Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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I think what kills me about this santising and dumbing down of the narrative and lore behind gods like Grummy etc. is that by making the entire game into a weird grey neutral sludge they can try and say, see it's all even now and you can make your own story free from our own writers' biases and hang-ups! Be free! But in reality, they're kicking the legs out from beneath the creative table that everyone sits around to build a fun story in the first place by erasing the basic creative beats that people can use as the basis for campaigns.

That's not to say in the hands of a naturally creative person or group you can't take that sludge and form it back into something great but it's fucking hard when you are essentially homebrewing right from the fuckin get-go thanks to feckless diversity hires sanding off every potentially rough edge to appease twitter niggers and trannys. It's like when they try and make Itchy and Scratchy violence free to appease Marge and end up with a bland and boring product that causes all the kids to turn off the TV and go outside.

Honestly, I don't think anyone will really care about the narrative choices and still make orcs and drow and illithids bad guys without giving a fuck and this is all some lame cover for WotC to just say, hey look we tried it's not our fault the CHUDs aren't playing pretend the way we told them to.
 
Didn't non-evil Liches use a different ritual so they wouldn't become inherently evil?
Archliches were a bit different yeah and alongside the elven Baelnorn have been around since 2e. One of them even served as the namesake for Khelben Arunsun's Moonstars. You're still fundamentally undead though, with all that entails, no matter how noble your goals and methods. Alathene Moonstar still had to drain the lives of people to maintain her form for all she restricted herself to evil wizards and villains, so there's a good chance any Paladins and so on might still want to send you on, albeit more diplomatically than usual.

3.5 also had the Walker in the Waste/Dry Lich, a sort of psuedo-druidic variant focused on sand, salt, and drought. Pretty big Ozymandias vibes in that they had an aura of heat that dried out and preserved their domain, fluffed as guarding the ruins of civilisations past. They could be neutral instead of evil but were still anathema to the living in how inhospitable they made their surroundings.

Personally I'd prefer something along those lines. It's fine to have non-evil intelligent undead, like the Undying from Eberron, but let a Lich just be a Lich and be dangerous just by virtue of what it is rather than its motivations.
 
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Looks super gay and limiting. And i think dreamers are immigrants? I dunno seems kinda based for the creator, immigrants are literal animal brained stooges of corpos.
So when Ettin sees immigrants, he sees animals trying to make it as humans, but their brains aren't up to the task? Wow, that's racist.

Anyways, the next 200 pages describes Space Portland's geography and its inhabitants in autistic detail.

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The station is an O'Neill cylinder, made from material harvested from the moon and a few near-Earth asteroids, along with a generous dose of handwavium.

Getting to Space Portland requires either a ton of cash or a corporation to sponsor you. While this does mean you'll have a job waiting for you when you get there, this also means that deportation is a possible way to get rid of people who offend the corporations. Remember that.

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Space Portland is a fully functional city, which includes agriculture for food, extensive public transport, and plenty of indoor parks--which are being taken over by homeless people.

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Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The station is a planned city that has only been in operation for about ten years. It's in space and very difficult to get to. Where do all of these homeless slums come from? Why not just bounce them back to Earth if they're a problem?

Space Portland's infrastructure is being bought out by private interests who are letting it to go shit because it's funny.

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The people running the station are all the kinds of milquetoast vaguely racist white men that Ettin hates.

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Okay, here's something. The problem with housing and unemployment comes from all the kids who grew up on the station.

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Again, this doesn't make sense. What are they going to do, vote themselves largesse? Why not just go back to Earth?

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Truly, this place is a cyberpunk dystopia.

And in case you haven't filled in your bingo card yet, all cops are evil. For some reason Space Portland also needs a paramilitary black ops force too.

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Again, where is all of this unemployment coming from? How are people sneaking into the station, and why? This is especially bizarre considering that all cops are supposed to be bad guys, so we should sympathize with smugglers and drug dealers?

On to cyberware. Cyberware is either a medical replacement to fix something broken or just because it looks cool. You can get entire prosthetic bodies if you want. The "cyberpsychosis" gimmick of other cybertech games isn't actually a thing, that's just the Man keeping people down.

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This argument is particularly dumb. If you have a worker that needs an expensive cybernetic system to replace damaged meat, why not just hire someone else? Are people really that eager to sign up for a lifetime of debt slavery? Apparently they are in Space Portland.

Also, here's some ridiculously whiny bullshit about dysphoria.

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"I'm just so dysphoric when I think of myself not having cat ears and neon glowing veins!"

There are also androids in Space Portland for some reason, which are basically the same as regular people, just with fewer rights.

17.png
 
So when Ettin sees immigrants, he sees animals trying to make it as humans, but their brains aren't up to the task? Wow, that's racist.

Anyways, the next 200 pages describes Space Portland's geography and its inhabitants in autistic detail.

View attachment 3625086

The station is an O'Neill cylinder, made from material harvested from the moon and a few near-Earth asteroids, along with a generous dose of handwavium.

Getting to Space Portland requires either a ton of cash or a corporation to sponsor you. While this does mean you'll have a job waiting for you when you get there, this also means that deportation is a possible way to get rid of people who offend the corporations. Remember that.

View attachment 3625087

Space Portland is a fully functional city, which includes agriculture for food, extensive public transport, and plenty of indoor parks--which are being taken over by homeless people.

