How much Saga Edition review would be too much?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 3:47 am

OK, so people are wrong on the internet about Saga Edition, so I've obtained, well, Saga Edition, and set out to do a review of it.

I feel since it is so very d20modern it fits in very well with the way I yelled at d20Modern that time, which people seemed to like.

So the idea was, hey I'll go through and individually and specifically shake the angry fist at every last piece of crazy methodically one by one, much as I shook the angry fist at every last talent on the various reviewed d20modern classes.

And I'm going to need to cover, pretty much everything, because Saga fans are kinda dense and seem to be going for a sort of "God Of The Gaps" thing where whichever bit of the system that ISN'T specifically mentioned is somehow the bit which makes it all work.

The problem is that going into Saga Edition Core Book alone I find easily half of it could use yelling at in detail, and the rest has various "highlights" that really need mentioning.

So I'm maybe 2/3rds done on a detailed angry fist shaking at the core book and I'd say I've got over 30 pages of "Holy crap look at that... it doesn't even work... what's that rule even think it's doing... oh look yet another fucking +1 only less so... etc..." and I haven't even done the droids chapter yet.

The question is basically. Can people stomach maybe 40 pages in the style of my old d20modern class review, or do I need to slash this thing back to the bone?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 3:52 am

Well, at the Den there are a few things we like:

Being thorough instead of half-assed
Undiluted rage/vitriol

So I say go for it. Spare nothing. Fling shit at every single word that needs it.

shau · Post by **shau** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:06 am

Koumei wrote:Well, at the Den there are a few things we like:

Being thorough instead of half-assed

Undiluted rage/vitriol
So I say go for it. Spare nothing. Fling shit at every single word that needs it.

I vote for this as well.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:56 am

This thread exists because Dean declared that he had fun in a high-optimization multi-splat Saga game and rambled off some builds that could play together and come out at about the same power level, and when PL declared "how dare you have fun playing a system with flaws (cough3.5cough) you are the worst kind of person" he kind of got fucking told for not knowing enough about the system to even have that argument in the first place and also doing his usual PL thing where he enthusiastically argues with things he is only pretending other people have said.

This entire review will be nothing but an exercise in cherrypicking points that feed back into that argument. I love a good Denner rage-review, but you are not really signing up for that. You are signing up to watch him jerk off about how much he hates those guys in that other thread who dared to call him for his bullshit. Which is not to say that Saga is a good system, only to say that PL's 'review' will be solely an effort to convince himself he was totally justified in being a strawmanning twatface.

So much fucking pass.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 7:13 am

DSMatticus wrote:This thread exists because Dean declared that he had fun in a high-optimization multi-splat Saga game and rambled off some builds that could play together and come out at about the same power level, and when PL declared "how dare you have fun playing a system with flaws (cough3.5cough) you are the worst kind of person" he kind of got fucking told for not knowing enough about the system to even have that argument in the first place and also doing his usual PL thing where he enthusiastically argues with things he is only pretending other people have said.

This entire review will be nothing but an exercise in cherrypicking points that feed back into that argument. I love a good Denner rage-review, but you are not really signing up for that. You are signing up to watch him jerk off about how much he hates those guys in that other thread who dared to call him for his bullshit. Which is not to say that Saga is a good system, only to say that PL's 'review' will be solely an effort to convince himself he was totally justified in being a strawmanning twatface.

So much fucking pass.

To be fair, Saga is a terrible system, and there's nothing wrong with tearing a terrible system apart piece by piece. You can only claim that PL is doing something for spite after the work is finished and there's actual evidence to that effect.

Personally, I hate Saga because I convinced my gaming group to pick it up based on my love of Star Wars, and nobody at all had fun when we played it. It was a gigantic mess that was all my fault. I'd love to see someone rip that pile of shit apart.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 9:20 am

DSMatticus wrote:This entire review will be nothing but an exercise in cherrypicking points.

I'm unclear on what your actual point is here. Saga is bad, d20modern bad rather than 3.x D&D bad and that IS a step in the wrong direction. I want to make that clear, some people disagree, they won't give specifics or reference actual rules, so I intend to do a definitive review that actually references the fucking rules.

As for "cherry picking" to prove that it is as horrendous as it is... my entire point is that I came across so many fucking cherries I was worried people would get sick of fucking cherries. The whole damn thing is cherries. I'm drowning in god damned cherries.

