You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.
Buddhism != race
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You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
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Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
]I want him to tongue-punch my box.
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Court stuff... What I need though is rules for all the elaborate gift giving and letter writing and subtle snobbishness of samurai courts.
unless someone comes up with a good enough Logistics & Dragons system to make Three Kingdoms more interesting than a Pendragon reskin.
In other words I'm asking for a fucking lot of actual thought and work from them.
Seems like people expect 'more' out of an Eastern setting than a 'generic tolkien western fantasy', with societies (and social mechanics) that make sense given the availability of magic/technology and so on while with a western 'generic' setting forgotten realms nobody really thinks about how 'raise dead' affects politics.So what I'm looking for is a fully integrated part of the setting.
Most of the Western public seems to want an East Asian setup that invokes China and Japan, and maybe Korea and the Mongols as well. Exposure to Anime and Wuxia is high, while interest in, say, Southeast Asian fantasy environments is very much lower.
Instead of blurring it all together, maybe distinct sections on ancient China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia/central asian steppe cutures, Viet Nam/southeast asia, Himalayan nations,
Tarkir did better than Kamigawa right? Though I figure that's in part to the cards being better overall. So people want to see representation of different East Asian countries/cultures, but what exactly do they expect as iconic of those cultures?I want a number of fantasy cultures from my East Asian themed fantasy, and I want them to draw heavily from different East Asian cultures. Basically the minimum I want is Tarkir's Khanates
Going towards China, I'd probably want to see shit along the lines of Journey West
Inuyasha, Also rat-people.
Um... if you let me play a kind of unsavory crow-dude swordsman
How would you want these 'demihumans' integrated into a campaign setting? Something like D&D where being a tengu or monkey man is powered down from their mytholigical inspiration into 'LA+0' compared to humans as elves and dwarves are? Or something more like say After Sundown where the supernatural have an edge over 'average humans', and only humans with a supernatural nature of their own can compare?*Touhou*
Well, this actual Buddhist thinks that Tenra Bansho Zero does a great job with portraying three broad archtypes of Buddhism and esoteric Taoism found in East Asia (mainly Japan/Korea/China). The three main sects of Buddhism in Tenra also disagree on what happens when one dies, with one believing "nothing", one believes "you go to paradise if you recite this sutra", and one saying "you reincarnate based on karma", which I think allows for more setting flexibility than how D&D goes "btw the afterlife is strictly explained with no vagueness or mysteries and at a high enough level you can open a door to heaven or hell and raise the dead".You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.
Yes. Kamigawa is a famously poor selling set, while Khans of Tarkir is a famously well selling set. Some of that is obvious set power: Kamigawa is full of trash cards and aside from a few broken cards made little impact, while Khans is a power house whose wedge factions continue to dominate tournaments well into the next block. And some of that is how nicely they played with other cards: Kamigawa has a lot of keywords like Arcane that only do anything in reference to cards inside the block, while Khans special cards actually work fine with cards mixed in from other sets.OgreBattle wrote:Tarkir did better than Kamigawa right?
Well, I think it depends on the system and what it's trying to do. If we're talking D&D In Asia, then I'd be cool with a LA 0 youkai races and short paragon classes. But if we're talking something more like AS where people are allowed to start with about half a dozen supernatural powers and non-supernatural characters are spellcasting miko and demon samurai and I know next to nothing about non-japanese asian fantasy tropes, that'd be cool too.OgreBattle wrote:How would you want these 'demihumans' integrated into a campaign setting? Something like D&D where being a tengu or monkey man is powered down from their mytholigical inspiration into 'LA+0' compared to humans as elves and dwarves are? Or something more like say After Sundown where the supernatural have an edge over 'average humans', and only humans with a supernatural nature of their own can compare?Um... if you let me play a kind of unsavory crow-dude swordsman
Cool, good to know. I was mostly subtly poking Jigoku to write something, but I couldn't remember if he'd mentioned being Buddhist here before, so I didn't want to mention that explicitly.Well, this actual Buddhist thinks that Tenra Bansho Zero does a great job with portraying three broad archtypes of Buddhism and esoteric Taoism found in East Asia (mainly Japan/Korea/China). The three main sects of Buddhism in Tenra also disagree on what happens when one dies, with one believing "nothing", one believes "you go to paradise if you recite this sutra", and one saying "you reincarnate based on karma", which I think allows for more setting flexibility than how D&D goes "btw the afterlife is strictly explained with no vagueness or mysteries and at a high enough level you can open a door to heaven or hell and raise the dead".You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.
I'm pretty sure TBZ takes inspiration from Masamune Shirow's manga Orion which is a sci-fantasy setting where karma is a force of existence that can be manipulated with technology, so you may want to check that out. Eric Wujik's work on Mystic China and Rifts China also does a good job of portraying "Kungfu movie Buddhism/Taoism".
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I think that has something to do with the presence/absence of assumptions.OgreBattle wrote:Seems like people expect 'more' out of an Eastern setting than a 'generic tolkien western fantasy', with societies (and social mechanics) that make sense given the availability of magic/technology and so on while with a western 'generic' setting forgotten realms nobody really thinks about how 'raise dead' affects politics.
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
Are incredibly catchy theme songs packaged with that?hyzmarca wrote:Kung-fu monkeys.
Neither concept is remotely worthy of being a class in DnD in the first place.Schleiermacher wrote:
No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here.
Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level.
