Legend: some dude's d20 clone

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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So. How's this game coming along? Good?

For comparison's sake, what's the best melee combat monster that people can come up that sacrifices only a little (or nothing) for more out-of-combat utility and maybe even summoning/minion leadership... to that of just some dude randomly grabbing tracks that seem good?

Mind, I've only skimmed the PDF. And I don't know how much and what has changed since this discussion topic's heyday.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by TarkisFlux »

They did another round of errata back in May, but they still don't have a monster book. The monster book still has no firm release date or even a preview. So while the basic document is probably tighter now (not that I've read it), you're still rolling all of your own opposition and encounter designs. I'd forgive you if that was a deal breaker.

None of their promised adventures or campaign settings have materialized, 2+ years after their funding targets were hit. Because unpaid volunteer writers and whatnot. (Protip: don't promise stretch goals that aren't basically completed already, especially if you're donating everything you take in to charity).

Their forum is slowing down substantially, as the old blood runs out of things to contribute and new blood slows to a trickle. It's almost like they failed to capitalize on their momentum with promised content or additional work or something.

The last news post on their site was 4 months ago, a basically empty stall where they talk about why they're not doing anything visible and how 'things take time'. The one before that was 6 months prior, when they finally got around to telling everyone outside of the kickstarter / irc that their lead designer had officially left the project. And that stupid post ended a weekly design / fluff blog that had some genuinely amusing ideas in it.

So I wouldn't say that it's coming along. I might put it up for "Heartbreaker of the Year 2012" though.
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Post by Blicero »

I skimmed through the new version when it came out. The main addition I noticed is that they finally have a masterlist of feats. Which is nice, but it's the sort of thing that should have existed years ago. Most of the changes since beta have been bugfixes and other things that are hard to notice. Lots of new things have been added, though.

Like TarkisFlux said, the developers have a number of outstanding promises that they have completely failed to fulfill: two adventures, two settings, one mini-setting, and an encounter generator. I also think that most backer rewards (like leatherbound rulebooks and shit) have not yet been handed out, but I could be mistaken there. And, of course, the fabled monster guide is completely MIA.

The forums are close to dead at this point. The IRC channel is still pretty active most days, but it can't provide the same sort of support that a forum does. What little activity there is tends to be rules clarifications and questions, as opposed to game discussions and other more interesting types of communication. The more unique and experimental parts of the rules (like the skill games and non-combat encounters) are almost never mentioned, which makes me suspect that few people actually use them.

I ran a 15-20 session long Legend campaign this year. It's not a bad system by any means. The main issue is probably the lack of a monster manual, or even sets of suggested encounters and the like. My Legend preptime consisted almost entirely of statting up opposition. You definitely get better at it, but it was still taking me 10-20 minutes to write up a single mildly optimized opponent, which is not great.

That being said, if you have a group of players who are okay with 4E-style adventures and an MC who's willing to write up all the bad guys, I would say that Legend is strictly superior to 4E while providing the same sort of experience. You can also run Pathfinder AP-style adventures no problem. That might sound like faint praise ("Legend: Better than 4E!"), but it's not necessarily meant to be.

From a more design-theoretic standpoint, there's a lot to be interested in with Legend. The class design and multiclassing paradigm remain quite well done. The game really does feel like someone read all of the TNE threads from way back when along with the CharOp advice of the day and used them as inspiration to create the best arena fight simulator ever. Unfortunately, RPGs usually consist of more than arena fights.
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Post by Ghremdal »

AFAIK, the writers were organizers of a arena play on the GitP forums a while back.
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Post by Blicero »

Ghremdal wrote:AFAIK, the writers were organizers of a arena play on the GitP forums a while back.
Yeah, Legend started out as the houserules for that whole Test of Spite thing.
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Post by Marisel »

We were playing a Legend game that recently trailed off due to scheduling issues. I'd estimate we were at around 15 sessions, we made it to level 9 or 10.

The biggest issue is that it just takes a LOT of time to write up opposition, and that it's hard to tell what's an "ok" thing to write as opposition versus what's "too easy", "too hard", etc.

Another problem we came across was that, with as easy as multiclassing is, and a fairly optimization-inclined table, everyone ended up at the same sets of tracks to do what they wanted to do. Want to melee? You're in some combination of Smiting, Path of Destruction, and Swashbuckler. Want to be good at *everything*? You're taking spellcasting. Etc.

That said, it wasn't a bad game. Just, if you're expecting more than an ok combat simulation you're going to be disappointed.
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Post by Kaelik »

Marisel wrote:That said, it wasn't a bad game. Just, if you're expecting more than an ok combat simulation you're going to be disappointed.
This. Legend just seems to be a slightly moderately interesting combat simulator. You can't do jack nor shit out of combat that is particularly meaningful because they got rid of as much of that stuff as they could because it ruins the railroad.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I think that they really fucked up by ruthlessly excising most of the non-combat stuff from the game. I know why they did it, it's because it's extremely hard to balance that crap when it comes out of the same pool as your battle options... but the smart thing to do would've been to just make non-combat items completely divorced from your item accumulation and just make a few completely non-combat tracks (and NOT tying them to class, that way lies hate and fail; do it like the Runesong and Elementalist bonus tracks) and give them their choice for free.