And on that basis you accuse me of being a big mean poo poo head who is totally going to be selective with evidence and then declare you not only don't want to see the excessive evidence version you want to bury your head in the sand and pass on even the evidence highlights version?

Who the fuck is being selective with evidence here? Me or you?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 12:34 pm

My point is that there has never been a time on this forum since I signed up three and a half years ago when you were not a strawmanning fuckface in the name of "stop liking what I don't like!" The only conversation* I have ever seen you have on this forum in good faith is about how shitty the Australian government is, and presumably then only because when you attempt to construct strawmen of conservative assholes a cousin of Poe's law kicks in and you end up describing reality with perfect accuracy entirely by accident.

The actual thesis of this thread is that you are going to show the people in that other thread what's what for being wrong on the internet by agreeing loudly and angrily with criticisms they posted. Because you are a strawmanning fuckface, and you think if you yell at things loudly and angrily enough people won't bother to ask if anyone actually said the things you are yelling at. The possibility that you would manage to do this review honestly went out the fucking window from the first sentence of the goddamn thread. You know, the sentence in which you declared that this thread was for taking jabs at strawmen!

How about you do a Skyrim review starting from the tagline "DSM and Kaelik are Skyrim fanboys, here are all the things wrong with the game they don't want you to know about!" and in that review you just verbatim repeat criticisms Kaelik and I posted about Skyrim? Then you can declare that a moral victory for your "flight didn't obsolete 90% of Morrowind's challenge and even if it did who cares fuck mudcrabs (also 90% of the game is reskinned mudcrabs) stop liking games where magic isn't so awesome!!1! that being a dude with a sword is a viable life option" bullshit.

Your posts in IMHO are borderline useless. Not because you aren't capable of insightful commentary, and not because you aren't capable of making vitriol charmingly clever to read. But because in spite of those talents, you're actually just a fucking liar who shouts too much. The instant you are forced to actually argue a point with another human being you transform into a shitgoblin like some sort of incredibly bizarre and unfortunate lycanthrope made of awful. You seriously made this thread to try and win an argument that didn't happen! Think about that! Think about how fucking retarded that is for two seconds! HOW, PL. HOW IS THIS A THING. WHY ARE YOU THIS AWFUL.

*Edit, to be fair: I am exaggerating. A lot of your MPSIMS shit is fine, presumably because most of your posts on MPSIMS receive no argument and/or were arguments with tzor, another case of "impossible to strawman; actually is that awful." Really, you are fine right up until someone disagrees with you (on any topic, any point, small or large), but when they do you become the aforementioned shitgoblin and instantly substitute the conversation that is happening with a fantasy conversation in which you are slaying fanboys with your mighty ragesword. Why the fucking fuck do you fucking do that, you fuck?! Why?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 12:53 pm

So in otherwords DSM, you have a giant personal vendetta against me. And typically enough you lack the self awareness to realize you are in fact yourself strawmanning my entire position on this thread and throwing in a repetition of your personal grievances over every other deeply personal grudge you hold against me.

Seriously your position flat out is a rather hilarious strawman that I'm setting out to take jabs at strawmen about something Dean did or did not say, when flat out I intend rather clearly to simply describe and discuss the Saga edition rules.

You know unlike anything you want to do, what with 100% of what you have posted on this topic across two threads, and likely on my eventual review being personal attacks against my character.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 1:59 pm

PL, the number of people on this board who have a giant personal vendetta against you think you are a strawmanning fuckface is surprisingly large. Because that is what you are, and anyone who has had the pleasure of arguing with you has experienced it first hand. Which is exactly why I brought up the Skyrim hilarity, a three-year-old thread in which you responded to people disagreeing with a specific criticism you made while simultaneously criticizing the game for a half-dozen other far more serious things "fanboys" and then proceeded to viciously beat some strawmen. How unpleasantly consistent of you.

The fact that you think being called out for your conduct is a "vendetta" or an "attack against your character" is actually pretty fucking hilarious. I mean, it might be technically true. Given that you are a strawmanning fuckface, I do personally dislike you and I do think your character is lacking. In the same way that if you kicked orphans, I would personally dislike you and would think your character is lacking. But hey, let's try a little experiment: you stop being a strawmanning fuckface. If I stop calling you a strawmanning fuckface, then it clearly means I am not out to assassinate your character in the name of a personal vendetta, and instead am calling you a strawmanning fuckface because that is what you are. You up for that?

