T. B.'s page

In any case, my issue with that player wasn't just the loli-character - it's that she insisted on making it intensely, disturbingly sexual. (Such as - ugh, "descriptively" - hitting on the other players while affecting a little girl voice.) But when you lay it out as a fashion that's intended to dock adult women out as...

Well, I'm glad you dodged the bullet.

Mainly because I was in a similar situation (adult wanting to play as a... questionable child), and at first I thought, "How could this go wrong? We'll have a smartass wise-beyond-years child soldier in our midst. It'll be great!"

It wasn't. It really, really wasn't.

NC-17, but more out of situational comedy than actual unpleasantness.

"Golly, my intestines sure look extra purple today."

what cracks me up is when anyone tries to claim that loligoth "fetishism" or interest is not treading a highly questionable path. It's as if they do not understand where the term "Lolita" in that regard comes from, and why it is a questionable path.

Or to quote the Bard Sting - "He starts to shake he starts to cough just like the man in that book by Nabokov"

By the time that starts, it's best to just back out of the room.

And I especially don't want to (in one disturbing case) even scratch the surface of your weirdo loli-fetishism.

Ugh. I almost want to ask how this happened, but... ugh.

6. Is this real?

You had to ask, so, unlikely.

As for Damien, he's actually resurfaced in recent months. I found out he got arrested and charged for assault against an interracial couple when he was 18. He's out of prison now and I actually saw him crusading on a different rpg forum against rpg companies that portray minorities in positive light. Kinda sad to see that things never change... but at the very least, I'll never have to deal with him again.

You need to finish what you started. Find him... and end him.

... With dice, I mean. Not your fists.

Sluts sluts sluts

I'm sorry, your avatar combined with the content and tone of your posts is just unintentionally hilarious.

"Hey, Bill. Tell us the story of how you and Sarah met."
"..."
"KILL HIS ASS"

Yes, I prefer my players to have to deal with taxes and medical insurance, especially after spending a few months in the local hospital, rolling sanity checks against passive-aggressive physicians and impossibly bland food after getting that spear critical in the liver.

I don't see the reason why you need such a specific rulebook at all.

Any GM can cannibalize a logical series of events from the environment, both (or all) characters' stats and description (body type, flexibility, lining up properly, etc.), and feeling towards one another (whether it's an empty act tantamount to object-assisted masturbation or full of love and passion and blah blah blah).

Ah, that's not exactly what I meant.

What I mean is, is there something out there that explains how combat works? Because honestly, I don't fully grasp it.

Long story short, I'm trying to learn my way around the Old World of Darkness. Thing is, after Pathfinder, it's less than... intelligible, sometimes. So, basically, is there some resource out there that walks through a combat or social scenario, step by step?

I'm basing most of my knowledge off of the 20th Anniversary Vampire the Masquerade rules, by the way.

Perhaps. But this is still happening around a table.

In depth and detailed simulation, not emulation.

It's still basically assassins and private military corporations and James Bond/Jason Bourne... with World of Darkness lore.

You have never larped in your life, have you?

No, I'd rather not get blown to pieces.

Well, in terms of depth, it's more that I'm making my players make informed and logical decisions, rather than depending on dice rolls.

So, for example, one of their characters is versed in bomb defusal, so I give them a US issue bomb defusing manual. Ingame, the character encounters a complex bomb. The player must then use a combination of the manual, logic, and a few dicerolls to defuse it.

Obviously, this doesn't happen every single session. Think of it as a kind of... nonfighting miniboss.

Spycraft, huh? I'll give it a look. Thanks.

Well, even if the game is played in the conventional player-per-character sense, I don't want to rule out the possibility of a player capturing a tank or attack helicopter, or having "pilot" be their profession.

D20 Modern and White Wolf... don't quite fit what I'm looking for. Think more of a military simulator that takes even the littlest of minutiae into account. Multiple people to pilot a tank or jet and to be aware of the g-forces' effect on their bodies, radar jamming requiring knowledge of channels and wavelengths, hacking requiring the player to have an understanding of the operating system and source code, bomb defusal being... basically a real-time mock bomb defusal minigame, and so on.

