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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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retail (15), gurps (15), cataclysm (15), get (15), own (15), been (15), around (15), want (15), playing (14), redbeard (14), still (14), any (14), how (14), while (14), charted (14), labels (13), comments (13), story (13), could (13), had (13), swtor (12), rpgs (12), day (12), over (12), facebook (12), blogthis (12), email (12), posted (12), now (12), our (12), expansion (12), original (12), only (12), who (12), being (12), bad (12), big (12), online (11), months (11), new (11), few (11), dragonflight (11), bit (11), same (11), way (11), where (11), without (11), power (11), gaming (10), wars (10), blizzard (10), players (10), make (10), here (10), person (10), why (10), thing (10), then (10), version (10), well (10), something (10), right (10), other (10), lot (10), doesn (10), those (10), its (10), setting (10), trader (10), team (10), weather (9), video (9), tbc (9), past (9), blog (9), free (9), era (9), show (9), com (9), hours (9), next (9), didn (9), systems (9), never (9), 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Text of the page (random words):
gs you d expect in an rpg while traveller is definitely a hard sf game don t mistake the game as being entirely centered around combat it s not traveller was designed from the beginning to handle a lot of campaigns and while the free form trader type of campaign is the most ubiquitous type of traveller campaign that doesn t mean that you spend all of your time examining spreadsheets and figuring out optimal profit margins as if you were playing a pencil and paper version of eve online heh if you really want to i guess both from imgflip com but campaigns aside let s talk about another elephant in the room advancement traveller may not be so unusual today but the concept of a game where there is little if any skill advancement once character creation is complete very much went against the grain back in the 1970s think about it this way what would wow be like if there were no levels or power ups or skill progression such as is currently found in the game if the point of the game wasn t to become powerful but the telling of the story and your character s progression through the story while you may potentially learn more skills and or spells attack moves etc and you might find better arms armor weapons the concept of raid bosses with explicit and or implicit affiliated gear checks would take on a different meaning if you were a crewmember on the firefly or the bebop your focus isn t on progression it s where your next meal is coming from if you were fezzik inigo or westley your character progression in the princess bride happened before the real story began when princess buttercup was captured the entire adventure didn t end with someone leveling up but rather their escape from prince humperdinck s clutches their adventures certainly didn t end there but they weren t running around looking for loot and better magic items to use my point is that the mindset we have with a lot of our rpgs is very much advancement loot oriented or maybe min max oriented and traveller is not built for that sure you might end up with a better ship than the beowulf class free trader hey that empress marava far trader would work but how you got that ship in place of your old one is worth an extended campaign all by itself in fact there s a starter adventure hook out there that is exactly this your crew purchased the rights to a starship that s sitting out in the wilderness having landed there a while back and the owner wasn t able to get back and take off it s all yours but it s out there somewhere surely that s not a big deal is it is it in the end traveller is one of those rpgs whose charted space setting is so amazingly deep that if the game mechanics don t suit you i could easily see traveller s charted space being used as the setting for another rpg such as fate or savage worlds still traveller itself has its share of devotees even today not too long ago my oldest was hanging with a couple of friends from her high school days the boyfriend of an acquaintance was there and talk eventually turned to rpgs oh i play this sci fi rpg that hardly anybody has ever heard of the boyfriend piped up but we like it oh my oldest replied you play traveller holy crap you ve heard of it yeah my dad has a lot of splatbooks for it score one for the sci fi devotees free trader beowulf come in free trader beowulf can you hear me come in free trader beowulf hang in there beowulf help is on the way from steve jackson games gurps traveller website before anybody asks yes he was one of the people from this story i still keep in touch with him even after he left our company and moved to houston to take a job with nasa yes he works at nasa as a third party programmer and presently is coding various systems for artemis the lucky dog it s morphed into the indycar series of today it s a very long story as to how cart led to a rival league the indycar racing league irl and how after several years one league folded and the resultant fallout created the indycar series gurps is one of many generic role playing systems out there but also one of the more complicated ones to set up it is so detailed that it is difficult to configure the way you like it but once