Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 4:24 am
Frank, I think that by your count, the planet Earth has failed as a setting due to excessive diversity.
If 3E taught us anything, it's that you WIN teh RPG by having a limited basic set and selling expansions, while allowing players to alter it themselves. The question isn't whether your system includes something, but whether it can expand to include something.K wrote:If 3e taught us anything, it taught us that letting people make their own settings and monsters or just adding to yours will let you win at the RPG industry. I'm not looking for personal fame here, so I don't mind if someone tacks on their awesome setting to mine.
Have you ever considered that maybe you just suck?FrankTrollman wrote:YES IT DOES!K wrote:The settings themselves were fine. It really doesn't hurt your game at all if Samurai from Legend of the Five Rings are in a party with Dark Sun Psionicists and Krynnish steampunk gnomes.
Holy shit, can you even hear yourself talk here? If you have a party that has an L5R samurai, a Dark Sun Psychic, and a Krynnish Tinker, you do not have a game. That's not a cooperative storytelling game of fantasy adventure, that's a TFOS team. Anything too out-there and absurdist to make it onto a Saturday morning cartoon show is just indescribably lame.
If you can't explain what the fucking hell is going on to an eight year old, your setting is too damn complicated. And if it has a samurai, a canibalistic halfling psionic desert nomad, and an Edwardian Mormon gadgeteer, it's never going to pass the sniff test.
A setting that lacks the basic discipline to determine what it doesn't have in it doesn't have anything in it. Stuff just happens in formless void and nothing matters.
-Username17
Well, it is important that the PCs be races that exist. Their foes can be some random monster of the week, but the PCs themselves should have some connection to the game world if you want any kind of roleplaying at all.K wrote: Those are the characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation, Angel, and Inuyasha, and they were wildly popular and at no point could anyone tell you what was in the setting and what was not. The whole point of those settings was that the world was a vast and mysterious place and you has to be ready for the unexpected. That is the default fantasy setting because at no point is Conan even fighting the same thing twice. There are no categories of monsters in fantasy literature, so why RPGs need them is beyond me (unless you want to play Pokemon, at which point I have to say "would you like to play a big-boy game?")
At the end of the day, I'm not playing with eight-year olds, so crippling my game with rules that restrict setting choices is bad design on first principles. Hell, eight-years olds don't even want the game to be explained. They just want to meet cool stuff and have awesome adventures.
I have to ask, does a Demurrer kick lots of ass in your game? Otherwise, I don't want to be the lawyer.K wrote:I mean those character concepts are pretty damned simple and many long-running TV series have had combos like "child savant, android, bestial alien, and psychic who are all military officers." How about "gang leader lawyer, god-thing, wizard, vampire, and bardic demon?" How about "demon puppy-man, guy with void in hand, reincarnated priestess, ninja demon-hunter, and boy-demon trickster?"
Those are the characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation, Angel, and Inuyasha. . .
Yeah, seriously. This is exactly what a game shouldn't turn into: A situation where players can't make any choices, they just roll dice. It's one reason that I'm heavily against a diplomacy system where it's all just one dice roll and then something either happens or doesn't happen and you're really not sure why it happened.FrankTrollman wrote: Seriously, what the heck do you do? It's Star Trek, what the characters do is wander around running diagnostics until theyfigure out what radiation emissions from the crystal aliens are making their shit explode and then they throw some super physics at the problem to either shut out the harmful rays, solve the deeper environmental problem causing those rays to happen in the first place, or just frickin leave and hope the problem doesn't follow. But what the heck does a player do? The characters are just making extended science tests until they win the adventure, the player has seemingly no input whatsoever.
I would say this is incorrect. The more races you write the more effort you'll expend on that. A race writeup needs to contain at the least a physical description. In effect there is an overhead every time you put in a new race that takes time/pages away from new cultures.FrankTrollman wrote:Fantasy Races and Determinism
“Black skinned elves are for killing.”
There is an absolute limit to the number of race/culture combinations that a game world can handle, which is essentially unmodified whether there are large numbers of races or small numbers. That is, when detailing the continent, you will write up a series of different cultures until you run out of space on the map, run out of word count, run out of allotted time for world building, or are for some other reason required to stop.
Concerning Inu Yasha and Angel: So you are stating that all the demons are one species, and all the undead are one species?FrankTrollman wrote:So to recap:
Inu Yasha: Three races: Yōkai, Human, Hanyo.
Angel: Three Races: Demon, Undead, Human.
Star Trek: Completely fucking unplayable.
Final assessment: your exact choice of examples shows exactly why you are wrong and I am right.
This is exactly wrong. The more races there are, the less variation will appear in each race, and the more likely you will be ale to render judgment upon a creature because it is a Kua-Toa and all of those people are bad. The Atreides and Harkonen are just humans, and indeed many members of each team successfully switched sides or infiltrated the other team because racially they were exactly the same. At the limit of D&D standard racial bullshit, you have D&D standard racial bullshit - where it is literally OK to kill baby Sahuagin because they are all bad anyway.sigma999 wrote:Race/class combination is quintessential for durable settings. Anad by quintessential, I mean that without the ability to shuffle the combination of species and role in life, one has a stale environment as entrenched in pomp and birthright as the Dune setting. The characters are born to their clan and role; they might be able to make a name for themselves as individuals, but an Atreides and Harkonnen will never be able to become members of the other side. It's just how the setting goes.
However, I don't want to play Dune, I want to play a fantasy RPG.
Granted, there are players that enjoy a stereotypical "It's an orc! Kill it before it rapes and pillages." kind of setting but in my experience they are few in number these days.
Probably for the better.
Final Assessment: you are high.FrankTrollman wrote:---
So to recap:
Inu Yasha: Three races: Yōkai, Human, Hanyo.
Angel: Three Races: Demon, Undead, Human.
Star Trek: Completely fucking unplayable.
Final assessment: your exact choice of examples shows exactly why you are wrong and I am right.