There's a limit as to how good this game can get thanks to some wonkiness from d20 inheritance and a few rather stupid design decisions -- like having the damage dice for your weapon be almost pointless after a certain point -- but it's almost embarrassing how many times they tripped over their own two feet on these issues.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Tue Jul 08, 2014 5:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Blicero »

Marisel wrote: ...and that it's hard to tell what's an "ok" thing to write as opposition versus what's "too easy", "too hard", etc.
In what sense do you mean that? We found that one level N character is roughly equivalent to almost any other level N character. Battles sometimes went poorly for the PCs, but when they did, it was almost always because of bad tactics or players forgetting how their characters worked.


Another issue is that combat gets really bookkeeping intensive starting at like level 5 or whatever. Just like 4E, there are a lot of 1-round buffs and debuffs that you can throw around during combat. And Legend makes the mistake of having some effects end at the beginning of your turn and some effects end at the end of your turn, which is frustrating.

The rules would almost work better as a small-scale wargame. There's very little in the game that incentivizes roleplaying or creative thinking. If someone made a low budget videogame version of Legend that was just multiplayer skirmishes, I would play the shit out of that.
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Post by Ice9 »

I guess Legend delivered what it promised, but that was pretty disappointing compared to what I expected. I actually thought it was going to be like a completed version of TNE - D&D revamped by people who actually understood the rules. Honed by their experience with the Test of Spite.

Instead it was - the Test of Spite, in full RPG form. That is, it didn't cover anything outside the battle. In fact, it seemed like it actively resisted anything that could allow you to bypass a battle. Which I guess makes sense, as a showcase for carefully crafted tactical challenges, but left me completely cold.

I realized I wasn't going to play it when I found myself skimming through the items, tossing them all aside in the search for something with a non-combat effect, and got really excited when I found something that made blockades and didn't specify they were temporary - so potentially, you could build crude structures with it! At the point that's the most exciting thing in the game, it's not for me.

Just as well, I suppose, as the continuing lack of a Monster Manual would have killed it for me. Frankly, I'm lazy / have better things to do, and hand-crafting more than a very small percentage of the foes in a crunchy game is unacceptable. Currently, that's a big hurdle in running anything (crunchy) besides Pathfinder - PF has the whole bestiary at my fingertips to search and copy/paste, other games don't.
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

On one hand, Legend tried very hard to stick to D&D so they would be recognizable for the Test of Spite (and so they could draw people who liked D&D 3e). On the other hand, they had a bunch of cool ideas and they tried to make those fit with the D&D 3e sacred cows.

I would be interested in seeing a community compendium of monsters. I mostly use mooks with a single track to avoid the manual labor, but I would be willing to make up some cool stuff if others would share.
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Post by Marisel »

Blicero wrote:
In what sense do you mean that? We found that one level N character is roughly equivalent to almost any other level N character. Battles sometimes went poorly for the PCs, but when they did, it was almost always because of bad tactics or players forgetting how their characters worked.
Well, we ran into issues with lack of useful CR guidelines for their monster templates. Elites/Adepts/Minibosses, Operatives, etc. Depending on which tracks you assign an enemy it can become very very difficult to run a reasonable encounter. If we're just running an encounter against N enemies of around party level where N is the number of people in the party, it works great, if those enemies are just one or two tracked. As soon as you step up number of tracks, or reduce enemy numbers (and thus increase level) things can become pretty wonky pretty fast. If you're looking at fighting one enemy who is, for example, and Operative Miniboss who is alone (let's say, a dragon, for example) and you want them to have a setup that's reasonably synergistic, you can run into trouble, especially if you're at a level where they'll gain important circles that your PCs don't have. It was very easy to end up with enemies that could push defenses above the PC's RNG, or that could produce enough area damage to drop the entire party within a round or two.

I guess at the end of the day, requiring a fairly careful hand in encounter design in addition to having to write it all ourselves was too much work.

Edit: Not to mention the, as you've pointed out, huge amount of bookkeeping necessary for certain tracks and abilities as levels increase. That became tedious.
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Post by Blicero »

Yeah, my bad. I didn't really use Mooks, so I forgot that the attempt made to fit them into the CR system was somewhere between "fuck" and "all".
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Post by Kaelik »

Blicero wrote:Yeah, my bad. I didn't really use Mooks, so I forgot that the attempt made to fit them into the CR system was somewhere between "fuck" and "all".
Not just mooks, literally anything other than N creatures or Party level is completely fuck all random.
Ice9 wrote:I guess Legend delivered what it promised, but that was pretty disappointing compared to what I expected. I actually thought it was going to be like a completed version of TNE - D&D revamped by people who actually understood the rules. Honed by their experience with the Test of Spite.

