Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

koz · Post by **koz** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:18 am

Tumbling Down wrote:
Mister_Sinister wrote:TumblingDown: That isn't a thing to be proud of. Seriously.
Well, I still think it keeps them above North Korea, no matter what anyone says.

That's rather reminiscent of Frank's criteria regarding being an author better than SKR. Just sayin'.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:03 pm

Damn it people, stop making me want to move to Australia.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu May 17, 2012 7:19 pm

Australia, where giant spiders eat even bigger snakes!
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/spid ... 6332961171

Coming to your backyard soon!

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri May 18, 2012 8:21 am

The conditions are fucking awful out there. The moisture level of the air is so low (and the heat is so high) that you instantly die if you try to breathe outside without a respirator kit. Also, the miners and their bosses are largely a bunch of fuckheads. There's a reason why they couldn't buy our support in not imposing a mining tax.

That said, if you move to a city in Australia you'll find the place much easier to live in than America, what with the health care and all that.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri May 18, 2012 1:44 pm

What part of the brain comes up with ideas? I want a smart-ass answer next time someone asks me where I get my inspiration from.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 18, 2012 1:59 pm

Koumei wrote:What part of the brain comes up with ideas? I want a smart-ass answer next time someone asks me where I get my inspiration from.

Frontal Lobe for the most part. Although ideas like "I am hungry" are generated elsewhere.

-Username17

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Fri May 18, 2012 2:33 pm

Frank, who is SKR?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 18, 2012 2:44 pm

sabs wrote:Frank, who is SKR?

Sean K Reynolds. He is a very bad author of D&D and d20 material. He is best known for having asked people to pay for his cat's vet bills in exchange for him writing feats for a semi-official web piece. But he also wrote some extremely unbalanced material, which for a while had Magic of Feyrun well acknowledged as the most broken book of 3e. He is apparently a personal friend of people like Monte Cook, which is why he was allowed to write the Mage rules for Monte Cook's World of Darkness, which are far and away the most insane part of that game.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat May 19, 2012 1:48 am

Who in your opinion are the three best writers for any edition of official D&D, World of Darkness, and Warhammer 40K?

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue May 22, 2012 2:31 pm

Writers is a tricky term. Do you mean creative people who can make an interesting setting or do you mean people who can make good/decent mechanics or do you mean those who can do both.

I'm not very familiar with WOD and 40k when it comes to who wrote the rules. But with D&D it's also hard. Monte is one of my favorite when it comes to putting out interesting settings or weird plot hooks. Aside from Ptolus and a few other stupid shit, most of the time he seems to be gold. His Planescape work, and his work on AU/AE was good. His mechanics are not great.

Mike Mearls (sacrilege, I know) is another good/decent but not great at coming up with good setting or fluff. Iron heroes was a horrible and complete clusterfuck. But the setting was pretty cool. I'm not familiar with his setting work on 4e so I can't talk about that. But the little bit of fluff that came up with D&D weabo handbook was also decent.

An old favorite at nice d&d work was Paul/Jenell Jaquays. She (she came out a year or so ago) did mostly Wizard magazine and some modules that were not official. But she did also do a little bit of fluff writing and awesome artwork for TSR. Jaquays is now involved in the video game industry.

---

The question of best mechanic writers in D&D is a hard one. I really do think that most of the mechanics for 2e/3e are variations of shit. You mine some gold and silver from that shit once in a while.

I'd still put out Monte's name for his work in original 3e. Again not very awe inspiring but it was decent.

Jason Carl also stands out for some of the work he did on "Sword and fist."

I'm sure I can come up with another kinda-good name but migraines make it hard to think.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue May 22, 2012 4:11 pm

WH40K?
Dan Abnett.
The Daniverse.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 24, 2012 6:20 am

Anyone know a good program to design gaming cards? It occurred to me that if I want to bring back hecatomb, I could totally just whip up a spiritual successor rather than bringing back a flawed palette swapped mtg clone.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 24, 2012 6:46 am

Prak_Anima wrote:Anyone know a good program to design gaming cards? It occurred to me that if I want to bring back hecatomb, I could totally just whip up a spiritual successor rather than bringing back a flawed palette swapped mtg clone.

Sorry man, if you want it to not look like a someone took an online M:tG cardgen program and typed new words into it, you're going to want to grab a copy of InDesign or something similar and graphic design up the cards yourself.

