SKR quotables

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:55 pm

We need a top 3 most important (for making things worse) game designers thread.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:45 pm

Chamomile wrote:We need a top 3 most important (for making things worse) game designers thread.

What a terrible suggestion.

That being said, my picks are Gygax, SKR and Mearls.

Gygax did most than anybody else to create and market the hobby but he also also set the RPG's evolution like 30 years back by being a huge jackass, writing the seminal books in a way that shat over player agency and set DMs in an adversarial role. We still didn't recovered from the damage he caused.

I have a personal hate hard-on against SKR because I'm from the "non-magical people should be awesome" school of thought, and he isn't. There's probably people who caused more damage to the hobby than him, but SKR personally considers "power attack" as being twice as good than "quicken spell", so he has to be on all "worse game designers, ever" lists I make.

Mearls has been captaining the D&D ship for some years now, and it's pretty clear he has no idea of what he's doing. Also, mother-fucking dwarf rappers.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:53 pm

nockermensch wrote:Also, mother-fucking dwarf rappers.

I'm sure I'll regret this, but what are you referring to?

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:57 pm

Antariuk wrote:
nockermensch wrote:Also, mother-fucking dwarf rappers.
I'm sure I'll regret this, but what are you referring to?

Please refer to my forum sig. That's an actual quote.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:11 pm

Antariuk wrote:
nockermensch wrote:Also, mother-fucking dwarf rappers.
I'm sure I'll regret this, but what are you referring to?

There is a YouTube video of a D&D Next Playtest session. That is the way Mearls describes the character he brings to the session. He was clearly amused by the concept - the reaction from the rest of the table seemed rather muted.

Honestly, the character concept doesn't bother me much - I can't imagine it being appropriate for any game that I'd want to play in, but I'm sure it's appropriate SOMEWHERE. And at least he's showing that Fighters can do something other than swing a sword! He's a non-bard performance artist - that's worth some (small) number of points.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:21 pm

I'm honestly not sure that I'd put Mearls in the bottom three. I mean, he and his 4.0 crew have managed to make a game that a lot of us really dislike. They've managed to repeatedly fail their skill challenge for "write a working set of skill challenge rules." They've managed to make Paizo the de facto standard bearer for "Dungeons and Dragons" despite the fact that Paizo can't even use the name. Still, the combat minigame part of 4th Edition is at least functional, even if I personally find it about as interesting as watching paint dry. And in the context of D&D that's probably the most important thing to have -- a workable combat minigame.

To me the worst game designers of all time are people like Raven McCracken, who wrote a game that is simultaneously stupid, broken, and incomprehensible. You can say 'yeah, but Mearls did much more damage to the D&D brand than McCracken ever did to anything', but I want you to try this thought experiment: put McCracken in Mearls' shoes over the course of his work on D&D. Do you think the results would be better?

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:25 pm

I knew I shouldn't have asked. I am so sorry. Thanks anyway.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:45 pm

Chamomile wrote:We need a top 3 most important (for making things worse) game designers thread.

Byron Hall, or whoever it was that designed fatal. Also Lorrain Williams, (does she count?)

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:03 pm

Yeah, it's a bit too early to declare Mike Mearls the worst game designer of all time. Even though 5E D&D is on track to go down in flames.

That said, there's a chance that it might not fail -- Pathfinder didn't, against all odds -- and it'll pull his ass out of the frying pan. If it does go down, though, he'll definitely be in the top three. Being at the helm for the last year and a half of an edition of the most famous TTRPG that failed, jerking off to dwarf rapper porn for another two years, then being at the helm for ANOTHER huge failure of the most famous TTRPG is a level of fail that exceeds that of McCracken or even Hall.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:12 pm

Chamomile's proposal is the "top 3 most important (for making things worse) game designers." Not "the worst game designers, ever".

