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

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Zak and the rest of the OSR continue to be literally Hitler.

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4chan? I'm insulted!
I looked up these twitter accounts, plus a few more from that thread (OK, I knew about "Olivia"), and the mental illness is dripping from the screen. Again and again, you look at who is making the tweets, and you find posters who are mentally unwell, socially hopeless, broke, unhappy and into fucked up ideologies. When there is an actual picture, it is always some malformed loser with heavy piercings, poison hair and clear signs of being sick. When it is art, it is freakshit furry or fetish stuff that suggests the same. There is not one normal looking person with a well adjusted family life among them. They are all rejects, and not mild cases, but the absolute bottom of the genetic and social barrel.

What is hard to understand is how the OSR has a bunch of people like this as well. How did killing orcs and exploring dungeons attract so much slime? The people I know who swear by the efreet cover DMG and Against the Giants aren't like this. They are people with kids and mortgages, or maybe angry metalheads. You would think the OSR would be offputting to the weirdos since it is based on ideas they hate. Where are they coming from? How did they end up there? Or is it just twitter and RPGNet?
 
I looked up these twitter accounts, plus a few more from that thread (OK, I knew about "Olivia"), and the mental illness is dripping from the screen. Again and again, you look at who is making the tweets, and you find posters who are mentally unwell, socially hopeless, broke, unhappy and into fucked up ideologies. When there is an actual picture, it is always some malformed loser with heavy piercings, poison hair and clear signs of being sick. When it is art, it is freakshit furry or fetish stuff that suggests the same. There is not one normal looking person with a well adjusted family life among them. They are all rejects, and not mild cases, but the absolute bottom of the genetic and social barrel.

What is hard to understand is how the OSR has a bunch of people like this as well. How did killing orcs and exploring dungeons attract so much slime? The people I know who swear by the efreet cover DMG and Against the Giants aren't like this. They are people with kids and mortgages, or maybe angry metalheads. You would think the OSR would be offputting to the weirdos since it is based on ideas they hate. Where are they coming from? How did they end up there? Or is it just twitter and RPGNet?

I just want to immolate orcs.
 
I looked up these twitter accounts, plus a few more from that thread (OK, I knew about "Olivia"), and the mental illness is dripping from the screen. Again and again, you look at who is making the tweets, and you find posters who are mentally unwell, socially hopeless, broke, unhappy and into fucked up ideologies. When there is an actual picture, it is always some malformed loser with heavy piercings, poison hair and clear signs of being sick. When it is art, it is freakshit furry or fetish stuff that suggests the same. There is not one normal looking person with a well adjusted family life among them. They are all rejects, and not mild cases, but the absolute bottom of the genetic and social barrel.

What is hard to understand is how the OSR has a bunch of people like this as well. How did killing orcs and exploring dungeons attract so much slime? The people I know who swear by the efreet cover DMG and Against the Giants aren't like this. They are people with kids and mortgages, or maybe angry metalheads. You would think the OSR would be offputting to the weirdos since it is based on ideas they hate. Where are they coming from? How did they end up there? Or is it just twitter and RPGNet?
Troonery and social media are to nerd communities in the 21st century as crack is to black communities in the 80s.
 
Admittedly, I've had a hard time convincing people to give CoC a shot, since they're put off by the idea of their character getting killed off in the end instead of being Roland McHeroic, retired dragonslayer, but I think both heroic fantasy and horror are great for RPGs and tabletop stories.
Pretty much every character in my CoC campaign ended up dead or insane. Or worse.
 
What is hard to understand is how the OSR has a bunch of people like this as well. How did killing orcs and exploring dungeons attract so much slime? The people I know who swear by the efreet cover DMG and Against the Giants aren't like this. They are people with kids and mortgages, or maybe angry metalheads. You would think the OSR would be offputting to the weirdos since it is based on ideas they hate. Where are they coming from? How did they end up there? Or is it just twitter and RPGNet?
grogs make OSR because the original b/x book is hard to get
raggi makes LOTFP, it's still OSR
Zak S makes a bunch of artsy dungeons and also starts playing ye olde dnd with pornstars™
New people are drawn to the artsy parts and not to the OSR parts.
They all get together into a scene and make NuOSR, which varies from games vaguely resembling old DnD to games vaguelly in the spirit of old DnD to completely random nonsense.
Troons

that about covers it.
 
Pretty much every character in my CoC campaign ended up dead or insane. Or worse.
When I was in college, the RPG club ran a CoC oneshot module for Halloween called Dead Light, and like a dozen people showed up. Fortunately, the GM had enough pregenerated characters for all of them, so with module's premise of "all your characters start out in a car that gets stuck just outside of a gas station/diner in Spooky Happenings, Massachusetts" easily replaced with "all your characters start out on a bus etc." they could all squeeze in. As I recall we lost an average of 2-3 investigators per set piece, because almost none of them were familiar with how easily you can die in CoC (two of them thought it would be a good idea to go out and have a close look at the creepy floating light in the woods, as I recall). By the end of it all we had narrowed it down to a reasonably-sized group.

For whatever reason the one black girl who showed up elected to play an aristocratic Southern belle, and goldarnit, she played it to the hilt.
 