I mean, Strange Eons is pretty boss, and I've done some cool things with it, but ultimately the card design templates are between you and photoshop (or Gimp). Strange Eons just puts the text in the right place and generates printable pdfs of card sheets.

The card back and even the design of the card front is something you have to paint with some kind of paint program.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 24, 2012 6:59 am

Yeah, I was looking for something like InDesign or Illustrator, because I'm basically going to have to design the cards from the ground up. One of the unique things in Hecatomb that I want to keep was the ability to merge monsters together. Hecatomb did it with pentagonal plastic cards that had four clear edges, I thought about it, and figured I'd do it with just thicker cards and cut edges that fit together like puzzle pieces. The plastic looked pretty slick, but the cards were notorious for coming out of boosters cracked, printed off center so you couldn't use them, and lots of other problems.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu May 24, 2012 12:41 pm

So this one requires a bit of explanation and possibly deserves its own thread for that, but whatever.

I've been batting around a setting idea in my head, not sure what for (probably nothing, like most of the settings people daydream about). An advanced technological civilization has mostly been destroyed by some kind of magical catastrophe which has left the ruins of the massive urban sprawl that was once the heart of the civilization permanently corrupted, and the corruption is spread every year by the weird monster-things it spawns every year.

Just fighting these monster things causes you to slowly be corrupted into one of them, so the standard method of keeping the corruption at bay has basically been to offer up people as sacrifices, tossing them out into the world to fight the demons in exchange for great rewards in what are essentially extremely pleasant leper colonies set up so that those who fight the corruption can be offered some kind of incentive to actually do so without having to actually let them back into the population centers and spreading their own corruption around. Most of the sacrifices eventually go evil, either because their mind gets corrupted before their body, or because they've been given a raw deal so they decide to switch sides out of spite.

So the question I have is what kind of monsters might make up the corrupted ground troops? I know I want them to be some kind of unearthly perversion of natural life, but I'm leery about using Silent Hill-type shambling monsters with their nostrils tied to their kneecaps by invisible strings, both because those are really hard to design and because they're actually not all that threatening to a heavily armed warrior who's been doing this for, like, three years. That's not even orc vs. Aragorn levels of threat, that's slime vs. Cloud Strife levels of "argh, not these nuisances again" levels of threat.

Your standard modern rage virus type zombie fits the physical capabilities these things need to have, but fiction is saturated with them and I'm kind of sick of zombie apocalypses, and the spin of "with swords" just isn't enough to shake that up for me. Cthulhu monsters have a bit of a problem in that they're too capable. It sort of loses its punch when someone can chew through a half-dozen mi-go and a shoggoth with any kind of regularity. They also have the issue of it being really hard to make new ones, though they carry the advantage of being public domain, so if I ever decided to do something with this, I totally could just have deep ones in there.

What I really want here is a perfect fourth option that has all that advantages I'm looking for but none of the drawbacks, but in the likely event that no one has such a concept lying around waiting to be given out to the first stranger who asks for it on the internet, I'd settle for people just saying which of those three they find most appealing.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu May 24, 2012 12:58 pm

or because they've been given a raw deal so they decide to switch sides out of spite.

don't think they would logically give up and be transformed then, sounds more like they would start a third faction that wars on everyone.

But to your question about monsters, you can pretty much do anything. Other humans (from different area), demons, devils, robots, zombies(not just slow shambling ones but also other types), radioactive creatures, golems, psionics, ghosts anything.
Can you define the type of setting, atmosphere etc. that you want a bit more?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu May 24, 2012 2:18 pm

If you want to just run it, try mixing together Stargate d20 and Heroes of Horror.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu May 24, 2012 3:44 pm

Orcs. They are very classic hits in terms of corrupted purity and all that, but you can always throw some templates around.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Thu May 24, 2012 3:57 pm

Chamomile wrote: I've been batting around a setting idea in my head, not sure what for (probably nothing, like most of the settings people daydream about). An advanced technological civilization has mostly been destroyed by some kind of magical catastrophe which has left the ruins of the massive urban sprawl that was once the heart of the civilization permanently corrupted, and the corruption is spread every year by the weird monster-things it spawns every year.

So... pretty much Dragon Age?

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu May 24, 2012 4:38 pm

I never actually played that game. Is it that similar?

