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Ginthaeriel

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Everything posted by Ginthaeriel

  1. Here's what I would like: A bunch of D&D players decide to create their own setting. The very first campaign, it's early in the setting, there are no gods, no religions, no real civilization. Survivalistic dark ages. This is really easy since all you really need to know are the climates, geography and races. The first characters the players roll will be extremely powerful- legends of old, true history makers. As they play, they each elaborate on different facets of the growth of civilization- as world rulers they can order their people to do certain things like invent technology, discover magic or fight wars, and that will carve the very sociopolitical and technological/magical levels. The players will then go and do totally insanely powerful things, and they ascend and become Gods and then you set up the whole theistic system of the setting. Each player will contribute what they think is a really cool setting into this setting, and as such the setting will be tailored to their preferences. Then they create a SECOND batch of players, which are of average power, and play the game normally. No need to buy the FRCS, just the core rulebooks, and you get much more playtime and enjoyability from the fact that you feel like you're living in a world that you created. Best of all, it doesn't take much hassle- you create the very world as you play. At least, the first time around. The dungeon master doesn't have to spend weeks on end coming up with every facet of the world history- these things are just set up naturally AS the characters play- and that way there will be no argument about whether a certain event or certain war or whatever sounds stupid or unrealistic or what race sounds dumb, since the base of the world sprang from what actually happened during playtime. Also, this way, the deities won't seem so distant and it will be easier to roleplay. Think about it- it's pretty hard to really get yourself into the mindset that you worship Boccob or Mystra. And this is probably where those anti-role playing Christian nuts get real leverage and real anger over. But wouldn't it be much more easy to relate to a deity that actually was... well... you? You've played in the very shoes of the God you worship, you know their desires and motivations, so the God doesn't seem like some unfeeling presence that gives you domain spells and are nothing but DM tools to keep you in line, it actually feels like a genuine deity that you can really understand. Then again, if you worship an incarnation of yourself, you'll, ironically, probably turn into a satanist. Actual, true LaVey-ist satanism isn't about worshipping the devil, but it's a philosophy that sees the self as the most important facet of one's existence in your personal universe, and that there is no actual supernatural forces- that religion is just a tool to turn individuals into mindless sheep and keep them from reaching their true potential and to give power to an elite few. This has nothing to do with morals, they say. The whole "satanist" motif is used out of irreverence to Christianity, the most powerful religion in the world, which the satanists oppose. If anything, they are more like sticking their tongue out at an organization whom they oppose ideologically, insteaad of any real desire to rip the spinal columns out of young boys and paint their blood in the shape of a pentagram. What? It's not like *I'm* a satanist or anything. I actually find their ideologies a little bit egocentric and misguided, although I do respect where they are coming from. But anyways. Back to the topic at hand.
  2. My friends all play WOW, so that's what I'm going to play. Having friends play the same game as you makes whatever game it is approximately 10,000% more fun. Of course, you don't have any friends do you, Visc, seeing as how you live in Iowa? ZING!!! Just kidding, sorry, I had to say that one. It was too good to hold in.
  3. No, It's just a reflection on how incredibly insane Japan can be sometimes, when you look at the fact that their equivalent of Stephen King writes about Hermaphrodites and Pedophiles. I'm just saying. Of course, Japan also gave us Tentacle Rape Hentai, so I suppose there really isn't any real doubts left about this issue.
  4. First of all, rules were made to be broken. I dislike the Paladin class, and I think it really should be a prestige class. Second of all, I'm not whining about the whole "restriction" thing. I don't like rollplaying, and I think the paladin is overpowered. But you're saying a particular type of character is restricting, and I disagree- I don't see any hindrance of being lawful good, especially when you're a paladin. So I think that the paladin is just munchkiny through-and-through. Which is why I prefer it be made into a prestige class. I mean, what if I wanted to play a lawful good mage? Should I automatically become more powerful and get some bonus spells because I'm lawful good? According to you, anything that's lawful good would get some sort of penalty, so wouldn't it be unfair if the paladin was a powerful class because of this? Won't that mean all the lawful good mages in the world are getting jipped? Now if the Paladin, on the other hand, got some sort of Code of Conduct that specifically forbade the paladin from doing certain things that would clearly put them at a disadvantage, then I'm okay with that. For example, let's say an honorable paladin refuses to ambush his enemies, and must face his enemies head on or else receive an XP penalty. Or maybe a protector paladin has sworn never to take a life again, and also cannot allow a life to be lost at the hands of another while he is present, Isaac Asimov style. Now that is a definite, tangible restriction. But that can apply for any alignment. Evil paladins may have a code where they cannot allow any of their enemies to flee them- they all must die. Or else, XP Penalty. In this way the code of conduct a paladin has is more in line with his Deity, and infact a DM may create a specific code of conduct with his player before the campaign begins. It's stupid to pigeonhole everything into Good and Evil, Black and White. See, now THAT is roleplaying.
  5. Frankly, I cannot believe that something like this is being discussed. WHO CARES?! IT'S A HORROR MOVIE SET IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN AND/OR AMERICA, MUST YOU TURN EVERYTHING INTO A ROLE PLAYING GAME?!?! Also, in the ringu book, Sadako (not Samara, which is a lame name) is actually a hermaphrodite girl who was born with little testicles, who had latent psionic powers, who had sex with a doctor with smallpox or something like that and contracted said disease, got thrown into the well out of self defense by said doctor when he discovered she had balls and she tried to kill him with her mind, used her psychic talents to molecularly reconstruct the smallpox virus so that it's much more deadly and can kill in seven days, and used her psychic talents to burn a psionic message into a videotape that will cause the human body to create this virus and therefore cause it to kill itself. Yeah. So if you see any "Psionic Hermaphrodites" in any of the Monster Manuals, then I guess there you go. By the way, the book never had any little girls crawling out of a TV. And the main character was a male journalist. Who had a crazy eccentric psychic professor friend. Who raped a girl when he was in high school. The guy who wrote Ringu is considered the Stephen King of Japan, btw.
