The state of Post-OSR content

Reposting something Settembrini put up at K&KA. :)

DO1Wdei.jpg
 
So the "Tactical Minis Game" that allegedly famous for its superheroic characters is a mobility scooter? How does that follow? Like, shouldn't a joke have some basis in perceived reality?
 
I do remember that in one of Settembrini's podcasts, 4e was referred to being a bicycle, design by committee, with 3 wheels since someone once reported having fallen off. I don't know enough about 4e to say where that perception came from, but apparently it's out there.

Maybe superhero characters are a "safety net" of sorts?
 
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What about a comparison to synthesizers? (Sorry, my other hobby.):

OD&D: Modular
AD&D: Analog poly synth
2e: digital hybrid synth
3e: sampler
4e: Digital Audio Workstation
5e: digital analogue modeler

What would the basic line be? Monophonic analogue? 3e era basic: "keyboard" from Target?

What is nice about the above is that it actually fairly well maps to what was happening at the same time.
 
tetramorph said:
What about a comparison to synthesizers? (Sorry, my other hobby.):

OD&D: Modular
AD&D: Analog poly synth
2e: digital hybrid synth
3e: sampler
4e: Digital Audio Workstation
5e: digital analogue modeler

What would the basic line be? Monophonic analogue? 3e era basic: "keyboard" from Target?

What is nice about the above is that it actually fairly well maps to what was happening at the same time.
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OD&D has got to be a Moog (=moduler?).
B/X is a Fisher-Price keyboard.
Meztner Basic is an electronic doorbell.
 
Dr. Peter Kreeft (Catholic apologist) speaks about his love of Tolkien in this interview starting at 14:10. I post it here because we've gone back and forth about Bombadil several times, with the majority disliking his inclusion on the LotR.

Kreeft starts speaking about Bombadil at 19:00. Interesting is the interviewers take (siding with the anti-Bombadil crowd) versus Kreeft's---which beautifully articulates my feelings on the matter.

If you care...

"...if they come from the concious mind..." is a major part of what's wrong with much Adventure-writing/fiction in my opinion. The creatively is too predictable and meditative, and as a result feels too tidy and artificial.
 
squeen said:
Dr. Peter Kreeft (Catholic apologist) speaks about his love of Tolkien in this interview starting at 14:10. I post it here because we've gone back and forth about Bombadil several times, with the majority disliking his inclusion on the LotR.

Kreeft starts speaking about Bombadil at 19:00. Interesting is the interviewers take (siding with the anti-Bombadil crowd) versus Kreeft's---which beautifully articulates my feelings on the matter.
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I have no issue with Bombadil as a concept, or his existence in Middle-Earth; the Bombadil poems are fine. My issue is with the pointlessness of his appearance in LotR. In fact, I see his as am impediment to good storytelling, because not only does nothing happen - the main characters accomplish nothing, and learn nothing - but he actively removes their agency.

The hobbits get caught by Old Man Willow, are rescued by the Hand of God, and learn and accomplish nothing. The hobbilts get caught by the barrow-wights, are rescued by the Hand of God, and learn and accomplish nothing. IIRC, they don't even find Merry's magic sword on their own, he hands the swords to them, with them having done nothing to earn them. The whole thing has about as much function as "Merry finds a magic sword in a field."

I understand how Bombadil first got there, because as I understand it he was telling these stories to his kids as a serial, and a random episode works fine in that context. So he added a crossover with a old character AND his rogues' gallery, who (as with many poor crossovers and sequels) are up to the exact same tricks they were in the original poem, and defeated by Bombadil in the same way (he may have even had the same dialog). I think the work would have been better if he had the discipline to excise an element that added nothing to the overall work, or publish it as a separate short story, or shove it into an appendix like Arwen's story.

squeen said:
"...if they come from the concious mind..." is a major part of what's wrong with much Adventure-writing/fiction in my opinion. The creatively is too predictable and meditative, and as a result feels too tidy and artificial.
Click to expand...

I agree with this assessment. WotC adventures are formulaic, antiseptic, and have a far too 21st century sensibility for what amounts to, at the latest, an early modern or 19th century political, social and technological environment. They exist in a clockwork universe in which every element has a logical explanation which must be explained to the DM, even if the logic is a bit dodgy, and eschews any mystery. The OSR's focus on the mythic underworld is a reaction to this, if nothing else.
 
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I am with the pro-Bombadil crowd, while critics are correct in that aside from the swords Bombadil does nothing to further the narrative of the Ring nor of any of the four hobbits, what it did for me is establish Middle Earth as a place. The character undoubtedly had a lot of encounters and interactions with inhabitants of Middle Earth along the journey most of them were not relevant or even notable. The incident with Bombadil while not relevant was notable as it was one of the few times any of the characters encountered the wonderous side of Middle Earth.

