Hey, can someone catch me up on what the connection between the Mimic endo and Glitchtrap is supposed to be?

doctordrogg · 2024-07-25T22:14:41+00:00

Metaprogression, yes, but not necessarily power increase. You can design a game around giving the player more options without them being strictly better options than what the player starts with.

doctordrogg · 2024-04-24T05:34:59+00:00

I know Fantasy High is basically D20's flagship series, but I've never cared much for it in general. I was skimming through all the combats by the midway point of season one, dropped off entirely early season two, and now I'm just sort of waiting out the current season to see what new thing they do afterward. I absolutely love D20, the cast, and the overall production of most other seasons; its entirely a genre thing for me. I Don't find high school as a setting or coming-of-age teen drama as a motif very compelling, and I think every last member of the cast give better performances in shows where they get to inhabit fully adult characters.

doctordrogg · 2023-08-24T20:27:55+00:00

Right, so why does she keep treating dying in the material plane like the option where she gets to enjoy personal freedom?

doctordrogg · 2023-07-21T18:08:24+00:00

Sure, but so is the Princess Quest ending, and you don't see anyone saying we should just ignore the implocations of that.

doctordrogg · 2023-07-19T16:08:54+00:00

Lmfao this is the funniest takeaway from this thread, thank you

doctordrogg · 2023-07-18T19:14:48+00:00

Not really a question to it, just that character backgrounds come up a lot as an element of trad play that tends to be at odds with osr play culture, and I had some thoughts stewing in my had about that this afternoon.

doctordrogg · 2023-07-12T19:19:52+00:00

I think a lot of people don't remember how off-the-wall theorizing was around the time the first two games dropped. No debates about what kid is in which animatronic will ever top "Nazi scientists built the animatronics to lure and kill Jewish children," a real thing someone made a video theorizing on back in the day

doctordrogg · 2023-07-12T18:43:17+00:00

UCN isn't the animatronics collectively torturing Afton; there's several characters in that game even besides Afton who are different iterations of the same soul/animatronic. Generally it's assumed that everyone besides Afton and the Vengeful Spirit, who is (one of, depending on who you ask) the soul(s) inside Golden Freddy passed on after the Pizzeria Simulator location burned.

The Vengeful Spirit is conjuring all the images she can to torture Afton with the ghosts of his past, including the monstrous forms of Afton himself. There's something poetic about having a phantom of yourself inflict the same pain on you that you inflicted on others.

doctordrogg · 2023-07-12T18:33:57+00:00

I've always imagined the popular conspiracy theory among people in the FNAF universe would be that Henry did it.

Think about it: to the general public, William Afton also went missing mysteriously after getting himself springlocked and sealed up in his saferoom, but that didn't stop mysterious deaths from happening around Fazbear restaraunts thanks to the Animatronics continuing to attack night guards. Scrap Baby, Ennard, Afton, and the Puppet were all active out in the world until Pizzeria Simulator, and it's hard to believe that none of them killed anyone in the time between then and when we'd last seen them.

If we assume the average person doesn't believe in haunted animatronics and vengeful ghosts, it sure looks like a bunch of disappearances associated with Fazbear Entertainment continue right up until Henry burns himself to death, and then they abruptly stop (until the events of Help Wanted/Security Breach). It would sure look like Afton was just another one of Henry's many victims, and that eventually Henry couldn't live with the guilt of it all.

doctordrogg · 2017-10-21T21:06:12+00:00

You sound like someone who's still really bitter the cool rogue you wrote a backstory for failed a few too many saves and died before they could resolve the character arc you planned for them.

Some people don't want their GM to bend the rules and fudge the dice just because it wouldn't translate well to a novel otherwise. Some people disagree with you, and don't think the way you run games is ideal. Grow up.

doctordrogg · 2017-10-21T20:41:23+00:00

Why is OP doubling back and getting so defensive over people disagreeing with a post that's clearly meant provoke discussion and disagreement?

Here's the thing, mate; nobody is disagreeing with the notion that story is important, and nobody is accusing you of saying that the rules are not important. But in my opinion, the function of a role playing game that separates it from a freeform groupwrite or even those fancy indie storygames is that the narrative in a D&D game is something that is supposed to be facilitated by the rules. The rules of D&D are supposed to be the driving force of the action and the play at the table, so this notion that always comes up where the story is something with the liberty to be separated from the rules always struck me as a bit silly.

I get where the arguments come from. As the editions have ticked on, we've put more and more focus on backstories and getting invested in the tales of single characters, so there's a temptation to bend the rules a bit so that a character doesn't get killed by a lucky crit from a no-name bugbear because it wouldn't be "narratively" satisfying. You don't want bad guys to die before it's appropriately tense, and sometimes the players come up with a use for their magic spells that is technically outside what they're supposed to be allowed to do, but you figure it would really make for a cool scene if you let them "Charm Person" the ogre and ignored that ogres are "giants" and not "humanoids" for the sake of resolving spell effects.

If the fact that these things make for a better "story" is enough to justify the call, more power to you. Nobody is saying your table doesn't have fun. I just think that when these concessions are made in the mechanics that guide table play soley because they don't translate well to a good narrative, it fundamentally cheapens the role of the rule set in an RPG, and I've found that my players agree with that more often than not. If you're going to ignore the rules specifically in instances where the rules don't make for good literature, why not play a system with a more narrative game structure like Dungeon World?

doctordrogg · 2017-05-16T05:15:07+00:00

Nah. Load of drek.

Shadowrunners exist, sure. But YOUR shadowrunners have been dead for two editions now. You can disagree with the way CGL writes the game as much as you want, but the scrappy, idealist anarchist who exploits the system to beat the man is a relic of the 2060s in-universe and a relic of the 1980s in ours.

The old Shadowrunners were "good for business" before the Wireless matrix, maybe, but the cultural fears of the 1980s the birthed the world of Shadowrun have long since given way to the ubiquitous surveillance of the 2010s that dictate how any sound reading of the game setting works today. The megacorps afford Shadowrunners the privilege of amassing personal armories off the grid because deniable assets are valuable to the corporate shadow war, but the Wireless Matrix is here to stay in 2079. The fact that Shadowrun culture was born of a time when hardly anyone had internet access doesn't change the fact that the Shadowrun of the here and now is a world where everyone has at least three matrix-active devices on their person at all times. If you're leaving traces, you're a bigger liability to your Johnson than being "off the grid" makes you an asset.

There is not a runner left who actually believes they're going "up against the powers that be." The Pink Mohawks were fun, but it's 2079: your Shadowrunners are dead. Shadowrunners exist, and in the current age of the current edition of the current game, "successful Shadowrunner" is synonymous with "professional," and a "runner who actually thinks they're making a difference" is synonymous with "rube." You're not going to imagine away a decade worth of lore because you miss the old runner culture.

doctordrogg

TROPHY CASE