This is why I ignored the likes of FATAL and Synnibarr: Writing a niche RPG that's so bad as to become legendary is small beans next to being on a position where you can actually influence the entire hobby and then doing it for the worse[/u]. SKR is a legendarily bad game designer, but even if I didn't have to include him in every negative designers list I write, he would still earn his place on this one because people take his word seriously.

I considered including Lorraine Williams, but she wasn't a designer.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Mon Feb 10, 2014 6:08 pm

Do you get extra credit the more successful a franchise you fuck up? If so, then some representative(s) of the successive teams of monkeys working on D&D since the release of 3.0 probably do have to go in the top three. Taking the dominant RPG on the market and making it place second-best to its own third-party publisher is pretty impressive.

Other candidates:

* Marc Miller: T4 was a pretty epic fail, and Traveller was arguably the most successful sci-fi RPG ever created.

* Justin Achilli: presided over the destruction of the original World of Darkness and the launch of the new World of Darkness.

* Kevin Siembieda.

CCarter · Post by **CCarter** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 3:32 am

I'd nominate David 'Zeb' Cook and Ron Edwards for the Hall of Horrors.

Zeb for 2nd Ed., with all the Oberoni, Stormwind and encouragement of GM story building, fudging and illusionism.

Ron Edwards in case his GNS stuff is responsible for 4E.

I'm up in the air on Gary... Its a mess but you gotta start somewhere.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 4:27 pm

Justin Alexander's rants to date combine with the pace he can crank out shovelware to make me speculate that he may yet earn himself a place here.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 7:42 pm

Wow, so SKR.

I want to quote something specific, but it just makes my brain hurt.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 8:44 pm

ishy wrote:Wow, so SKR.
I want to quote something specific, but it just makes my brain hurt.

There you go, quoting something actually reasonable the guy said. I must commit sudoku now that I find myself agreeing with SKR.

His general attitude is still bad, but Invisibility shouldn't be mind affecting.

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 8:46 pm

so skr

such game design

wow

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 8:59 pm

(e) A spell that caused 1 point of damage to all characters within 100 feet of me, no save.

Option (e) is a fairly reasonable attack spell. I'd probably put that at 2nd or 3rd level, possibly higher depending upon the rest of the spell's stats.

This bit is normal SKR though.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:04 pm

While there certainly could be a type of invisibility that is mind-affecting, as described in 3.x, it is clearly not. But I'm curious as to what initiated his rant. But should also be noted that in every single example he provided where he thinks 'mind-affecting' is too powerful is FUNCTIONALLY identical to 'invisibility bends light'.

The fact is that if it WERE mind-affecting, it would actually be a HUGE nerf to the spell. There are a bunch of creatures that are immune to mind-affecting spells and abilities. If invisiblity were mind-affecting, it would work LESS OFTEN, then if it works as described. His claim that making it mind-affecting simply makes it 'too powerful' doesn't mean much unless there were riders or other benefits to being able to affect the minds of anyone looking at you regardless of plane...

Compare, for instance, to non-detection. The specific way it works is undefined. Presumably, your magic has to locate the target and it makes you mostly invisible to 'magical sensors'. But functionally, it work identically if it just affected the mind of anyone looking for you and it made it hard for them to 'clearly visualize' you, or some-such.

So, while I agree that his interpretation is correct, I still don't see why it matters so much to him that he's considering suicide.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:13 pm

None of that made any sense. Invisibility being mind affecting or not has nothing to do with whether see invisible lets you see it. If invisibility erases you from the minds of other people, then it works like Shadowrun Invisibility or Vampire Obfuscation, which work fine. They are not the most powerful effects in the game, and things which specifically counteract them would still do that.

The way 3rd edition illusions work is actually very very weird. You actually are allowed a will save to disbelieve any Glamer you "interact with" and Invisibility is a fucking Glamer. Now it has some legacy bullshit about how if you "make an attack" the Invisibility effect drops automatically, but that's a whole separate can of worms and also does not negate the interaction-disbelief rules.

