The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the companies with multiple accountants who call themselves ‘indie’, as if ‘indie’ meant ‘independent from Wizards of the Coast’.
But wherever you want to draw the line, it can’t be a single author, ‘indie’ can’t mean ‘a lone human with paper and a pen’, because nobody makes a standard RPG alone.
Even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits page at the start.
Any book with only one person to credit wouldn’t have an editor; and any book without an editor desperately needs one.1
This is a response to Robgoblin’s post on hex maps.
It should have been an email, but Robgoblin has no contact details on the blog.
Our cartographic goblin argues that a six-mile containing one settlement doesn’t map to Middle Ages European fantasy settings, as any six-mile area would contain more than a single settlement.
Even in rural Scotland, relatively sparsely populated even in the mediaeval era, such a hex containing my hometown contains:
The town itself
Two or three villages
Two Iron Age hill forts
At least three castles
Part of a line of Roman fortifications and signal stations, though none of the major structures fall within the area
The giants aren’t bad once you redirect their bountiful energies.
We slept soundly next to this one, who was plagued by little men with stabbing, rusted knives, who woke him with a stab every time he slept.
Once the little lights from their wicker-basked heads appeared, we woke him, Poopy died, and he smashed the lot with his great giant-hands.
The next mission was to find and retrieve a pious man called ‘Gregor’.
Every time an enemy scarred him, he would draw his blade across the scar to make a cross.
The fact that his wounds did not cause infection provides proof that the B_______ has truly blessed him (praise be, unto both heads).
Soon after, more Friends of Giants Society folk came by, and informed us of a tower where someone collects artefacts from the time of giants.
This is a true and honest account of the events leading to my recognition as royalty (pending), and acceptance into the clergy (impending).
We found ourselves, as so many do, brought together by slavers, who have always lived up to their official mission statement - ‘connecting people’.
The slavers shunted into some abandoned space under a false pretence, so I crafted an ingenious plan to circumvent the journey, which my new companions misunderstood, and so proceeded into the black depths, to speak with an animated skull who desperately wanted to hold onto his sanity, despite his insane condition.
Late to the party, you say?
Nevertheless, Pathfinder’s a great example of some awful design features.
I took a little longer than the rest of the table to make a character, as everyone else had a tablet, with a program.
Issue 1: When humans resort to software to make your ‘pen and paper’ RPG characters, something has gone terribly wrong.
I noticed that the Sorcerer and Paladin classes both relied on high Charisma, so I went for a multiclass ‘sorcerer/ paladin’ elf.
I thought it’d make for some nice ’elvish flavour’ on top of the paladin class; the pious warrior who also heals, and does elf-magic.
I grew up with people questioning whether you can be a real artist and still use Ctrl+z.
Before that, people probably wondered if digital photography was ‘real photography’.
My generation feels deep suspicion towards any kind of ’not-real-art’ arguments.
Now Chatbot9000 has flooded the web with saccharine kittens and uncanny valley boobs, and they’re clearly ’not actually art’, but it’s hard to say why.
So here is why I say these images are not real art.
They are not designed, nor planned, and cannot represent anything.
The Blade films portrayed a vampire language, which makes no sense.
Why spend another night with some bald twat memorizing cases when you could be in a club getting your teeth wet?
Why would vampires develop and sustain a vampire language when they could speak Wallachian?
Vampire: the Masquerade made no direct use of any vampire languages.
Without Wallachian, the reader had to assume that elders spoke to each other in modern English, leaving them vulnerable to the nearest eavesdropper with Auspex.
I was chatting with a Turkish gent, and he told me about his time playing D&D as a kid.
And to prelude a short anecdote, I have to take my hat off to the bunch of young teenagers reading hundreds of pages of rules in a second language, translating character-sheets on-the-fly, and live-translating the rules for magical items whenever a question comes up.
The Turk played as a shit-stirrer.
He wound people up with awful characters, and enjoyed his characters’ various deaths, which were always self-inflicted and entirely deserved.
But he had limits, he informed me.
RPGs should have a ‘social stat’ to roll, not because you should always roll for social interactions, but because you sometimes must roll for social interactions.
I acknowledge all counterarguments:
This is a ROLE playing game.
It’s fun.
We need to know how that player bribes the guard - rolling dice does not provide a satisfying answer.
…et c.
Everything ever said on the subject is entirely correct;
HOWEVER
The players have just made a 5-point plan to infiltrate the castle. It’s devious and fun, and they’re on ‘point 3: looking presentable in front of the chef’s mother’.