Also: are you fucking stupid, or do you just think everyone but you is? You are seriously trying to claim that this thread isn't related to that other thread (and therefore I shouldn't be giving you shit for what a strawmanning fuckface you were in the other thread), and yet the very first sentence of the OP is "Remember that other thread? I'm going to review Saga core and prove them wrong! Even though the people in that thread straight up told me Saga core was boring and shitty and no one had said otherwise to begin with!" Again: you have set out to win an argument that didn't happen. It is the declared purpose of this thread. You have already failed the burden of not being a deceitful ass in this thread, and so I am calling you a deceitful ass in this thread.

And now I'm going to (attempt to) go back to not clicking through the ignore I have you on and let you "show those fanboys" or whatever bullshit you've convinced yourself you're doing. I've posted enough walls of text, and calling you a strawmanning fuckface n+1 times isn't going to make you suddenly realize how shitty you've been over the years. You strawmanning fuckface.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 5:32 pm

DSMatticus wrote:This thread exists because Dean declared that he had fun in a high-optimization multi-splat Saga game and rambled off some builds that could play together and come out at about the same power level, and when PL declared "how dare you have fun playing a system with flaws (cough3.5cough) you are the worst kind of person"

Don't forget, fellow readers, that this explicitly happened. PL is going out of his way to personally shit on people for having fun with something he doesn't like.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:14 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:So in otherwords DSM, you have a giant personal vendetta against me.

What the hell man? No one has a personal vendetta against anyone here except maybe the recurring trolls like Roy, Shadzar, or the bear world guy. Take it from someone with personal experience in this, if you're having a hard time with people on the Den consider that the problem might be with you.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:52 pm

virgil wrote:PL is going out of his way to personally shit on people for having fun with something he doesn't like.

I don't even mind that he did that. I mind that his criticism was him gish-galloping through outright falsehoods and lies. The end of that thread had me declaring that every single thing written in his "Evasion isn't worth taking in Saga" was such a huge series of lies and falsehoods that if anyone thought there was a single true thing said they could say so and I would respond. Not a single person raised a hand, because PL is reaching critical mass as a person known only for being dishonest.

That is why this review holds no value. We could have Shadzar review 3.E or Silva review the concept of learning and of course they would shit on it but they would be spouting uninteresting bullshit the entire time and that's valueless. Literally every single thing PL said about my Saga posts was wrong or dishonest. There was not a single thing he said that wasn't immediately pointed out as being the opposite of true. For those not in the know I wrote about several high-op Saga builds of mine and PL responded with a series of things that were completely untrue and eventually he admitted that he was wrong all the time because he'd never even read my posts. PL is willing to write a 30 page response against my posts about Saga but he's not willing to read those posts. Nor is he willing to read the books that the discussion was about because he is that dishonest.

In the thread he shouted that all my abilities were just piles of +1 bonuses even though there were no +1 bonus adding feats or talents and the abilities I had were things like flight, force fields, invisibility, illusion magic, and many many attacks a round. People called PL on this. He said my builds were bullshit 20 level builds even though of the three builds I discussed one was 7th level, one was 1st level, and one was 12th level (which I mocked for taking too long). People called PL on this. PL admitted to having read no Saga sourcebooks while he shat on the Saga sourcebooks we were discussing and people called him on it. People called him out over and over again and in the end his treatise on Evasion was just so full of bullshit that it exhausted anyone's willingness to even point out all his lies because PL doesn't actually give a shit about his own dishonesty.

PL's review is uninteresting for the same reason that so many well respected posters keep him on ignore; Because he doesn't care whether the things he says are true or not.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 9:37 pm

Dean wrote:There was not a single thing he said that wasn't immediately pointed out as being the opposite of true.

Dean. You lost that thread.

When specific rules WERE referred to like the storm trooper evasion post that was made of direct rules content and actual math that you disputed ONLY with "it's not true ever, just trust me!". Your, still broad and non-committal, Starships of the Galaxy claims were examined and found in detail to be a pile of shit. And you sat there silent with nothing to say about it, because when you can't say "that book just fixes stuff, in some way, hey look a system where you can pick options PROBLEMS SOLVED!" you have nothing.