EDIT: Also, I've never tried the Stargate d20 system, any reason why you think it'd be good for running this setting?

EDIT 2: Also, orcs are right out. They're way too familiar, and I'm trying to set up at least some sense of background horror about how the defeat of civilization at the hands of the mysterious corruption is basically inevitable. Whether or not that ends up actually being true (I haven't decided, and if it ends up being a game I run, it'll probably be at least possible to get the Good+ ending where you actually win everything forever), I at least want to be able to convince people that it's true. Orcs are the minions of an evil overlord who is inevitably defeated, not a malevolent and ever-expanding force of nature.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri May 25, 2012 5:58 am

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
...and probably actionable (I don't know where you work, so I can't say for sure). My suspicion is that it's to cover for the actual reason, whatever that might be (Politics? Nepotism?).

Update for anyone paying attention:

Found out several things that are more than likely factors in the decision to demote me:

-A fellow employee with more seniority wanted my job. If they had told me that, "happy" would be a bad word but I would at least have not taken it personally.

-A former roommate who works there is the one starting the "Ted the Flayer is violent" rumor. Not surprising, I knew the guy was a snake already but I'm displeased that he did that.

-Another coworker got into an argument with me out of work and decided to scream (no exaggeration, I have witnessed said act) that I said that all women were liars and whores for a period of about two weeks. I called her a liar specifically, and accused no one of being a whore at all. A mutual friend said she was sexually abused. When I mentioned that I was also sexually abused and I don't act like that, I was told that it was "different" for men. I made the poor decision to not file a complaint then on the grounds that I assumed the screaming, swearing crazy lady in the break room wasn't someone with a lot of credibility. Now if I do it, it'll seem like retaliation. I had assumed that Management would interpret her as being batshit insane, but it seems I underestimated the sheer stupidity of management in this case.

-Ethics. As in, I won't go against them to increase sales. Electronics is a low-profit area, I get that. I get that I need to push add-on sales. I do in fact suggest people buy extra controllers, games, HDMI cables or other things I think they'll have use for. I will NOT sell the extended warranty that's worded in a way to prevent anyone ever getting anything for, I will NOT offer them a store credit card where the interest rates might as well say "Sandpaper nostril rape", I will NOT lie and say the Monster HDMI cables are in any way better than the cheap $10 cables if asked. Sure if someone requests an extended warranty or asks to apply for a store card, no problem. I do that. I won't go out of my way to sell more.

The whole point is moot anyhow. After pulling some strings and checking with some old contacts, I have a really good opportunity lined up for September. All I have to do is wait it out for the summer, and move halfway across the country. If I get to be as far away from these treacherous rat-bastards as possible, I'm calling it 100% positive. All I have to my name is a computer, an Xbox and some games, and my cat. I'm thinking of showing up on my last day of work drunk and wearing the uniform of a competitor.

Now, to get by this month. Thanks to a combo of the demotion and radically cut hours, I'm going to need to really work to make rent.

Here's a question: Can I borrow $50 from someone? Barring that, how can a young, healthy man make a quick $50 legally? I can't sell my plasma, I have lithium-based meds in my system and they won't buy it. I have a wii, but I'm not sure who would buy it for that much...

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri May 25, 2012 7:28 am

If I were you, I'd still make the complaint, even if only to distance yourself from her a bit more.

I don't have a US backaccount, only a European one with Euros, so you might have some conversion problems, but I can borrow you $50 if I can transfer it.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Fri May 25, 2012 7:44 am

Hmm. Would paypal work, or should western union be used instead?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri May 25, 2012 10:10 am

Ted, on your last day, I would say just show up in a bathrobe and wrinkled lounge-y, don't give a shit clothes, with your cat, and sunglasses.

Hell, I didn't intend it, but I'll just say it, The Dude+cat.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Fri May 25, 2012 1:27 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:Ted, on your last day, I would say just show up in a bathrobe and wrinkled lounge-y, don't give a shit clothes, with your cat, and sunglasses.

Hell, I didn't intend it, but I'll just say it, The Dude+cat.

Getting the sunglasses to stay on the cat might be a challenge though.

EDIT: I actually didn't expect to offer to lend me $50, lol. But seriously, a cousin has expressed interest in buying my Wii. I hadn't played the thing for nearly a year, and I'd rather sell something I don't use or need rather than borrow money from a stranger when I know I might not be able to pay it back for a very long time...