When I was in college, the RPG club ran a CoC oneshot module for Halloween called Dead Light, and like a dozen people showed up. Fortunately, the GM had enough pregenerated characters for all of them, so with module's premise of "all your characters start out in a car that gets stuck just outside of a gas station/diner in Spooky Happenings, Massachusetts" easily replaced with "all your characters start out on a bus etc." they could all squeeze in. As I recall we lost an average of 2-3 investigators per set piece, because almost none of them were familiar with how easily you can die in CoC (two of them thought it would be a good idea to go out and have a close look at the creepy floating light in the woods, as I recall). By the end of it all we had narrowed it down to a reasonably-sized group.
Last time I ran CoC, all of the players made characters with near zero research / academic / lore skills. No literature, no history, barely any science. One had a decently high EDU so could sometimes get away with more generic knowledge rolls. Much of the game was them bumbling around based on guesswork leading to an unnecessary character death. The rest got through alive but failing to prevent the key thing they were supposed to stop.

For whatever reason the one black girl who showed up elected to play an aristocratic Southern belle, and goldarnit, she played it to the hilt.
That sounds a riot. Was she actually into RPGs beforehand because I've often found that the people who've never played an RPG and aren't indoctrinated with the conventions often are much better at it. Case in point, non-gamers who come to play in my games are often more successful because they don't make assumptions (which get them killed), they don't assume they are the centre of the world and that everything is balanced around them (which gets them killed) and they think outside the box and actually try original things like they would (which keeps them alive).
 
Whole point of Lovecraft stories is that there are beings and forces that see humanity in same way we see ants.
As for protagonists of his stories they are usually normal people who end up in encoutering these forces.
But there certain invidiuals that are not exactly good guys. For example in story the Hound protagonist is graverobber who does it for fun. In the Vault protagonist is undertaker who robs dead and is willing to cut corpses into smaller pieces just to fit them into caskets....
 
Funny little thing.

Back when the D&D movie hit Vudu, they wanted $39.99 for it.

About a week ago it dropped to $29.99. (Fuck That)

Now it's at $19.99.

Hell, I might wait a month or so and get it at $5.99.

That tells me that someone is screaming " BUY OUR MOVIE ON STREAMING! OH GOD, PLEASE!"

And you know, I might have, if Hasbro and WotC hadn't spent all that time making sure I understood they didn't need me in the hobby any more.

Guess they forgot I'd take my wallet with me.
 
They will have plenty of new, diverse fans to pick up the slack for every problematic one they fire. ...What? The new fans are broke ass loons who think capitalism is theft and don't pay for anything?
 
They will have plenty of new, diverse fans to pick up the slack for every problematic one they fire. ...What? The new fans are broke ass loons who think capitalism is theft and don't pay for anything?

It turns out the diverse fans think reading and math are white oppression of black and brown bodies, and tiktok attention spans, and zero imagination, only able to blindly parrot dogma and start to smash anything that doesn't sufficiently conform to it.
 
Instead the guest goes on a near two hour rant about how horror games using the works of H.P. Lovecraft aren't scary because Cthulhu doesn't give a fuck that PC are trying to keep him asleep and that EVERY game, regardless of genre, needs the PC's to be heroes.
Yes, but no.

I disagree with the thread saying that characters in CoC need to end up dead or insane. That doesn't make for a good game, and ever since I started reading Lovecraft, a surprising amount of stories have the main character eek out some kind of victory. As someone said earlier, the "everyone needs to end up dead or insane" comes from people who never read the stories and are going off reputation.

I also think there's space for Lovecraftian horror with an action hero or even fantasy bent. Most of Lovecrafts popular monsters are stated and are canon in many settings. There was a great Counter Monkey episode about how Cthulhu goes with anything.

Is it normal from gaming groups requiring everyone to play the hero? Or is this a byproduct of ten years of cape shit movies?
I'd say it's normal. The rational is that "I'm a boring nobody in real life, why would I want to play that in my escapist entertainment?". This might be why I don't mind "freakshit" races in DnD, because I almost always play dragonborn when given the option, and everybody love playing warforged.
 
It turns out the diverse fans think reading and math are white oppression of black and brown bodies, and tiktok attention spans, and zero imagination, only able to blindly parrot dogma and start to smash anything that doesn't sufficiently conform to it.
If they exist at all. I believe I've mentioned 'phantom demographics' before. A lot of these idiots are making marketing decisions based on social media, which... tends to distort things.
 
And to me, that's what makes it so compelling. Your PCs are likely just ordinary Joes (or maybe a little unusual or special, just enough to get the wrong attention), so they're hopelessly outclassed. Chances are they're either going to end up dead, insane, or living out their days as a retired recluse haunted by the past. And if you're playing the setting straight, none of it really matters, because Cthulhu (or Azathoth, or the Yith, or whatever's worse) is going to eventually wipe the whole human race out. But that's good. It's a perfect allegory for our fear of death and the unknown, and fighting against that is necessary to avoid falling into terminal ennui.
You can have have CoC game where the players win. You just leave it unanswered if what they did actually worked or even explain how they were able to defeat the eldtrich creatures.

An example would be the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones wouldn’t destroy the Ark, wanting to confirm that its power was real even though he knew something terrible would happen if it was opened. He is able to defeat the Nazis by having them witness the Ark while Marion and him close their eyes. The unknowable and ancient power of the Ark kills the assembled villains.

Indy proves there was a power in the Ark but will never know what exactly that power was. The Ark is now in the hands of America’s “top men” and who knows if these ignorant agents understand the power they possess. Perhaps a fool will unleash the power of the Ark on the world and doom humanity to extinction. Indians Jones will never know. All he can say is that he won his battle.
 
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