I know that may not sound like fun to some, but it's what I'm looking for.

That, and damaging the 'weak' (feigned or not) members of an enemy party is a convenient way to divide the other members' attention- between attacking you, or assisting their downed ally- or provoking them into doing something rash and 'heroic'.

Knight said it sooner than I could.

If someone isn't loaded with armor and weapons, chances are they're going to fireball your ass to high Hell. Even worse if they start stat-buffing the heavy, slow fighter. Think of a light soldier with a rocket launcher- weaker, but much more dangerous.

And even if they are just objectively weaker, you may as well oneshot them (as that javelin-wielding orc did) and remove them from the equation entirely, for the sake of simplifying the combat scenario.

Then again, taking out the seemingly weakest opponent on the field is always a fine strategy.

Up to forcing a player to leave, after a single session of play, by escalating the threats to raping and killing her PC (through email exchanges with the whole group in copy).

Jesus Christ. You did call out said player on his b~@&$%!+, right?

...self aggrandizing 'ubermensch' kills whoever he wants, f***s whoever he wants, and proceeds to deliberate upon the uncivilized nature of the world while sitting in a pile of dead prostitutes (who were, don't you worry, raped before they died).

Look at this again, if you please. I am not being utterly literal. I am sure there are (rare) points in which Jorg does not kill someone he wanted to kill, or raped someone he wanted to rape. Most of the time, he does. The point about him musing upon barbarity whilst reclining upon a shield volcano of dead women is means to point out the irony of the book. How Jorg, the nine-to-fourteen year old ubermensch (yes, I know this is repeated continually by other reviewers, but it was the immediate word to spring to mind upon reading the first twenty pages), is so very special, and his actions are beyond the scope of the contemptible 'ordinary'.

How I spoke is called levity.

Now, sexual abuse, like all subjects, is fair game for any novel willing to treat it with proper awareness. Unfortunately, in the Prince of Thorns, it exists merely as trite shock value. Much like most actions performed by Jorg and his most pliable underlings, really. As Lawrence mentioned in an interview, he wrote the series to entertain, not to present a social commentary or level a criticism against society.

Now, you may say that these atrocities exist to better convey the nature of this 'world' (I use that term lightly, given that the world is simply... a wetter version of Europe). So be it. The issue runs deeper; Lawrence struggles to create a world that is truly dark. No- he fails. Murder, rape, torture, pedophilia... that's it. That's the best he can do. His pen stops, and he frowns to himself, wondering, "well, I made him rape and murder and torture and act like an a%%++#~. What else?"

I mean, why was Lolita's Humbert such an unsettling character? Because he related to the rest of humanity- or, at least, made an attempt to. Humbert's depravity runs so much deeper than Jorg's, not because of the volume of crimes committed, but because of the intimacy. A world need not be rife with felony to be dark. That's a mistake many young writers make- but Lawrence is not young anymore.

As evidenced by his two-dimensional characters, he doesn't really understand the human condition. But he avoids needing to, as the only entity in this book that approaches the definition of 'character' is Jorg. The special, doesn't play by the rules, male fantasy Jorg.

But I'm getting carried away. All of that is completely beside the point.

Ludicrous exaggeration- oh, my friend, my friend. How you function in contemporary society, where language is a maelstrom of connotations and hyperbole and litotes, I know not. I don't know how I do it myself, sometimes.

And I appreciate your sensitivity to other individuals' trigger sensitivity. I guess I could learn from you in that regard.

But, whatever. Our 'argument' is founded in misinterpretation. You seem like a reasonable person.

I'm not sure if 'hyperbole' is a viable alternate term for 'not actually true'.

Why people can't just say, "I just didn't like this book," rather than having to make up "mountains of dead, raped prostitutes", I'm not entirely sure.

hy·per·bo·le

It's not a viable term for "untrue"- but, thankfully for me, the Prince of Thorn's setting has enough latent misogyny and 'darkness' to pile XX-chromosomed corpses higher than any mountain.

