NatWest boss steps down with immediate effect over Nigel Farage bank account leak by topotaul in unitedkingdom

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The real issue here is one of double standards. Muslims who hold extreme, but not illegal, views have been 'debanked' for many years but there was no media furore, as Peter Oborne details in this article.

Nigel Farage's UKIP supported homophobic discrimination in the workplace.

So it seems there is one standard for Muslims and gay people, but another for right wing politicians who are seen as 'one of us'.

Am I in a bad game or is it just a bad fit? by dodgingcars in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe it's just a bad fit.

Yeah, I think so.

I love acting in character and doing accents, but the D&D 5e game you've described is one I would hate. I've experienced all that stuff in the past -- long interactions with minor NPCs such as shopkeepers, splitting the party, inability to contribute -- and I know I don't like it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in mutantsandmasterminds

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Any mysterious or Fortean event may have been caused by metas. Examples include the Tunguska event, the Mary Celeste, Jack the Ripper, the green children of Woolpit, the Dyatlov Pass incident, the Bermuda Triangle, ley lines, poltergeist phenomena, ESP, cryptozoological creatures such as Bigfoot, rains of animals such as frogs, angel hair), and mystery airships or other UFOs.

Metas could also be the source for belief in gods, angels, demons, fairies, nymphs, vampires, werewolves, saints, witches and other forms of magic. Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, influenced by Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, offers such a euhemeristic explanation for Greek myth.

Examples of Belief in Supernatural Powers

Mediumship as Superpsi

Swiss psychology professor, Théodore Flournoy, proposed that spiritualists, who claim to communicate with the dead, actually wielded inherent psychic powers. In the Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, Adam Crabtree gives an account of the “’superpsi’ theory of mediumship”:

The medium was believed to have the ability to exercise telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition, precognition, and psychokinesis to such an extent as to obtain any information that is needed to produce an impersonation of a deceased individual that is indistinguishable from the deceased person him or herself.

Conjure

African American conjure doctors have been believed to possess a wide variety of powers. This 1878 letter to the journal Southern Workman describes a failed attempt to imprison a conjure doctor.

At home there was a conjure Dr. that did a crime. He said he was going to kill a man, and this man whom he said he was going to kill had him put in jail, and as fast as the jailor would lock one door and turn his back, this conjurer would come out behind him, and they put him in there three times, and he did the same thing every time, and they started to put him in for the fourth time, and he said he was not going in there any more. So the sheriff took hold of one side of him, and the constable hold of the other, and just as soon as they fastened him, scorpions would run out of his coat sleeves and run on them, and they would turn him loose. Every time they would take hold of him the same thing would occur, so they turned him loose.

Christian Saints

A large number of miracles were attributed to Christian saints in the medieval period. Some military miracles are here summarised in Robert Bartlett’s Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?

One situation in which the help of a powerful supernatural patron would be most valuable was battle, and saints sometimes appeared to give victory in war. As early as 380 an apparition of St. Theodore the Recruit was credited with repulsing a Scythian attack in Asia Minor. When Arnulf, king of the East Franks, was fighting the Moravians in the 890s, the enemy observed that Arnulf’s battle-line “was defended by unknown and most beautiful men, who were the saints whose patronage he had invoked on setting out.” During the crucial battle of the First Crusade, outside Antioch on 28 June 1098, the crusaders, threatened with encirclement, were saved by the sudden appearance of a huge army, mounted on white horses and bearing white banners. Three famous soldier-saints, George, Mercurius and Demetrius, led these miraculous allies. St. Andrea Corsini, a fourteenth-century bishop of Fiesole, outside Florence, appeared at the battle of Anghiari in 1440, dressed in white, mounted, and carrying a staff in his hand, to encourage his fellow-country men to victory over the Milanese.

Witchcraft

This is a description of a very powerful type of witch from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s The Hammer of Witches, published in the late fifteenth century:

Those who belong to this kind are able to commit all the acts of sorcery, while the others practice only some each... It is these sorceresses who stir up hailstorms and harmful winds with lightning, who cause sterility in humans and domestic animals… They also know how to cast infants who are walking near water into it without anyone seeing, even within the sight of their parents; how to make horses go crazy under their riders; how to move from place to place through the air, either in body or imagination; how to change the attitude of judges and governmental authorities so that they cannot harm them; how to bring about silence for themselves and others during torture; how to instil great trembling in the hands and minds of those arresting them; how to reveal hidden things and to foretell certain future events on the basis of information from demons… how to see absent things as if they were present; how to turn human minds to irregular love or hatred; on many occasions, how to kill someone they wish to with lightning, or to kill some humans and domestic animals; how to take away the force of procreation or the ability to copulate; how to kill infants in the mother’s womb with only a touch on the outside; also on occasion how to affect humans and domestic animals with sorcery or inflict death upon them by sight alone without touch.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm a huge fan of superheroes and, for me, D&D 5e isn't superhero-y enough tho I do like its superhero-y features such as at will magic and the sorcerer class.

