfully wedded the power of Artpunk to the power of core D&D and became the stronger for it. You call yourselves the masters of design? Then Design. Personally I expect every last one of you to collapse from despair before you even put a single word to writing, and do everything in your power to avoid competition.

 

[The1True]

There is 100% a prejudice against newer versions in NAP and the (original) OSR.

It sucks, because I <3 old school. My library is fucking impressive. If we bump into each other at a party, me and these grognards, we are going to talk about some good old times. I don't reject the old, but I do embrace the new. If my gaming group wasn't so thoroughly entrenched in 3e (we've got like a century of playable material collected at this point), we'd be moving on to 5 now. It sucks running into this violent rejection of newer systems.

 

[squeen]

It sucks running into this violent rejection of newer systems.

I'm not sure how violent the rejection is. It far closer to complacency and offense (at how the Great Game that was fine-the-way-it-was has been twisted). Again, these dudes are bunkered in and/or preaching to the choir, not galloping around the internet kicking in doors.

They likes what they likes.

 

[Beoric]

I'm not sure how violent the rejection is. It far closer to complacency and offense (at how the Great Game that was fine-the-way-it-was has been twisted).

Ok, how do you not see that indicating you are offended by the "fact" that someone else's preferred edition is "twisted" is, erm, a tad unwelcoming? At least an unpleasant rejection, although the violence of the rejection may be in the eye of the beholder.

 

[squeen]

A tad unwelcoming, sure. But what normal human expects others to like what they like? It's more the opposite---a rare treat when they do. It is those happy coincidences of taste upon which great friendships are built.

 

[The1True]

Ok, how do you not see that indicating you are offended by the "fact" that someone else's preferred edition is "twisted" is, erm, a tad unwelcoming? At least an unpleasant rejection, although the violence of the rejection may be in the eye of the beholder.

I guess if you establish a happy little echo chamber like say K&K, then interlopers shouldn't feel butthurt when they don't like the language that's going around. I was duly warned while signing up, and stopped immediately. No harm done.

So what's the difference here? I mean reviewers like Bryce and Prince are pretty clear about their predilections. But for some reason I'm more prickly about edition warring here. Like, cool bro, enjoy your oldschool. I like it too. But, liking what you like doesn't require rejecting other editions in ways that are guaranteed to either start a fight or drive people away from these open forums.