The Worst

As with everything else he does, only Spoony's old RPG stuff is really worth watching.
I genuinely think some of his old stories and insights were interesting. Now his head is so far up his ass that its impossible to think of him as anything but a wheezing retarded grognard disconnected from reality.

Dare I ask?

Yeah, he went way too far into grognard territory. My old DM damn near ruined the campaign by following his advice.

Which advice in particular?

He makes sock puppet accounts to try to discredit any other channel that talks about tabletop rpgs so people only watch him. He only ever made a few good videos, but I still think that one video sly flourish made years ago was still a better one.

Is that all?
I thought that was standard practice on youtube DESU, ejitjer directly or through legions of fans.

Slightly off topic, but are there channels you, or others, WOULD recommend?

Here's the right answer.

The stuff about dragons circle strafing and generally being terrifying. We were pretty high level, but we got utterly wrecked because the dragon killed our cleric and wizard first, then flew off to recuperate and came hunting for the rest of us one at a time. It wasn't all Spoony's fault, since our DM kept coming up with reasons why we couldn't hide (wide open plain), but it shows that it's only worth playing monsters 'realistically' if you let the players actually use the environment to their advantage. You either play a game of hack and slash combat, or you play monsters realistically. Not both.

Geek and Sundry.
I haven't watched any of their videos in a while, but apparently Critical Role is keeping that channel alive.

DESU this sounds more like a badly designed encounter or just a bad DM.

Playing monsters realistically makes masses of sense, but your DM should have given you more than a flat featureless plain.

I suppose you could argue that the logical end of playing monsters realistically is that monsters want to win. But any good GM knows to not do that. So, I think your GM just wasn't good.

The only thing I disagreed with in the Circle Strafe video was that Spoony then had the dragon hunt the players down all the way to town and have them all murdered in true GM fiat style. I think once the players realised the Dragon isn't going to land you need to give them a chance to safely retreat and even 'realistically' the dragon may not wish to pursue outside of its hunting area or close to the town with the legion of guards holes up in towers and on the walls with bows and ballistas.

So it seems your GM sadly just used it as an excuse to murder you all rather than as a way to encourage you to go about an encounter more intelligently and indeed use terrain which you should have been able to do. I mean if there's wheat anywhere in the open plaons , which in an agriculturual society ahould be everywhere that's tall enough for a man to hide in by standing let alone prone , or long grass , or whatever.

>I suppose you could argue that the logical end of playing monsters realistically is that monsters want to win. But any good GM knows to not do that.

I want new-school to go. If monsters are played realistically, then players need to work tactically to defeat them, rather than just rushing them like video game protagonists who know they're going to win.
A GM ought to establish things in the world that the players can reasonably beat and things they cannot. Then if the players figure out some way to beat the latter, the GM gets a pleasant surprise.

This guy gets it. Although I gotta say wheat is pretty flammable. (Tall green grass is not)

>had the dragon hunt the players down all the way to town and have them all murdered in true GM fiat style
Yeah, that is shit.

>New school
That advice comes from DMing advice older than either one of us. A DM that wants to win is fucking terrible.

Aye, yeah the dragon can start burning down the wheatfields, and presumambly some poor farmers, looking for the players but it would still with some luck give them opportunity/distraction to escape. This also gives players a consequence if they do escape, their actions caused a bunch of farmland to be destroyed of which the Lord who owns it will be very pissed.

OR the Dragon doesn't want to start burning down farms as it's too preoccupied with finding magic items/ finding a mate/ protecting its young to want to deal with the local Lord and his army deciding to go on a Dragon bashing adventure as now it does pose a threat to their lands and people ( and more importantly the peasants wont pay their taxes if the Lord isn't doing his job of actually protecting them that the tax supposedly pays for in the first placd.)

I guess the wider point is it isn't a video game and so things should react in a naturalistic way towards their motivations and most intelligent beings, even really powerful ones, wont suicidally pursue anything to the death unless they really need to.

This, fuck Wil the SJW and Felicia Day, you can tell she doesn't even care about the sjw shit, when she talks about sjw bullshit it sounds like reading off a script.
>The Professor
He seems like a nice guy, but the cuck supports those annoying loud mouth feminist podcasts that only want to bring feminism into mtg so they can make more pateron bucks.
>Spoony
Suicide when?

>Muh feminism
Keep your triggered bullshit out of gaming. I'm so fucking tired of both fucking sides.

>Keep your triggered bullshit out of gaming
That's exactly what he's saying. If no one opposes SJW entryism, then the SJWs will bring this triggered bullshit into gaming en masse, and you'll never hear the end of it.