you ve decided on a system and customized a set of abilities it is easy to implement that being said i frequently like to quip that gurps is a game where the system tends to get in the way of a good time the third imperium is the largest star empire in charted space and so you frequently see charted space and third imperium used interchangeably if you re like me and see a space game with a name like imperium in it and immediately think of evil galactic empire don t worry the third imperium is definitely not that the closest way i can describe the imperium and charted space in general is that it is the age of sail in space distances still have to be crossed for communication and while the jump drive does connect star systems it does take time for a starship to cross the vastness of space subspace communications ala star trek and star wars simply don t exist if you ignore the gurps stat blocks and or tweak them to your own version of traveller you re using the writeups for these gurps splatbooks are fantastic to mine for ideas and setting materials i think the only drawback now is that they might be hard to find in print not as hard to find as merp for example but definitely not something that ll just show up in the cheap bin in a random game store however steve jackson games has pdfs of the splatbooks for sale at their warehouse 23 website this is a pale echo of the same argument about realism by modifying a pc s character stats in ad d 1e due to aging or gender i understand the desire to make a pc realistic by modifying character stats if you want to play an aged cleric for instance but you don t need to modify stats for that any dm worth their salt would accommodate this without resorting to changing a character s stats at all same with playing a male vs female human pc just because the average male human is stronger than the average female human doesn t mean that female pcs should have a lower ceiling on their strength stat after all you re playing an outlier to the average human so artificial limitations to the stats for the sake of realism make no sense i know now that eve online isn t like that it just seems like it at times so that little quip here was to just tweak the eve fans out there after all we can t all be so lucky as to win a freighter in a game of sabacc and if you did can you imagine that the crew of said ship would be happy about that posted by redbeard at 2 55 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels comic memes rpg from the past traveller wednesday december 14 2022 are we not gods it s a problem that every rpg dm or developer has to grapple with eventually what do you do when the players in your campaign or game become too powerful i m not talking famous or powerful or admired but powerful as in demon lord slaying on home plane powerful or defeating death powerful or godslayer powerful or you get the idea that was a problem i grappled with back when i first played d d as my first characters to survive to l20 or higher were so powerful that i had to do something with them they steamrolled orcus and demogorgon for pete s sake and while that was also back in the days of dungeons containing rooms filled with five red dragons i at least understood enough that i ought to retire my characters so i rolled a die and adjusted my characters stats upward anointed them as gods and retired them having the original deities and demigods book by tsr around didn t exactly hurt in that regard but still what to do with overly powerful characters is a problem that people wrestle with all the time whether it be in a pencil and paper rpg campaign or a video game baldur s gate 2 confronts that problem in the course of the main storyline and without invoking spoilers let s say that i totally understand bioware s solution to the conundrum i d like to think that i could handle that situation as good as they did but i do realize that i never really had the chance that solitary situation in my youth was the only time i ve ever been a part of a campaign where my characters levels reached crazy powerful territory i mean the cleric in the recently concluded 20 year d d 3 0 campaign never reached above 9th level it was just the nature of that game to not progress fast and while that lack of progression didn t bother me the lack of progress on the overall story did none of the games i cited above had the baked in issues that are confronted by online games such as mmos however mmos especially those who have a progression based model will eventually confront the problem of the characters are too powerful and i don t mean too powerful for low level zones either because that s a separate although related issue this is more along the lines of when a main character in a novel becomes so powerful that they venture into mary sue marty stu territory such as pug and tomas in raymond e feist s first riftwar series or say the problems confronted by saitama the one punch man yeah pretty much from imgflip com part of the problem is the scale of the enemies a player faces because of the scaling up in power the enemies have to scale up as well so you may have started from humble beginnings but by the end you re hobnobbing with the rich and powerful every video game rpg ever from reddit do this a couple of times over the course of a few expansions and the next thing you know you re consorting with godlike beings here goes nothing eeep