Instead it was - the Test of Spite, in full RPG form. That is, it didn't cover anything outside the battle. In fact, it seemed like it actively resisted anything that could allow you to bypass a battle. Which I guess makes sense, as a showcase for carefully crafted tactical challenges, but left me completely cold.
I do want to say, it's not just that they basically stripped all non combat effects from the game. They also stripped all kinds of combat effects that didn't fit within their extremely narrow bubble of what could exist. Like they got rid of every single spell that was ever on any list of good offensive spells unless it had the word cloud in it, and they also got rid of stinking cloud.
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

Too bad this game didn't turn out well. I think the charity drive was noble but it also didn't leave any cash leftover for actually developing the game.
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Post by Kaelik »

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:Too bad this game didn't turn out well. I think the charity drive was noble but it also didn't leave any cash leftover for actually developing the game.
It was already destined to be a shitty game no matter how much money. They were tremendously committed to making Final Fantasy Tactics the RPG. That is never going to be a good enough RPG for people to care.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

A couple of questions/observations.

For a level 10 character or so:

1.) If you're playing with a group that is willing to break the fourth wall to enforce what Full Buy-In is supposed to be like, is it really that better an option than just grabbing your magical item crap? A lot of the tracks, even the good ones, have crap at certain circles.

2.) If I wanted a slightly glass-cannon character that traded a little bit of utility for damage, how does someone with the Just Blade/Shaman Spellcasting/Elementalist (Fire, obv.) track sound? The plan I have is to create walls of fire with Mystic Focus and then knock my foe through and above said wall. The move action gets devoted to movement and, well, murder pinball from Mental Thrust when I don't have to move. I'm aware that you'll have to finagle an extra swift action or two from somewhere to make the combination really worth it -- which is why I'm heavily considering going full buy-in and starting out as either a Ranger or a Rogue. But then again, I suppose I could just go Ranger with Professional Soldier/Just Blade/Shaman Spellcasting and play murder pinball with traps. And then enjoy the full magic items.

3.) Any must-have feats, magical items, skills, whatever that you can see for this character or generically?

4.) Does and how do natural attacks stack with manufactured weapon attacks? I heard that they do now. And this is potentially insane.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Blicero »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: 1.) If you're playing with a group that is willing to break the fourth wall to enforce what Full Buy-In is supposed to be like, is it really that better an option than just grabbing your magical item crap? A lot of the tracks, even the good ones, have crap at certain circles.
There's not a definite answer as to whether FBI is worth it. It really depends on the build. Luckily, Legend characters tend not to suck unless you do really stupid things like not making your KDM or KOM your top scores.

edit:
Does and how do natural attacks stack with manufactured weapon attacks? I heard that they do now. And this is potentially insane.
Sort of? As far as I know, you can't use natural attacks and manufactured attacks to get extra attacks per round. But if you have an ability that gives your natural weapon some weapon properties, and you wield a manufactured weapon, you get the effect of the natural weapon's properties, so long as they don't specify "this weapon" or say that they only apply when that weapon is wielded. Ex: You could gain the bonus from Deft or Reach, but not from Brutal or Guardian.

Caveat: I don't have a specific citation for that, and I haven't looked at 1.1 very much. So it's possible that this has been changed.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Nevermind. I suddenly stopped caring. I just realized that in addition to all of that round-by-round shit that you need to track with tokens, damage calculations can reach into the hundreds per turn by character.

That's fucking ridiculous. There's not even any point in discussing the game if the interface calculations are that awful. It ruined 4E D&D and it ruined this game, too.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Okay. So, read through the document again except for the diplomacy rules and I have to say that except for the ridiculous amounts of round-by-round tracking they might have something here. For a d20 game there's a huge amount of discipline for the RNG and bonus action accumulation no matter what combinations you do things in. I'm not particularly a fan of the slice-and-dice multiclassing system and think that it'd fail once it got out in the wild, but they did a pretty good job of keeping even weird combinations viable. So here are my thoughts on the shortcomings of the project so far, as of version 1.1:

[*] The biggest thing the game needs right now is a campaign setting. The second biggest thing the game needs is a monster manual. Until it has those things it's just not worth discussing.

[*] Legend doesn't seem to want to do 3E D&D epic. Rather, it seems to want to do levels 4-8 of 3E D&D for 20 levels. This might just be because of the lack of noncombat stuff, but even the powers don't really digivolve to be anything more than stuff you wouldn't be surprised to see come from a CR 8 monster. That's fine in abstract, if pathetically unambitious, but being a d20 hack it should be upfront about it.