Ah, yes, the argument that "but only [this rounded-down percentage] of pages actually contain rape, there's really nothing to be concerned about". The use of mathematics to exonerate authors seems to be the greatest appeal of authority most of can think of in this genre- most CthulhuTech apologists are wont to do the same.

My friend, I'm afraid you don't quite understand. My opinion was evident from my post. Whether I say it in the most literal method possible or provide a (figuratively) true exaggeration- I did not like the book.

And I love how you place the term mistreated in apostrophes.

I must be one of those few who doesn't care for alignments at all.

'Good' and 'evil' are so completely subjective, especially in a game setting; having such labels is meaningless.

That never happens in the book, at all. Maybe in the sequels, but certainly not in PRINCE OF THORNS.

... That was hyperbole. Not particularly far from the truth, I'm afraid, but hyperbole all the same.

Then again, if pseudointellectualism and philosophizing that sounds like that of a teenager justifying their innate greatness is something you'd enjoy, don't let me stop you.

Much like that Prince of Thorns book- self aggrandizing 'ubermensch' kills whoever he wants, f***s whoever he wants, and proceeds to deliberate upon the uncivilized nature of the world while sitting in a pile of dead prostitutes (who were, don't you worry, raped before they died).

Numerian wrote:

Read R Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing

A poor, poor friend of mine did. He called it the Plot of Nothing. It did seem rather derivative and kinda carbon copied from a mix of the Bible and LotR. No, I haven't read it, so I am possibly harsh and unfair.

Oh, there's plot- it's just highly uninteresting, and presented in an equally highly uninteresting way.

You aren't missing out. Learn from my mistakes.

I'm curious. Are there, in your opinion, systems that are simply too complicated for their own good, or outright complex simply to be complex? Either in terms of combat, leveling up, or any other aspect.

And, to you, at what point does depth cross the line into miserly scrupulousness?

I ask this, being rather generally unfamiliar with any systems outside of Pathfinder.

Thanks for the recommendations, people. Burning Wheel it is.

Just a question- how important are the Character/Magic/Monster Burners?

Burning Wheel Gold certainly seems promising... and only twenty five dollars for six hundred pages.

Though I have to ask about Burning Wheel's combat- how does it work, exactly, if there's less emphasis on it? I don't want a coin flip dueling system, you understand.

Do you still want a medieval-fantasy setting?

Yes, definitely. But if the setting drifts into ancient times or Renaissance times, I won't be too concerned.

And I can understand the lack of want for a 'realistic' RPG- for as Dire pointed out, not many players are interested in the concept of being shot in the head and then spending the next game session in an ICU, trapped in a series of coma-dreams. But personally, I find that to open a realm of possibilities.

Because we, living our ordinary lives, are unwilling to take truly dangerous risks and do truly extraordinary things. If we 'meta' that reality, that ordinary life- we suddenly have the insight, the ambition, and the lack of fear to do some very interesting things.

But when I say realism, I also mean realism applied to the world itself. Creatures that do not exceed the size of hypothesized dinosaurs, magic that still acknowledges the rules of physics (acknowledges, but does not follow), and protagonists that are not objectively better for simply being protagonists.

Alright, thanks for the suggestions, I'll give these a look.

Though I continue to search for a system that has truly 'dangerous' magic- as in, high risk, high reward, with the caster and allies just as likely to be damaged as the target. Magic that is weird, dangerous, not fully understood, but played with anyway- kind of like nuclear power in the 30s, if you would.

What level of realism are you looking for?

Well... I don't want to be a fool and say "the MOST realistic!", but... I'd say as realistic as one could comfortably get while still being in a game setting.

I guess the word for what I'm looking for is 'simulator'?

While Pathfinder has certainly served us adequately, I'd like to ask if there's anything else that has more emphasis on story, character background, and dare I say... realism. Less gamey-ness, if that makes sense. Less emphasis on levels and feats, more on action and circumstance That may seem odd to ask for in a setting of magic and megafauna, but what can I say.

I've looked into GURPS, and while it seems like a step in the right direction, the arbitration of 'advantages' and 'disadvantages' doesn't exactly thrill me.

Anything that really fits that description? Or am I condemned to create my own system?

Thanks.