View attachment 3625088

Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The station is a planned city that has only been in operation for about ten years. It's in space and very difficult to get to. Where do all of these homeless slums come from? Why not just bounce them back to Earth if they're a problem?

Space Portland's infrastructure is being bought out by private interests who are letting it to go shit because it's funny.

View attachment 3625089

The people running the station are all the kinds of milquetoast vaguely racist white men that Ettin hates.

View attachment 3625090

Okay, here's something. The problem with housing and unemployment comes from all the kids who grew up on the station.

View attachment 3625091

Again, this doesn't make sense. What are they going to do, vote themselves largesse? Why not just go back to Earth?

View attachment 3625092
View attachment 3625093
View attachment 3625094

Truly, this place is a cyberpunk dystopia.

And in case you haven't filled in your bingo card yet, all cops are evil. For some reason Space Portland also needs a paramilitary black ops force too.

View attachment 3625095
View attachment 3625096
View attachment 3625097

Again, where is all of this unemployment coming from? How are people sneaking into the station, and why? This is especially bizarre considering that all cops are supposed to be bad guys, so we should sympathize with smugglers and drug dealers?

On to cyberware. Cyberware is either a medical replacement to fix something broken or just because it looks cool. You can get entire prosthetic bodies if you want. The "cyberpsychosis" gimmick of other cybertech games isn't actually a thing, that's just the Man keeping people d
View attachment 3625099
View attachment 3625100

This argument is particularly dumb. If you have a worker that needs an expensive cybernetic system to replace damaged meat, why not just hire someone else? Are people really that eager to sign up for a lifetime of debt slavery? Apparently they are in Space Portland.

Also, here's some ridiculously whiny bullshit about dysphoria.

View attachment 3625101

"I'm just so dysphoric when I think of myself not having cat ears and neon glowing veins!"

There are also androids in Space Portland for some reason, which are basically the same as regular people, just with fewer rights.

View attachment 3625102
So it's basically roleplaying in a leftist political manifesto?

A socialist utopia getting screwed over by everyone going out of their way to be as one-dimensionally evil as possible. It's all very predictable and very boring, although i admit that HEOcities made me chuckle.

At least cybernetics don't eat your soul here, so my corporate high roller (let's call him Chance) can supplement his combat Mergers And Acquisitions cybernetics with vanity ones.

Yeah, i'm still rooting for the corporations here.
 
Didn't non-evil Liches use a different ritual so they wouldn't become inherently evil?
Necromancy is never good because Negative Energy always leans evil due to arcane reasoning. It's why zombies and skeletons, despite being mindless and acting just on impulse, are always evil.

These idiots never bothered to look up the Deathless, which were the good aligned undead that came about usually due to slight traces of divine power bringing them back out of their coffins.

As for the stupid cyberpunk book with the O'Neill Cylinders, they are letting their theft of Gundam show by the flood of hobos shitting up the space colonies. In the UC setting the poors were shoved off world to no longer poison the air and offend the eyes of the elites.

Also this cafe communist can eat shit since they benefit solely from capitalism to shit out such a garbage sci fi setting.
 
I'm sure soon enough the concept of "evil" itself will be considered a "far-right dogwhistle", anyway.
 
>objective good and evil are an far-right dogwhistle
I think that would be the thing that turns everyone against them. We can argue about what objective good and evil are, but at the end of the day, everyone knows they exist irl.
I don't know if you have ever dipped your toes into how modern redditors who play D&D view the alignment system, AKA Lawful Good somehow became the alignment most ok with murder because they for some reason murder everyone who disagrees with their own personal code, or Chaotic Good is now seen as "The Ends Justifies the means" and means you just get to "kill racists or anyone who disagrees with you but be good while doing it".
These people have corrupted morality to a point where it no longer exists or has a place in modern TTRPG design.
 
In 5e I suppose you could flavor a high level Reborn Wizard/Sorceror as a sort of alignment-friendly Lich. They have all the traits other than a phylactery, and can always just slap on a few spell-like abilities. They didn't choose to come back, sometimes you just come back.
 
PF2e isn't as homosexual and the rules are pretty comfy, it's not too bad.
Considering PF2e has that preamble text telling the DM that he's obligated to put fags and nigs in his game, regardless of whether or not they're at the table, 6e must be a real trash fire of wokeness.
 
l finally read about 5e (the crunch and controversies, late i know) and holy shit WOTC are retarded even more than I thought.
I just read somewhere that Kingdoms of Kalamar 3e books were/are seen as some of the worst stuff in 3.x even including oil, either i was lucky with what i read (campaing settings player version of the previous and the setting equivalent to africa?) or is it overblown?[/spoiler]
 
I don't know if you have ever dipped your toes into how modern redditors who play D&D view the alignment system, AKA Lawful Good somehow became the alignment most ok with murder because they for some reason murder everyone who disagrees with their own personal code, or Chaotic Good is now seen as "The Ends Justifies the means" and means you just get to "kill racists or anyone who disagrees with you but be good while doing it".
These people have corrupted morality to a point where it no longer exists or has a place in modern TTRPG design.
This has been a problem long in the making. Even 20 years ago Lawful Good charcters were frequently interpreted as "so good that they're evil".
 
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