Along with things like Gloin's impression of the Glittering Caves and a handful of other brief incidents that were also irrelevant, I think the importance of these is that they establish part of what the Fellowship was fighting for. Things that would be definitely lost if the Ring wasn't destroyed.

However, if your time or budget is limited then omitting Bombadil from an adaptation is not a big deal in my opinion.
 
Brief digression: due to losing a bet of sorts, I am reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer right now, and so far my impression is that the narrator in that book pays an enormous amount of attention to what clothes she wears every day. I don't think Tolkien ever mentions _once_ whether Frodo is wearing a cute red sweater or decides to bring his black bag instead of his purple one with him to Mordor.

In the words of Larry Niven, "it is a sin to waste the reader's time," so what detail an author chooses to include in a work makes a statement of sorts about what sort of reader the author expects, and what they are expected to care about.

I have no strong opinion on Tom Bombadil in Tolkien's novels (honestly I find the LotR novels tedious regardless of Bombadil's presence; The Hobbit on the other hand is an excellent adventure story). But _in a game_ players do not and should not expect to be passively consuming curated content; Chekhov's Gun in a novel must either fire or be edited out of the work as a waste of time. But in a game Chekhov's gun need only be *fireable* in some potential futures, depending on player choices. A Tom Bombadil character in a game need not do anything as long as he *could*. Giving someone a magic sword is one acceptable Bombadil interaction; so is cursing a player's hair to grow inward underneath his skin instead of outward; so is gently intervening with trolls pursuing the party to persuade them to show mercy and let the party have a last meal and an hour's rest before capturing and devouring them.

In a game, versatile game elements with many possible outcomes depending on how players interact with them tend to create interesting gameplay.
 
Hemlock said:
Brief digression: due to losing a bet of sorts, I am reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer right now, and so far my impression is that the narrator in that book pays an enormous amount of attention to what clothes she wears every day.
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Devil's advocate: the narrator of Twilight is a teenaged girl.
 
Alexander Moonbeam said:
Devil's advocate: the narrator of Twilight is a teenaged girl.
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Yes, and?

Maybe you're just saying it was obvious to you all along that (some?) teenage girls (and adult women?) are like that, but to me it was an eye opener, like reading an anthropological treatise on an alien species. The kind of stuff that makes you go, "Hey, this might make an interesting D&D race or culture."
 
Hemlock said:
Yes, and?

Maybe you're just saying it was obvious to you all along that (some?) teenage girls (and adult women?) are like that, but to me it was an eye opener, like reading an anthropological treatise on an alien species. The kind of stuff that makes you go, "Hey, this might make an interesting D&D race or culture."
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I seem to recall a comment by Felecia Day to the effect that she chooses her wearable magic items based on how they would look with her other wearable magic items. I don't know that she was serious, but the recognition of it as a consideration is still interesting.

I do often think about what adventurers look like, based on the magic item descriptions. Like wearing no armor with gauntlets and a mail coif, or plate armor with slippers and leather bracers, not to mention the various clashing bejeweled crowns, amulets, rings, etc. I have described adventurer-heavy parts of town to my players as including a disproportionate number of people wearing garish and clashing gear.

I have also considered imposing AC penalties if the character is wearing headwear/vambraces/gloves/grieves/footwear that is a lesser armor type than the main armor.
 
Beoric said:
I do often think about what adventurers look like, based on the magic item descriptions. Like wearing no armor with gauntlets and a mail coif, or plate armor with slippers and leather bracers, not to mention the various clashing bejeweled crowns, amulets, rings, etc. I have described adventurer-heavy parts of town to my players as including a disproportionate number of people wearing garish and clashing gear.

I have also considered imposing AC penalties if the character is wearing headwear/vambraces/gloves/grieves/footwear that is a lesser armor type than the main armor.
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That was a big thing a few years ago in MMOs. You could transmogrify your equipment to look cool. Yes, come back to World of Warcraft! You can spend gobs of in game money to change the appearance of your armor to look like a crown of flames1 This of course belies that stereotype that only women care about how they look.

They even one upped you on the penalties for wearing mismatched armor. It was actually a necessary change. They had issues where healing spec paladins were rolling for leather (ie druid) or mail (ie shaman) healing gear and winning ("ninja'ing") the gear away from the people it was meant for. So they instituted a penalty. If you were a paladin and you had one piece of non-plate armor, you'd take a penalty to all your stats. Same with shaman and mail. That way you wouldn't be tempted to roll for that nice leather helm that has great +int stats on it. That was meant for the druid you ass!
 
You aren't really playing WoW unless you are equipped with a purple viking helmet, a lime-green chest plate, a sparkling wooden mallet.

(I did not mean to imply that all teenaged girls - and certainly not all women - are overly preoccupied with their clothes. Just that enough teenaged girls are, that I did not find such digressions out-of-place in Twilight.)
 
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