Invisibility is clumsy hodgepodge of mechanics from four or five editions of the game, gradually accreting like rings on a gnarled oak. Whether the top level currently is explained by editing your appearance out of peoples' perception like Dracula or making light pass through you like the Invisible Man is really not even secondary but like tertiary to concerns about how all the various bullshit legacy mechanics fit together. It really just sets the tone of stupid conversations I might be forced to have: if Invisibility is mind affecting I might be forced to discuss whether it allows me to sneak by Golems; while if Invisibility is transparency I might be forced to discuss whether Invisibility makes you blind by causing light to pass through your retina. These are stupid conversations and I don't want to have them.

Every point SKR made was retarded and the argument he was having was retarded. If you want to clean up Illusions, there's plenty of places to start. The entire thing about "interaction" and "disbelief" is a giant clusterfuck that makes no one happy. It's not even a rule because no two people play it the same way.

-Username17

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:18 pm

Clearly SKR thinks that what determines how powerful something is is based on who they effect, and not the actual effect.

Which is why he thinks one damage to everyone is a 3rd level spell, because it effects everyone.

But actually, the value of a spell is who it effects times the actual effect divided by the actions spent to cause the effects. So in fact, SKRs only point of judging a spell is only one third of the spell.

But more fundamentally, he seems to believe that who the target is defines who is effected, even though he specifically lays out an obvious counter example. Because if invisibility is hiding the light it still effects everyone that uses light to see.

So bending light it actually more powerful than no save mind magic because it effects more people, since more people use light to see than are subject to mind-affecting spells.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:22 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:Justin Alexander's rants to date combine with the pace he can crank out shovelware to make me speculate that he may yet earn himself a place here.

That seems perhaps a bit extreme. A lot of JA's actual design work has been kind of shitty, but his essays are often pretty insightful, particularly when they're about adventure design.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:29 pm

invisibility wrote:Items dropped or put down by an invisible creature become visible; items picked up disappear if tucked into the clothing or pouches worn by the creature. Light, however, never becomes invisible,
although a source of light can become so (thus, the effect is that of a light with no visible source)

So if you drop an item, pick it up, it is visible. If you put in your pocket, it is invisible. If you then take it out of your pocket it is still invisible.
And it doesn't make light invisible.

That is some real specific light bending.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Feb 13, 2014 4:17 am

tussock wrote: The Mary Rose wasn't even salvaged until 1982, and it's eventually shown that the big longbows were not accurate and had to be drawn by straitening your whole body with the bow hooked against the knee. Thus all the joint deformation in English bowmen, and most cultures not bothering. Light bows were used alongside them for rapid precision shooting.

I found some quotes that back it:

the Englishman did not keep his left hand steady, and draw his bow with his right; but keeping his right at rest upon the nerve, he pressed the whole weight of his body into the horns of his bow. Hence probably arose the phrase "bending the bow," and the French of "drawing" one.

-English Social History - A Survey of Six Centuries - Chaucer to Queen Victoria

[My yeoman father] taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow ... not to draw with strength of arms as divers other nations do

-W. Gilpin (1791) Forest Scenery

But do you know if there's any videos or illustrations showing the way English warbows were drawn?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 3:13 am

No, all I've seen is a bit of modern guesswork, working back from the skeletal deformation to show the bow locked open with the arms in place but pulled with some larger muscle group like the legs and core.

The key to the puzzle is likely that they couldn't train adults to do it at all, had to start as kids, so there's probably some normally small locking or balancing muscles that have to grow alongside the big ones or you injure yourself in the attempt. Modern people won't be able to recreate it easily, and it won't follow from basic theory. Maybe it breaks your wrist, or tears a shoulder muscle, or tears away spine or knee supports, or any number of things. Probably looks really awkward.

There's no contemporary teaching illustrations because bows are for poor people. Sucks to be them.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 5:02 am

I heard that one of the developers said that "interacting" with an illusion means either touching it or taking a standard action to specifically examine it.