Irrational Hatreds in RPGs

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He Kender did....

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Excessive point-buy character generation. Buying stat points I can deal with. Buying skill ranks i'm ok with. Shit, buying the occasional 'feat' or 'talent' ok then. But balancing the points you've spent to painstakingly build a character that you want to play (a bit too much by the looks of things) with fucking advantages and disadvantages - NO. Ooh, if I buy colour-blind, I can get that thing that makes me ever so slightly better at that thing I wanted to be good at. If I read the entirety of the players handbook and all the point-buy options available, I might be able to squeeze out a tad more optimisation. Club foot for lip-reading! Annoying PvP hang-up that'll fuck up play for a monkey's tail so I can balance better!

grumble.

Fun fact: I have literally never completed character creation in any edition of Mutants & Masterminds. I just give up somewhere along the way, counting beans.

The books sure looked fun, though!
 
Fun fact: I have literally never completed character creation in any edition of Mutants & Masterminds. I just give up somewhere along the way, counting beans.

The books sure looked fun, though!

GURPS for me. What a balls-ache. I never want to see, let alone come into contact with Hero at any point.
 
I've always preferred the kind of disadvantage that doesn't give you more points but has a "you get a bennie" style thing whenever it affects you in play. That way they are self balancing rather than people trying to take being colorblind to buy a new combat feat.
 
The biggest flaw in doingvadvantages and disadvantages is that they mix role playing with mechanical. Why should Flashbacks, which has no mechanical disadvantage be used to fund an improved fireball spell that does?
 
The biggest flaw in doingvadvantages and disadvantages is that they mix role playing with mechanical. Why should Flashbacks, which has no mechanical disadvantage be used to fund an improved fireball spell that does?

Ugh, the amount of player characters in the 90s with "Dark Secret"...
 
Roll-under resolutions.
I, on the other hand, love roll-under. If it were up to me more games would use it.

Waterdeep has a population of 130,000. That is insanely huge.
It is insanely huge in a medieval European context. There have occasionally been preindustrial cities with larger populations than that, though.
 
Paris was the larg
I, on the other hand, love roll-under. If it were up to me more games would use it.


It is insanely huge in a medieval European context. There have occasionally been pre-industrial cities with larger populations than that, though.
Paris was the largest European Middle Ages city and it was (I think) 200-220k But it was also the perfect location for that being on a major trade route, a major river, and the heart of a rather large kingdom. It still had a rural to urban density of 6/94% so we are talking a support system of an entire kingdom a little smaller than HRE for one city.

The main difference here though is that we know that London and Paris and all those other cities had this infrastructure. On all Faerun maps, where that infrastructure should be is wilderness and orc dens. It simply does not exist in the Forgotten realms.
 
Paris was the larg

Paris was the largest European Middle Ages city and it was (I think) 200-220k But it was also the perfect location for that being on a major trade route, a major river, and the heart of a rather large kingdom. It still had a rural to urban density of 6/94% so we are talking a support system of an entire kingdom a little smaller than HRE for one city.

The main difference here though is that we know that London and Paris and all those other cities had this infrastructure. On all Faerun maps, where that infrastructure should be is wilderness and orc dens. It simply does not exist in the Forgotten realms.
I was talking outside of Europe, but the same probably goes for those situations as well. Estimates of Teotihuacan's population at its peak, around 450AD, range from 125,000 to 200,000, covering an area of 30 km².
 
Fun fact: I have literally never completed character creation in any edition of Mutants & Masterminds. I just give up somewhere along the way, counting beans.

The books sure looked fun, though!
I'll bet you could find a nice youngster to help you out with that. Not all kids these days are rap singers or dope sniffers.
 
I was talking outside of Europe, but the same probably goes for those situations as well. Estimates of Teotihuacan's population at its peak, around 450AD, range from 125,000 to 200,000, covering an area of 30 km².
Yep. That city was odd though. Much of it was farm built on water. I read it had a much higher city to rural ratio than normal.
 
Yep. That city was odd though. Much of it was farm built on water. I read it had a much higher city to rural ratio than normal.
Conditions were extremely favourable. It also may well have held important religious symbolic significance from the beginning. It's really remarkable, especially since all travel and transport would've been on foot without any draft or riding animals present, to see the enormous sphere of influence it had. It was a true multicultural metropolis.

Anyway, something like that could "realistically" exist in a fantasy setting, but not in something resembling medieval Europe.
 
I always wonder who manufactures all those identical Chinese Zodiac placemats.
In the mid 90's I used to live on Capitol Hill in Seattle. After a night of drinking my buddies and I stopped at the local all night burger place. After a few bites my inebriated friends yelled out "I love Dicks!"

Capital Hill has Seattle's largest population of LGTBQ residents.

He got a lot of smiles and a few offers.
 