I was disappointed by The Angry GM. I actually rather like his written articles , the whole 'angry' style is a little childish but for the most part he makes a huge amount of sense and designs some really interestiny and useful gsme structures to design around.

Then I watched one of The Angry GM unmasked youtube videos and in the first five seconds he made a child sex abuse joke and it didn't get any better from there.

This is also when I realised it's ironic that the people who are most interested in tabletop rpg games are also incredibly poor at face to face interpersonal social interactions of which the game depends upon to work properly. This is probably why Critical Role is popular and entertaning to watch despite from a game design perspective having the depth of a paddling pool as they're all beautiful actors used to improvising under the spotlight.

>implying the DM is the monsters and if the monsters win, then the DM wins too

No, seriously, new school, plz go.

Gotta fail forward bro. If the dragon eats you that's just an opprtunity to describe heroically bursting forth from its stomach and maybe rolling some dice or something else those nerds do.

Haha what
I feel the same about his articles but I've never heard of videos by him that sounds fucked

>If no one opposes
Oh Jesus, it's not a fucking conflict. Just ignore them. You aren't fighting a culture war.

>The DM ISNT the monsters
Wut?
And no, the goal of the DM isn't to win, its to run the game. Are you mental?

>Oh Jesus, it's not a fucking conflict.
>I'm so fucking tired of both fucking sides.

Important question on the dragon thing. Where the players not allowed to attempt to run away? Maybe hide in some basements/larders?

I'm all for haha smart monsters best run style encounters. But those kind of need to allow you to be able to run, so you can come back if you want to.

Either way avoid my table people, we play hellfrost. A setting I have the distinct feeling you'd hate, what with the sample encounter involving a dragon repeatedly flying up into low clouds and dropping a cart in the players general direction.

All of them. Anyone who enables or promotes e-celeb trash should do the world a favor and off themselves.

Sides don't imply a conflict, just two groups of retards arguing. Unless ypou want to be picky about the term conflict.

Failing forward is a great principle, though, and orthogonal to what I'm talking about. The idea that players should be able to win every encounter is a "new school" idea, meaning something from the second era of gaming. IE the 90s onward.
Failing forward just means that failure shouldn't stop the momentum of things in its tracks, it should lead to interesting shit happening, too. Not necessarily good for the party, either.

Nope, in an old school style, the GM is an impartial referee between the players and the world he's arranged. The DM isn't the monsters, but he should portray them as real and not interfere if the monsters are going to win an encounter. That's how players learn to play better, and more creatively, because they are not guaranteed that every encounter they meet will be appropriate for their level and fight "fair."

>Avoid your table
But that sounds great. I'm stealing it.

The issue isn't smart monsters. Its bad DMs abusing smart monsters to kill and beat players, not to entertain and challenge.

>Semantics
As above,
Entertain and Challenge =/= beat and Kill
>Impartiality
That we seem to agree on.

I don't think anybody could say exactly except for the people at the table. But in the anecdote Spoony gives about the Circle Strafing Dragon he says when the party does give up and run away to town he had then dragon chase them down and just kill them all. Whether that actually involved a series of attempted rolls to hide or run away or whatever isn't states but by the sounds of it, and Spoony's general style he just had them all killed 'rocks fall everyone dies' style by the dragon when the players decided to flee. Which is pretty shit, even if I do agree that the dragon shouldn't just land and let the hasted barbarian kill it with a Greataxe.

But there are clearly two sides in conflict here: you have the SJWs, who want to purify the hobby in their own image, and then you have the people who oppose them, who want to keep the hobby pure in their own image. The sides fight to push the other out. How is this not a conflict?

>You have the evil boogiemen
>Then you have, tjhe rest of us, right comrade?!

No. You have the fuckwits making drama and the other fuckwits making their own drama. Both sides act like persecuted victims. Both sides won't shut up about their perceived boogiemen, and both sides are fucking intolerable to the rest of us poor cunts caught in the middle of your fucking stupidity.

Yeah... just watch the videos.

Granted he's sadly not exactly in a minority when it comes to nerds making casual rape jokes. I think when you live in fantasy land you become very divorced from the reality of rape and sexual abuse and it becomes just another fantasy thing , unfortunately this one happens in the real world a lot.

Not to say that people shouldn't be free to make jokes but unless there's some actual wider artistic point they're usually terrible jokes played for quick shock laughs and the gaming table most of the time isn't exactly the place to tackle or broach the subject in the first place.