You want to declare your silence and inability to actually refer to the rules you are ostensibly discussing victory instead? You want to just say "nuh uh, your wrong because secret reasons!" fine. You don't want to read my saga review, fine, I don't think you could really follow it anyway.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:09 pm

I say just let him do his damn review. That way everyone can see his thoughts on it. It'll be far better to criticize what he actually writes than to speculate on how shitty what he is going write is gonna be. I try to take what people put here on a case by case basis. There are times when I agree with PL, times when I don't, and times when he has shat on my ideas for reasons that I'm not too clear on to this day. I still remember the "people can ride horses! you failed!" argument he delivered in a thread I made a while back. However, he is not consistently wrong like silva or shad so I figure its best to at least see what he writes.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:30 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:
Dean wrote:There was not a single thing he said that wasn't immediately pointed out as being the opposite of true.
When specific rules WERE referred to like the storm trooper evasion post that was made of direct rules content and actual math that you disputed ONLY with "it's not true ever, just trust me!".

I'll make the same offer here PL. If anyone looks at your 3000 word rant about how Improved Evasion is not useful in a system where every opponent uses AOE's and is not able to discern several different forms of dishonesty in your writing then I will respond to any question they ask.

I don't need to tell you the ways that you are dishonest because you do it intentionally and it doesn't bother you. That's a goose chase where you respond to people pointing out dishonest arguments with other dishonest arguments until everyone stops responding and you declare victory. What I will offer here, just as before, is that if there is even a single person who is not able to immediately identify your posts as complete falsehoods then that person may speak up and reference any part of the "debate" that they think was a legitimate argument on your part. Like before I don't think there will be a single Denner to whom the fact that you are both wrong and being intentionally dishonest won't be clear.

The thread you are so proud of winning is a series of posts where people tell you you are lying, deceitful, and wrong with no exception. Not a single person ever agreed with you and when I asked if there was any person lurking or reading who didn't understand why you were wrong no one raised a hand.

A PL review of Saga would just be a series of ill-thought out shouts brought about by being actively mocked for his flailings in the other thread. Den reviews are meant to be full of insightful commentary, acerbic insults, and system mastery. The PL type of review can be found anywhere on the RPGsite.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:36 pm

Dean wrote:The PL type of review can be found anywhere on the RPGsite.

That's a little unfair to PL as far as I can tell he hasn't threatened to punch anyone for playing RPGs wrong.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:45 pm

I meant the part where it would be composed of tribal, ill thought out memetics. Not the absurd machismo or insane self importance.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:51 pm

I do not think that PhoneLobster is capable of writing a 40 page thread on Saga Edition. I don't think he could even manage 40 reasonable length forum posts on the subject. Furthermore, I wouldn't want him to try writing such a review because it would mean having an incoherent rant about an RPG I give no shits about on the front page for as long as it takes him to give up and for people to stop arguing stupid goalpost shifting minutiae with him.

PhoneLobster, please do not post your review, nothing good will happen as a result.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 1:36 pm

MGuy wrote:I say just let him do his damn review. That way everyone can see his thoughts on it. It'll be far better to criticize what he actually writes than to speculate on how shitty what he is going write is gonna be. I try to take what people put here on a case by case basis. There are times when I agree with PL, times when I don't, and times when he has shat on my ideas for reasons that I'm not too clear on to this day. I still remember the "people can ride horses! you failed!" argument he delivered in a thread I made a while back. However, he is not consistently wrong like silva or shad so I figure its best to at least see what he writes.

I predict, now he wont write it

Wulfbanes · Post by **Wulfbanes** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 1:47 pm

I have had the pleasure of playing in a long-running Star Wars Saga campaign for over two years now, with about 50 sessions under the belt. I have had a lovely time, feeling very welcome in my MC's (and part of the group's) unbound enthusiasm for Star Wars. There's a bunch of formally expressed agreements on rules we avoid from the game, because we believe they break the game's fun (and the genre it's trying to emulate). Regardless of it is a good system or not, I've had a lot of my RPG fun from it, and I don't mind seeing another review.

Ravengm · Post by **Ravengm** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 6:43 pm

Regardless of motives, the vitriol of posters here tends to be what gets me through the week.

infected slut princess · Tue Sep 30, 2014 12:37 am

Haters gonna hate. PhoneLobster should do a review of this game, and if it's really long it should be broken up into parts. It would probably be a lot more interesting than most of the garbage people post on this forum. This forum used to have more interesting content. Now it pretty much totally blows ass.