now this trajectory doesn t have to happen at least to at this much a degree as it has in some mmos but eventually all online rpgs that hang around long enough will hit this wall but is it a wall well once you get past a certain point the scope of the game changes you re no longer in kill small creatures questing scope but kill big ol demons territory or you progress beyond that into slay an old god territory the people you interact with in game changes either slowly or quickly depending on the game involved and you re far beyond those salad days of digging up turnips for a farmer in the shire he looked all round him and it was only then that he recognized the place as his own cell yes said he there s the stone i used to sit on there are the marks where my shoulders rubbed their shape on to the stone there s the stain left by the blood from my forehead the day i tried to batter my brains out against the wall oh and these numbers i remember from the count of monte cristo by alexandre dumas unabridged edition pp 1048 edmond dantes in the count of monte cristo d artagnan from the three musketeers is another comes into power and consequently the story changes around him the stakes are higher because the people edmond seeks revenge upon have maneuvered themselves into positions of power and prestige but they remained fundamentally the same lowborn conspirators who betrayed him all those years ago or in baldur s gate you re introduced to the big bad in game in the intro only you don t realize what the context is until you ve played the entirety of the game by the end of the game your position in life has changed but the big bad has not both however are works with a defined beginning middle and end mmos don t really have that luxury so the stakes constantly change with each expansion and the easy way out for mmos is to raise the stakes with each successive expansion unfortunately that can back developers into a corner content wise a legion thing i presume from know your meme that meme aside when you get successively more earth shaking and more powerful end bosses in each new expansion whose plots to do whatever are even more outlandish than the one before it you get past a breaking point lotro had it easy relatively speaking because that mmo followed the books right up until the end when the ringbearer completed his quest and sauron was destroyed now the mmo becomes what do we do next to top that and there s no easy answer but other mmos such as wow have a harder time of it when you have to raise the stakes with each successive expansion without falling into any one of the following traps i m not bad i m defending us from the next big bad meet the new big bad same as the old big bad bait with one plotline and switch to a repeat of an old plotline an i was good or at least neutral but now i m bad big bad changing the backstory to create a new big bad out of whole cloth plotline even if the plotline of an expansion covers one of these traps you can still find an mmo story expansion that doesn t necessarily have a corresponding escalation in power to match the players own arms race it s not a given by any stretch however it takes a rare mmo to avoid falling into the more bigger better more design more gear more shinies more powers more everything and then you wake up one day and wonder just how you started out as this and then you find yourself looking like this and this is before the current expac in wow classic and you are hanging around with people like this you bet your ass she s bowing or this i m running out of screen space how the hell do you describe this to people back home without them wondering what has become of you and what do you do when a suitably lofty opinion of yourself creeps into your psyche when beings of this amount of power and prestige call you friend and invite you to sit at the table it can t help but influence your opinions of yourself and just how far away from your beginnings you have come more indeed there s no easy answer to the power creep per se since to a lot of people there is no problem at all there s always another hill to climb another challenge to overcome but i guess getting on toward middle age has taught me a bit about that spiral how there always is an upper barrier on what can be achieved and eventually we all have to live with our limitations our regrets and our failures of course a game that provided such an outlook wouldn t have a lot of players because it s more fun to win than be reminded of our mortality dark souls notwithstanding even changing the overall trajectory of the power creep just a little bit whether it be by level squish or moving the focus away from a world shattering in game story can engender more than its share of angst think of dragonflight and how there were more than its share of detractors when the expac was announced i for one applauded the movement away from the world is ending vibe that tends to permeate the wow ecosystem but i wasn t so foolish as to think that wow was going to stop being on a gear treadmill once the dragonflight released that treadmill is still there and the surest sign that wow is still wow is that you get to help choose the next leader of the black dragonflight think about that for a moment why would the two rivals for leadership of the black dragonflight a flight in famous for their ...
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