Looks like the Unusual Races chapter from RoW, but worse

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Judging__Eagle
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Looks like the Unusual Races chapter from RoW, but worse

Post by Judging__Eagle »

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Post by Koumei »

Even if it's amazingly well-made to the point of perfection, it's for 5E so would be perfect within the confines of 5E. Which means I'm not even willing to spend time looking through it, never mind three dollars.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The fact that they're 228 (or so) separate write-ups makes me feel like they're largely going to be garbage.

Using the "ROW: Unusual Races" method that Frank & Kieth wrote up isn't cut-and-dried; because while a lot of creatures in the monster manuals are pretty straightforward to turn into PCs with HD similar to their original CR; cases like the Pixie and "every single fucking Dragon" are not straightforward to resolve at all.

Truth be told, concerning Dragons; I didn't even bother adapting them for PC use. Instead I just copypasta'd the attribute scores of any dragon that was the same CR as the other PCs in the party, and decided that I'd use that method each time the Dragon changed in their CR. They'd be the "colour" of the dragon they wanted to be, and their breath weapon/special abilities would come online the same CR as their dragon type, but I basically gave up trying to reverse-engineer attribute modifiers, natural armour, etc. for each CR. I think I 'might' have given them Bard spellcasting progression with the sorcerer spell list; or just also made them sorcerers, but I can't recall the details of what I did to create the only dragon PC that I ran out of dozens of monster PCs that showed up in my [Tome] games.

By contrast, creatures that might seem harder to make usable for player use: e.g. Phasms, awakened animal/golem spellcasters, and oversized creatures, were orders of magnitude easier to adjudicate for player use than the amount of time I spent trying to make Dragons not a disaster for a player to use.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri Jan 05, 2018 5:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dogbert »

The fact that Mearls is still able to afford payola (on Kotaku and elsewhere), however, disproves my suspicion that the d&d division has no budget.
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Post by Mord »

A Kotaku writer not knowing what the fuck they're talking about? Shock.
This “Monstrous Races” mod is the sort of wonderful thing that, back in D&D days of yore, would exist as a titanic document in some far-flung basement, only to be enjoyed by a handful of players. We can at least thank the internet for giving us playable purple worms.
Let me fix that...
This “Monstrous Races” mod is the sort of wonderful thing that, back in D&D days of 2000-2010, would exist as an officially published volume produced by an actual paid staff of professionals at WotC, only to be enjoyed by tens of thousands of players. We can at least thank the internet for giving us shitty playable purple worms.
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Post by Username17 »

Dogbert wrote:The fact that Mearls is still able to afford payola (on Kotaku and elsewhere), however, disproves my suspicion that the d&d division has no budget.
I don't see any evidence that Mearls has paid anything to anybody.

Someone on Kotaku made a post "Someone made a weird homebrew thing for D&D." Specifically, Cecilia D'Anastasio made that post. And since she seems to write a lot of articles, I imagine that she has to dig pretty deep to get "topics" sometimes. She put up three articles so far today, which are titled "Amazon Kills Unpopular Anime Strike Service," "Smash's Beloved Feminist Icon Is Not Trolling, Mostly," and "There's A Website Dedicated To Stealing Furry Porn From Patreon Artists." Really, I did not make up any of those titles.

The item in question is a piece of homebrew that does a half-assed conversion of monsters out of the monster manual to 5e playable stats. But obviously it wasn't thought through very hard because the examples the article gives are just ways various monsters can't effectively adventure, not ways that they can. Anyway, it's up on the 5e half-assed pdf sales exchange, and someone at Kotaku wrote an article about that fact when she wasn't tracking down the mystery of where all the furry porn went.

-Username17[/spoiler]
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Post by icyshadowlord »

Aren't half-assed monster conversions kinda dime a dozen by this point though? Also, seeing those article titles makes me glad I have never dived into the madness of Kotaku.
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Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote:the mystery of where all the furry porn went.
Wasn't that an episode of Sherlock?
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Post by erik »

Koumei wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:the mystery of where all the furry porn went.
Wasn't that an episode of Sherlock?
If only that was a real replacement for any of season 4.
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Post by Dogbert »

FrankTrollman wrote:I don't see any evidence that Mearls has paid anything to anybody.
If the amount of articles Kotaku, Polygon, and similar channels have dedicated these two years to a game that is, for all practical purposes, abandonware, mixed with the alarming percentage of those "articles" that amount to infomercials is no proof enough to you, then I don't know what to tell you.
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Post by Chamomile »

5e is the current edition of D&D. Any geek news source is going to want to report on that regularly, regardless of the quality of the edition or whether or not they have any stake at all in the edition's success.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The really funny thing: the sheer dearth of official 5e content means that literally any remotely interesting fanbook can get articles written about it on a fairly popular website.

Even then, I don't follow the website regularly at all. I only came across the article due to it's being linked in an rpg FB group I follow.
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Post by Voss »

Dogbert wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:I don't see any evidence that Mearls has paid anything to anybody.
If the amount of articles Kotaku, Polygon, and similar channels have dedicated these two years to a game that is, for all practical purposes, abandonware, mixed with the alarming percentage of those "articles" that amount to infomercials is no proof enough to you, then I don't know what to tell you.
You're mistaking absolute desperation for constant content for WotC bothering to pay these idiots. These aren't inspired journalists with their fingers on the pulse of the geek community, they're shitposters who throw up absolute crap every few hours.* That they sometimes mention Dungeons and fucking Dragons is no surprise at all, just by sheer quantity of articles.