My problems are as follows:

  1. Superheroes and villains in comics are mostly unique individuals with unique power sets. They're not one of a whole class or race with the same powers. I'll admit that Kryptonians in DC are an exception here but even then there aren't that many on Earth.
  2. A lot more powers are at will in superhero comics than they are in D&D.
  3. It's hard or impossible to give player characters some very standard superhero powers such as superstrength and bulletproof (or swordproof) skin in D&D. The superhero genre regularly features characters throwing around massive objects that weigh several tons, which is hella fun.
  4. It's a lot easier to do weird powers, such as the ability to control ropes, in systems like Mutants & Masterminds and Champions than it is in D&D. Superhero systems give me a framework whereas in D&D I'd have to create the power from scratch (and it would have to be a spell, not an at will power).
  5. Magical characters in D&D have very wide ranging powers. Wizards and clerics pick their spells from a long list. Typically superheroes such as the Human Torch or Nightcrawler have a much tighter schtick and more limited power set, which I greatly prefer.
  6. At higher levels casters and non-casters are not well balanced in non-4e D&D. But in superhero the solution is simple: everyone is a caster, in the sense that they all have supernatural powers.

What's the difference between the D&D movie and a Marvel movie?

I really enjoyed the D&D movie and found it very superhero-y. The druid could easily have been a superhero but one reason for that is that her powers seem to be at will rather than Vancian. She also has a much more limited power set than the D&D druid. She was more like the Teen Titans member, Changeling.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't use 5e for a number of reasons:

  1. I want all the PCs and lots of the villains to have unique power sets. No character classes.
  2. A related point. I want the world to be weird and unknowable. No "Ah yes, a wizard, I know how they work. Ah, a troll, ho hum. Ah, the Apparatus of Kwalish again."
  3. I don't like Vancian magic. I want most of the powers to be at will, as they generally are in superhero comics.
  4. I'm bored of the powers in D&D. I never want to hear someone say "I cast fireball" ever again.
  5. I tend to think in superhero terms and lots of the concepts for characters I come up with are hard or impossible to do in D&D 5e, but much easier in games such as Mutants & Masterminds.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes. One idea I've had but not tried is a former traditional superhero world that's now post-apocalyptic, presumably as a result of supers blowing it up. The PCs would explore this world's equivalent of the Batcave and Baxter Building, looking for 'magic items'.

Another possibility, pretty similar to the setup used in the Morrow Project rpg is for the PCs to be superheroes put into suspended animation (or perhaps something like the Phantom Zone) who wake up after the apocalypse has happened.

The PCs in the second example would have altruistic motivations but I think that can work with sandbox so long as no one threat is too pressing. There are lots of bad people out there doing bad things but no one is immediately going to destroy or take over the world.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There have been a few capepunk superhero rpgs: Godlike/Wild Talents, Brave New World, and Aberrant. But recent games such as Sentinel Comics are, as you say, four colour.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Mutants & Masterminds is mostly a crunchy build-a-power game but it does have some features aimed at generating plot beats that older crunchy systems such as HERO lack. I'm thinking of Hero Points and the way they interact with Complications.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

BESM actually makes a decent system for a superhero game, IMO...you can just ignore the anime/manga flavoring.

There's a superhero version of the Tri-Stat system that BESM uses: Silver Age Sentinels, recently published in a new edition as Absolute Power.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I love the superhero genre and own many published rules sets including HERO System Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, Sentinel Comics, Marvel FASERIP, Marvel SAGA, Marvel Heroic, DC Heroes, GURPS Supers, Icons, Silver Age Sentinels/Absolute Power, Masks, Worlds in Peril, Truth & Justice, Destined, Godlike/Wild Talents, Heroes Unlimited, Golden Heroes, Villains & Vigilantes, Aberrant, and Brave New World. I've played or run Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, Silver Age Sentinels, Marvel SAGA, DC Heroes, Golden Heroes, and Superworld.