  6. Wouldn't any "alignment" allow for roleplaying restrictions, then? I mean, that basically means a Chaotic Evil guy MUST always be bathat crazy, Chaotic Good people MUST resist "authority" and stick it up to the evil corporation MAN, True Neutral people MUST be totally balanced and reasonable and listen to both sides of the argument, Lawful Neutral people MUST not jaywalk, etc. etc. etc. So how is being "Lawful Good" a restriction on how powerful Paladins are? Are you going to force the paladins to go NWN style and refuse any form of monetary reward for their good deeds in return for extra EXP? ROFLMAO. This just goes to show how completely wtflame the alignment system is. Roleplaying should be completely defined by how the player plays his character, not through some ultra simplified symbolic morality system. I mean, what *is* good anyways? What if you were raised in a culture that believes that if you do not cannibalize your close friends, you are denying their souls to reincarnate as your children? Under that belief, not cannibalizing someone would be akin to denying them salvation and forcing them to live forever in the underworld as a damned soul, which could be seen as worse than murder. So is being a cannibal considered "good" or "evil" in that aspect?
  7. Perhaps "never" is too strong a word, but even then, all surprises will be situational and not in terms of a world setting. For example, seeing for the first time that a place like Sembia exists when you've been adventuring in the Silver Marches your whole campaign is an example of world setting based surprise. Obviously this won't happen if you have read the sourcebook. Situational surprise would be discovering that the king was actually a doppelganger in the service of your archenemy. And that doesn't really count, because in any good story, it's kind of a *necessity* for the DM to be able to come up with cool twists like that, at least for a good game. Hell, even that situational surprise can be ruined if the adventurers knew doppelgangers existed. People ought to invent their own monsters as well. Using Sourcebooks is restricting. They are a waste of money. If you must use a setting, at least use one where not *everything* is really known, so that at least you can allow for some improvisational flexibility for the DM.
  8. Did you just call people who prefered 3E carebears? Do you even know what that means? It means someone who is too afraid of getting ganked in PvP and therefore whines about it. Not someone who refuses to understand a ruleset system that is inflexible, allowed for very little character development unless with the use of some very niche and hard to find rules, with lots and lots of supplementary overhead rules added by tons of different people all working from different campaigns with different settings and different styles all throughout the years. I say good riddance to 2nd Edition. This is Pen and Paper roleplaying, not a freaking computer game with "carebears", what matters is the story, the character development and the freedom of creativity. Does anyone still play such a restricted class based system? In all honesty, I believe the best PnP systems are ones that don't have any classes at all and are totally skill based. That allows for total character freedom. As for the whole FR vs. GH debate: here's my suggestion. Make your own world! Surely you must have enough creativity to not require having someone construct a setting for a story for you to roleplay, right? Honestly, it just seems so much more rewarding if you have characters that adventure in a brand new world of their own, creating the setting as they go along, as if they were exploring it. If you set a PnP game in FR or GH, you could just read the sourcebook and then know everything there is about the setting. Boring. The DM can never surprise you this way. Plus, if you create your own setting, it's magic levels, realism levels and amount of drow (which is going to become an actual statistic in all PnP products eventually, since they permeate every facet of PnP so damn much) are all custom tailored to your tastes. Sourcebooks are a waste of money.
  9. Solution: Disallow anyone to take the Paladin class, and only allow them to use the Divine Champion Prestige Class or at least some sort of variant. This I believe is Sammael's house rule. After all, it doesn't make sense that only good Gods get holy knights. Don't talk about blackguards, because I think blackguards are lame. With the whole lawful good thing pitched out, you can now make a campaign based more on dogmatic religion and opposing ideologies instead of the whole good/evil/law/chaos thing. Moral ambiguity rocks!
  10. I wouldn't know about the BEST MMORPG because I refuse to pass that kind of judgment on something I've never played... But I can, without a doubt, state which is the WORST MMORPG. Yes, worse than Star Wars Galaxies. In fact, this game is probably the worst game in the entire history of the world. It's worse than State of Emergency. It's worse than Deer Hunter 10. FINAL FANTASY XI Final Fantasy XI is one of the most party-based MMORPGs in the market right now. Oh wait, scratch that, FFXI is one of the most party-INHIBITIVE MMORPGs in the market right now. For a game that forces you to work with other people in order to do *any* sort of progression, it sure does do a great job of making you want to kill said other people, curl up into a little ball and live the rest of your life as a hermit, isolated from the outside world, severed of all contact from the bad nasty wicked men. The game pigeonholes you into having at least one member of one single class, multiplied by four. You can predict at least half of the composition of 90% of all parties currently active in the game. WHM/BLM/RDM/PLD. This means that all of the other classes will probably spend a large majority (hours) of their game time doing nothing but sitting in town sending tells looking for groups. Hell, even the characters who are in the
  11. Shouldn't this be in the KOTOR: Suggestions forum? Or at least, KOTOR: General Discussion?
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