[*] There's not enough non-combat stuff. Legend feels a lot like 4E D&D in which everything revolves around the battlefield and little thought is given to things that exist off of it. To its credit, it's probably more because the game feels that the combat rules are the most important thing ever instead of wanting to keep everything at Conan level as there is some impressive stuff you can do with skills. Still, it's a pretty huge failing so far.

[*] There's way too much fiddly round-by-round tracking. They have a fear ladder (in which different fear conditions trigger at different fear scores instead of making panicked a straight consequence of being shaken while frightened), Imbalances and shit for Discipline of the Serpent, and oh my God the Mechanist Savant. I understand that they want to have different resource management schemes and that's fine, but there really needed to have some thought put into streamlining things.

[*] The damage roll is almost completely useless after around level 10. I'm not kidding. It's more pointless than the damage roll in Final Fantasy d20. Rolling 1d6+30 is ineffably lame. Declaring that people do a flat 60 damage is only a teensy bit less lame. They need to completely rethink their damage formulas.

[*] The game should either fix its Legendary Rules or not have them in the game at all. The higher-level stuff is clearly unsuited for PCs and they're all wildly unbalanced in effect. Right now it's just a Mary Sue mechanic.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Blicero »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I'm not particularly a fan of the slice-and-dice multiclassing system and think that it'd fail once it got out in the wild, but they did a pretty good job of keeping even weird combinations viable.
What do you mean by that? Arguably Legend's most impressive accomplishment is the fact that the slice-n-dice multiclass system doesn't fail in the vast majority of cases.
[*] The biggest thing the game needs right now is a campaign setting.
If you look far enough back in on the main website, they have some campaign briefs. Unfortunately, there's basically nothing about those briefs that makes them particularly suitable for use with Legend as compared to something else.
[*] Legend doesn't seem to want to do 3E D&D epic. Rather, it seems to want to do levels 4-8 of 3E D&D for 20 levels. This might just be because of the lack of noncombat stuff, but even the powers don't really digivolve to be anything more than stuff you wouldn't be surprised to see come from a CR 8 monster. That's fine in abstract, if pathetically unambitious, but being a d20 hack it should be upfront about it.
You're underselling the scope of the game by a few levels. Legend characters can eventually get shit like long-distance teleportation, legend lore, wind walking, etc. I would not be surprised to see that on a CR 11 or 12 creature, but probably not a CR 8 (demons excepted). Also, the d20 model breaks down around that level, as you know. Legend's goal was "fix 3E combat such that it works for levels 3-11". There is nothing pathetically ambitious about that goal. And arguably, they did that. It's also possible to have a game with the scope of "3E, levels 3-11" that also has extensive viable noncombat rules. 3E sort of did that, Legend did not.

tl;dr: you can have an interesting noncombat game even if you don't have the full 3E epic scope.
[*] The game should either fix its Legendary Rules or not have them in the game at all. The higher-level stuff is clearly unsuited for PCs and they're all wildly unbalanced in effect. Right now it's just a Mary Sue mechanic.
I don't see that at all. There are a couple of Legendary abilities that are not super PC-friendly (Puppetmaster is the obvious one), but most seem fairly usable. The balance of the abilities is kind of iffy, though. A lot of them seem dependent on MC-fiat for proper use. And the ones that aren't super fiat-y are as bookkeeping-heavy as the rest of the system.
Last edited by Blicero on Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Legend only manages to 'not fail' with its mix-n-match multi class system by having none of the classes do anything. You can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others (especially if you consider specific levels, because things don't come in evenly), but it's all 4rry bullshit and no one cares.

I honestly don't care what kind of damage or healing engine your character has. The game doesn't have a society, an economy, or a monster manual. Nothing you could do is capable of mattering.

And when the stakes are that low, your design can't really fail. But so fucking what?

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Post by Blicero »

FrankTrollman wrote:You can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others (especially if you consider specific levels, because things don't come in evenly).
Okay. Then do that.
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

Blicero wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:You can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others (especially if you consider specific levels, because things don't come in evenly).
Okay. Then do that.
How about this: what sounds like a cooler description of your character's capabilities?

"My dude does 20 DPR, and my buddy only does 19 DPR"

"I cast Fabricate and used the profits to enlist a thousand-strong army."
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Post by souran »

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:How about this: what sounds like a cooler description of your character's capabilities?

"My dude does 20 DPR, and my buddy only does 19 DPR"

"I cast Fabricate and used the profits to enlist a thousand-strong army."
The first one tells me that the game is probably all about system mastery and that I can win before I even sit down at the damn table. However, it is at least playable.

The second one screams abusive fucking trainwreck that should have been obviously disallowed. A player who says or does something like that is basically saying "I'm bored" or "I'm Moving" or "I hate you people" and "I am making this game end"
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