*seriously put either into google. Currently their 'top articles' are 8, 11 and 15 hours ago, and 9, 12 and 14 hours ago respectively. That might go down as we wander into the weekend, but I'm not totally certain of that. And that the current articles are still whining about shit like GTA Online, Fortnite, and Pokemon Go kinda points to sites that are out of touch and behind on things.
Last edited by Voss on Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Dogbert »

Hmmm I guess a little of column A, a little of column B (counting interviews).

It's sad, though, to find out I could lose even more respect for Kotaku and Polygon. Now I see them as the catfish of the net.
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Post by Username17 »

Yeah, the flow goes the other way. Kotaku, Polygon, and similar channels exist by spewing click bait out on a minute by minute update. They have constant tabletop role playing games content because they have constant everything content. Cecilia D'Anastasio's investigation into furry porn theft isn't even the only furry-related "news" that Kotaku released that day.

Judging Eagle has it exactly right:
JE wrote:The really funny thing: the sheer dearth of official 5e content means that literally any remotely interesting fanbook can get articles written about it on a fairly popular website.
This is it. Kotaku needs to talk about what is "going on" in the RPG scene every day because that is how their click bait model works. There is fucking nothing going on in the RPG scene. Dungeons and Dragons is effectively abandonware. Vampire: the Masquerade is literally abandonware. Writing articles about the homebrew projects of randos is all that's left.

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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The funnier thing about that observation:

I wouldn't even be able to make that assessment if The Gaming Den wasn't the web site with the most consistently accurate depictions of the what is actually going on in the RPG industry.

For being such an "outlier" site that "everyone ignores"; the RPG community at large; and RPG developers specifically are almost always doing worse by not regularly the reading what's posted here.

I'd likely never get the truth behind whatever is going on at WoTC, White Wolf, Paizo, Catalyst, Steve Jackson Games, or any of the other 'big' publishers from their "official" websites/forums/etc.; but on TGD it's the closest thing to being a fly on the wall for those places.

Of course, that also makes me lazy and stick to reading mostly TGD content, b/c reading the condensed content on TGD is easier than sifting through the dunes of RPG.net or ENworld for the spoor of facts that need to be tracked down, and then trying to divine what is actually going on from their entrails when said facts are vaguely defined.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Archmage Joda »

Dogbert wrote:Hmmm I guess a little of column A, a little of column B (counting interviews).

It's sad, though, to find out I could lose even more respect for Kotaku and Polygon. Now I see them as the catfish of the net.
Hey now, that's insulting. Catfish can at least be used for food, can't they?
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Post by Eikre »

FrankTrollman wrote:Someone on Kotaku made a post "Someone made a weird homebrew thing for D&D." Specifically, Cecilia D'Anastasio made that post. And since she seems to write a lot of articles, I imagine that she has to dig pretty deep to get "topics" sometimes. She put up three articles so far today, which are titled "Amazon Kills Unpopular Anime Strike Service," "Smash's Beloved Feminist Icon Is Not Trolling, Mostly," and "There's A Website Dedicated To Stealing Furry Porn From Patreon Artists." Really, I did not make up any of those titles.

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One time wrote five paragraphs of article for the sole purpose of block-quoting one of my shitposts. So I'm sure you'll agree, she's doing god's work.
This signature is here just so you don't otherwise mistake the last sentence of my post for one.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The final lesson in all of this: To best improve the rpg community; TGD posters should be shitposting on Stackexchange (and possible RPG.net &or ENworld) with better thought out questions & responses than those sites could ever devise on their own.

Also, Eikre, did you actually stick your head into the tub, or is it good fiction?

Nevermind:
You may be wondering, "Eikre. Did you seriously get up and run a bath just to have citational highground over the armchair theorists?" All I have to say for myself is that there is a distinct possibility that the sangria I drank in the course of the experiment was not exactly the first sip of the day.
This video in the comments is a pretty good example (aquarium mermaid w/ air hose, drinking from a bottle of what is likely coca-cola) of what Eikre attempted.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Mon Jan 08, 2018 3:29 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by nockermensch »

Eikre wrote:One time wrote five paragraphs of article for the sole purpose of block-quoting one of my shitposts. So I'm sure you'll agree, she's doing god's work.
The amount of bottom-scrapping needed to create content based on rpg stack exchange answers makes me rather angry there are no clickbait articles about The Den about yet. Come on, is it that hard? Something like Your Favorite Game Blows: 5 Merciless Takedowns of Old Beloved RPGs, or This Forum Told A Popular DM To Suck A Barrel Of Cocks. What Happens Next Is Unbelievable. I'd read, "Like" and "Retweet" these.
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Post by Dogbert »

nockermensch wrote:The amount of bottom-scrapping needed to create content based on rpg stack exchange answers makes me rather angry there are no clickbait articles about The Den about yet.
You know, I have a blog I never use, I should do exactly this.
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