I challenge this assumption. It exists only because writers are human and have other things to do than to fill every century of their setting's history with events, so if they are stupid they will have millenia of nothing happening, and if they are not stupid, they will have millenia of "shit happened, but conquests and civil strife of countries long gone are not relevant enough to here and now to be described in detail". When your history is clearly cyclical, as it is in actual DnD settings, you can have millions of years of it, and it will only impact the current pseudo-medieval landscape through the density of dungeons left by previous civilizations that fell to magical apocalypses or internal decay and barbarian assaults.Mechalich wrote: whereas in most TTRPG settings it has to be stable over the long term (and if your setting includes long-lived races like elves it has to be stable over the incredibly long term).
I did not mean stable politically, but stable in terms of magic, technology, and powers - the kinds of things that delineate the mechanics of your setting. Settings where everything is changing due to 'magic coming back' or some such are unstable, and a lot of the fluff you might produce is immediately invalidated by the ongoing fluctuations. Or you have to write the setting such that it only exists in a certain limited time window before it implodes - which players generally dislike. Ex. Exalted has this problem in both ways.FatR wrote:I challenge this assumption. It exists only because writers are human and have other things to do than to fill every century of their setting's history with events, so if they are stupid they will have millenia of nothing happening, and if they are not stupid, they will have millenia of "shit happened, but conquests and civil strife of countries long gone are not relevant enough to here and now to be described in detail". When your history is clearly cyclical, as it is in actual DnD settings, you can have millions of years of it, and it will only impact the current pseudo-medieval landscape through the density of dungeons left by previous civilizations that fell to magical apocalypses or internal decay and barbarian assaults.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
I'd hope so.angelfromanotherpin wrote:Are incredibly catchy theme songs packaged with that?hyzmarca wrote:Kung-fu monkeys.
I think there'd be some demand. I know that there are non-christians who get kind of annoyed at D&D religions' overuse of christian tropes when they want to play a religious character (*raises hand*), and aren't Buddhists a rather sizable proportion of religious people?JigokuBosatsu wrote:Prak, you summoned me?
IRL Buddhist cleric here. I don't think it would be hard to do a Crystal Dragon Buddhism writeup. I had a halfassed one that didn't get beyond the Moleskine stage, though I did play a serial-numbers-filed-off Ikkyu in a PF game over on In The Trenches.
Not sure what the demand would be, though, other than Prak's boundless enthusiasm. I suppose if there was a concerted effort to make a full "Oriental Adventures" setting I'd be glad to contribute.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Global population doesn't matter, because your book isn't getting translated into Cantonese. What matters is the population that speaks the languages your book is actually in, which is probably going to be just English. That takes about 80% of Hindus and 50% of Buddhists and Muslims and about 30% of Christians out of your market immediately. If your target audience is people who actually have the same religion as what you're depicting, then your target audience is probably not big enough to justify having a book at all. And then on the other end there's the fact that someone doesn't actually have to be a Buddhist personally to know enough about Buddhism to notice when your Crystal Dragon Buddha is really just Crystal Dragon Jesus with gong noises and not a philosophically distinct person.Prak wrote:Looks like they were the fourth largest affiliated group (fifth largest group if you consider "unaffiliated" a valid religious identity in a survey on religious groups...). So I stand by my supposition. If you wrote a Tome of The East that covered Buddhism and Hinduism in D&D land you'd be going for gamers who are in the third and fourth largest affilitated religious groups.
Lethal Weapon 4 would make for a shitty OA adventure setting.sigma999 wrote:Watch any Jet Li movie.
All of that stuff. Running on air, punching faster than sound, wrecking demons...
But then again, westerners call that "magic" and it gets relegated to the mages.
In The Sorcerer and the White Snake Jet Li's monk-like character does some fantastic things all without being inherently "magical".
He's a monk, but acts like a D&D cleric Buddhist priest in action.
But The One would make a great one!fbmf wrote:Lethal Weapon 4 would make for a shitty OA adventure setting.sigma999 wrote:Watch any Jet Li movie.
All of that stuff. Running on air, punching faster than sound, wrecking demons...
But then again, westerners call that "magic" and it gets relegated to the mages.
In The Sorcerer and the White Snake Jet Li's monk-like character does some fantastic things all without being inherently "magical".
He's a monk, but acts like a D&D cleric Buddhist priest in action.
Game On,
fbmf
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
Even if we look at just the US, Buddhism is either on par with Islam or just behind Hinduism.Chamomile wrote:Global population doesn't matter, because your book isn't getting translated into Cantonese. What matters is the population that speaks the languages your book is actually in, which is probably going to be just English. That takes about 80% of Hindus and 50% of Buddhists and Muslims and about 30% of Christians out of your market immediately. If your target audience is people who actually have the same religion as what you're depicting, then your target audience is probably not big enough to justify having a book at all. And then on the other end there's the fact that someone doesn't actually have to be a Buddhist personally to know enough about Buddhism to notice when your Crystal Dragon Buddha is really just Crystal Dragon Jesus with gong noises and not a philosophically distinct person.Prak wrote:Looks like they were the fourth largest affiliated group (fifth largest group if you consider "unaffiliated" a valid religious identity in a survey on religious groups...). So I stand by my supposition. If you wrote a Tome of The East that covered Buddhism and Hinduism in D&D land you'd be going for gamers who are in the third and fourth largest affilitated religious groups.
The reason you do research into foreign cultures when writing books about non-standard settings is not because you expect even a significant minority of your readers to actually be from the relevant cultures, but because 1500 years of Buddhist history, legend, and philosophy is going to provide more fodder to flesh out your setting while also setting it apart from psuedo-European settings (including both competitor RPGs and your own psuedo-European continent, if you've got one) than six months of wild extrapolation from anime and kung fu movies ever will.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.