Conditions were extremely favourable. It also may well have held important religious symbolic significance from the beginning. It's really remarkable, especially since all travel and transport would've been on foot without any draft or riding animals present, to see the enormous sphere of influence it had. It was a true multicultural metropolis.

Anyway, something like that could "realistically" exist in a fantasy setting, but not in something resembling medieval Europe.
Indeed. Im curious about how many settlements supported it. I think it was also one of 3 large cities in thr region.
 
Critical fumble tables. Perhaps they can be used for good, but in my experience they’ve always been used in the name of passive-aggressive douchebaggery by mongoloid neckbeards.

I was trying to think of something for this thread and was blanking but you've nailed it for me, I don't think I've seen a critical fumble table that didn't make me roll my eyes.
 
So what are your irrational hatreds in RPGs?
Hatred is far too strong a word for anything as trivial as a roleplaying game. Irrational strong dislike, however?

Savage Worlds.

I can't. I just can't.

And high speed communication in the form of telegraphs.
For a bunch of cowhands, Pinkertons and bounty hunters, we sure used the telegraph a heckuva lot in our Boot Hill campaign, to an anachronistic improbability.

We could only shed our 21st century personas so much, I suppose. :errr:


That reminds me, I need to start a thread about oracular random content generation.So much to do, so little time.
 
Furries. Albedo aside, any game that features "furry" stuff is a hard pass. It's literally the only reason I refuse to even look at the newest Gamma World.
 
What is considered furry in this case? Does the vargr from traveler or the aarokockra count?


No, but I will admit they are close enough for slight discomfort.

I'm not sure I could define the "icky" kind of furry stuff, except by the conveniently vague definition of, "I know it when I see it"... I figure that's irrational enough.
 
Furries. Albedo aside, any game that features "furry" stuff is a hard pass. It's literally the only reason I refuse to even look at the newest Gamma World.
How do you feel about Justifiers?
 
No, but I will admit they are close enough for slight discomfort.
Ive wondered that for my own setting. Ive pulled from Earth mythology and use a varuant if the inuit Adlet and Japanese tengu, but am also anti furry for the most part.
 
For a bunch of cowhands, Pinkertons and bounty hunters, we sure used the telegraph a heckuva lot in our Boot Hill campaign, to an anachronistic improbability.

We could only shed our 21st century personas so much, I suppose. :errr:
Fun trick: set the game where there is no telegraph yet. :gunslinger:
 
Have you ever checked out Tekumel?
No. It's like Glorantha to me: I feel if I'm going to invest time learning mythology, I'd rather study a real one. I could be wrong, though, as I've never seen a useful/accessible Tékumel primer.
 
No. It's like Glorantha to me: I feel if I'm going to invest time learning mythology, I'd rather study a real one. I could be wrong, though, as I've never seen a useful/accessible Tékumel primer.

Yeah, that sounds right. It's a fascinating and detailed world, but it seems like a lotta homework. I prefer to get the bullet points of a setting and run with it.
 
Excessive point-buy character generation. Buying stat points I can deal with. Buying skill ranks i'm ok with. Shit, buying the occasional 'feat' or 'talent' ok then. But balancing the points you've spent to painstakingly build a character that you want to play (a bit too much by the looks of things) with fucking advantages and disadvantages - NO. Ooh, if I buy colour-blind, I can get that thing that makes me ever so slightly better at that thing I wanted to be good at. If I read the entirety of the players handbook and all the point-buy options available, I might be able to squeeze out a tad more optimisation. Club foot for lip-reading! Annoying PvP hang-up that'll fuck up play for a monkey's tail so I can balance better!

grumble.
Oh god this. Even games that aren’t point buy except for the Ads/Disads piss me off. The KodT strip where Bob takes One-Legged and Trick Knee on the same leg to double dip on points sums it up nicely.
 
Tieflings, warforged, Genasi...pretty much anything not big standard fantasy. But mainly the first one. Devil people? Why? ,
All the half-freak classes can die in a fire (or whatever else can kill them).
 
Indeed. Im curious about how many settlements supported it. I think it was also one of 3 large cities in thr region.
Well, I know it competed with Cuicuilco and Copilco in its early days. The circular pyramid of Cuicuilco can be seen in Tlalpan in present-day Mexico City. The already declining Cuicuilco and Copilco were destroyed by an eruption of the volcano Xitle, whose lava is still covering the pedregal in the Valle de México. After that Teotihuacan seized power of the whole region and started to expand more.

1ef908cc4d1edeba09fb406b49481a1c.png
Cuicuilco
 
These days I tend to skip over games that feature the "Tolkien standard" races: elves, dwarves, orcs, and halflings. I'm really tired of them, and have been for some time, even if they are "not your standard elves." I will still play D&D and OSR retroclones and such, but getting me interested in a new game or setting that features those species is a pretty hard sell.
 
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