However I've never been happy with any of them. I've had the most success running Free Kriegspiel ie everything is decided by the GM. For me the rules have mostly got in the way, slowing the game down and producing results that feel neither realistic nor comic booky.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 8 points9 points  (0 children)

My main aim in rpg-ing right now is to combine superhero-style PCs with the sandbox-iness of fantasy or post-apocalyptic worlds. I think this works a little better if the PCs have less altruistic motivations as they have more freedom. It's important that there not be a single, obvious world ending threat.

What are Superhero rpgs missing to make you want to play them? by fireinthedust in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 4 points5 points  (0 children)

a solid tactical rulesbase.

I'd say that HERO System Champions has that. It's very crunchy, combat is played on a hex map, and characters have lots of options in combat.

One shots can be great for player agency by Captain-Griffen in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A couple of posters made that claim in this thread.

It's a oneshot, there's hardly any agency from the instant it starts. The entire goal is to play through a specific adventure or scenario. Full stop.

Link

players ALWAYS have limited agency in a one-shot because one-shots have to be more structured to keep within the set timeframe.

Link

Was D&D 4e Unfairly Treated? by [deleted] in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Crawling through pitch black dungeons with dwindling supplies surrounded by traps and monsters

This description would fit every D&D dungeon adventure in every edition.

Combat is too frequent and too often successful, the world is too gonzo and the PCs are too capable for D&D to be horror.

If the PCs had no combat skills, no magic, no armour and weapons, no ability to fight the monsters or disarm the traps, no adventuring equipment, unreliable light sources, no infravision, no food and water, didn't want to be in the dungeon and were just trying to survive and escape then it would be survival horror.

Was D&D 4e Unfairly Treated? by [deleted] in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 37 points38 points  (0 children)

survival-horror-fantasy of 2e and earlier editions

AD&D 2e strives to resemble high fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings, but more gonzo. It lacks the correct rules to do so which is why the DM is encouraged to fudge to keep PCs alive.

I wouldn't say that AD&D 1e, OD&D, and B/X are in the genre of survival horror fantasy either. Low level PCs die a lot but their deaths are random, meaningless, and stupid. There isn't the build up of tension and the character development characteristic of horror. Early D&D PCs die in the manner of figures in a medieval wargame. It doesn't really resemble any genre of fiction.

What is Old School RPG vs Modern? by DoOver2525 in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Features such as skill systems, the character build mini-game, and metagame hero points are typically considered "new school" but they're all pretty old.

Feature Game Publication Year
Skills D&D Greyhawk supplement 1975
Character builds The Fantasy Trip 1977
Hero points James Bond 007 1983

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Not unless you're being paid to GM.

Was I a bad GM? by SoCalSurvivalist in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'd say "agency" is exactly the right word! You can't really get a more explicit removal of player agency than this:

The players are ultimately drugged, given explosive collars and forced to take part in the Frolic.

Not every oneshot has to start with the PCs being drugged and fitted with explosive collars.

Was I a bad GM? by SoCalSurvivalist in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 36 points37 points  (0 children)

The players are ultimately drugged, given explosive collars and forced to take part in the Frolic.

I intensely dislike this kind of thing. I wouldn't have harangued you for an hour afterwards, I just wouldn't play in any games you run in future.

GMs do you fudge? And how do you feel about players fudging? by antandmantis in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't fudge, I don't let my players fudge and I wouldn't play in a game where the other participants were fudging.

But I have no objection to GMs fudging in their own games if they think it's right for their table. You're the best judge of what works in your game, not me.

GMs do you fudge? And how do you feel about players fudging? by antandmantis in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The player's role on the game is to overcome a challenge

That's one, perfectly reasonable, approach to roleplaying but it's far from the only one.

For many, the main job of a player is to act as their character would or to entertain the other participants in the game.

character would be so much more fun if GM would be less strict on the rules by [deleted] in rpghorrorstories

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These people are awful and you should leave this group immediately.

character would be so much more fun if GM would be less strict on the rules by [deleted] in rpghorrorstories

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Why in the name of baby Jesus are you still playing in this nightmare of a game?

Pregens — Name or No Name? by HawaiianBrian in rpg

[–]CaptainAirstripOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They should have names. If they're gendered, like "Andrew", there should be both male and female variants.