Alright fine, you seem alright. (Though I warn you, that dragon encounter is actually a tad bullshit, what with just how low those clouds were).

Yeah, if it's rocks falls, that's bad. Suppose it might also depend on just how vigorously the dragon pursued. Which depends on how smarty a dragon we're talking about (though it'd still be kind of bad to have the thing start to fell houses and spray fire into the ruins too.).

I've seen the bad end of that. Real table. Real people (mostly). One player didn't like rape being brought up (like REALLY didn't like it). Gm at the time literally just repeats the word for a minute or two until she leaves. He was then rather confused as to why she couldn't take a joke. It was a meh campaign. And due to different person, different (significantly worse) game, similar (probably) situation he was barred from ever stepping foot near the rpg club. Yay.

Well, if clouds are bullshit I can modify it to be a ravine. Plenty of chances to work with that.

I personally don't enjoy Hyper RPG, but I can see why people might enjoy it. The showrunner that used to work on Critical Role realized what a good idea it was, and tried to replicate it with three different shows.

The biggest mistake was not getting voice actors to play, and just regular joes. No one wants to watch that shit normally.

Your deliberately misrepresenting things because you can't bring yourself to admit that there is a conflict, even if it's one that nobody but those involved give a shit about. You've gotten as far as saying there are two sides and that they're both kicking up shit. Now all that's left is for you to acknowledge that they're kicking that shit towards the other side.

Well it's less clouds are bullshit, and more it could attack and be back up in them in the same turn. You see dragons generally have a flying pace of 24, and in the system (savage worlds) your attacks can be declared mid movement with no restriction.

So it's game plan if you go by the encounter fully is to duck out of the clouds. Murder a pc in hellfire (2d10 with a change to burn is pretty big in sw), and then whoops guess you're blind firing at me (-6 to hit, it can technically roll stealth to oppose the roll. Base number to hit a ranged attack is usually 4). Unless the players hold their actions and attempt to interrupt the dragon mid its turn and have to contest it's agility to successfully do so.

So yeah. Not a bad encounter, but you need to work with it a bit to avoid it becoming an unmitigated slaughter.

Your anecdote sounds disturbingly familiar...

Except I don't think our RPG club canned the cunt. That or we did, and he just used another room nearby. It was a while ago...

Fine, for the sake of semantics, it's a conflict.

But in terms of how much worth there is to it?
You cunts may as well be arguing if Goku would beat Superman and treating it as SUPER serious.

Calling it a conflict is inflating its importance. "Pointless internet slapfight" is more accurate. One side says "respect my stupid ideas" and the other says "I refuse to respect you and your stupid ideas" and the stakes are... basically nothing. It's a tempest in a teapot, with both sides trying to paint the other as some powerful world-shaping force when it's just stupid people being pissy at each other on the internet.

I watched a video where Patrick Rothfuss plays Project:Dark, because it's the last video footage I could find of anyone playing this game. Now YouTube thinks I'm obsessed with Patrick Rothfuss and recommends me nothing but Rothfuss videos.

That sounds like a bloody savage encounter, I like it. I can imagine that players need to adapt fast or die faster. I can't see it being quite as bad in D20 (its what my players want) with delayed actions.

>Fine, for the sake of semantics, it's a conflict.
That's all I was looking for.

But as I continued, and as this guy puts superbly, Your "conflict" is meaningless.
You just want to feel like its important.
It isn't.

>You have the fuckwits making drama and the other fuckwits making their own drama. Both sides act like persecuted victims.
This. So much this.

>Your "conflict"
I have no stake in the fight either way. I just don't like facts being misrepresented. A meaningless conflict is still conflict.

That's hilarious. Damn you, google bubble nonsense!

Also, come on, Will Hindmarch, finish Project Dark up already, we're dying here!

So you're just autistic then. Okay, carry on.

For someone with no stakes you seem really invested. But sure, I'll buy it.

Ah yes, technically correct. The best kind of correct.

Oh yes absolutely. My one change would be to throw in the dragon falling and landing prone if it was shaken (toughness in damage done, rather difficult for most pcs making ranged attacks this is especially true). Not entirely sure what the equivalent would be in d20. Probably just a damage threshold.

Gives the folks without a bow or magic a chance to contribute and a chance to keep it down.

That said I looked it up. It's a little less brutal than I originally thought, as the base encounter is set with a young dragon. Oh god though it's also under a light rain (this is a constantly almost under freezing setting, and that's a minor vision penalty, don't worry though the dragon's frost fire breath is still effective). Oh and half the map is ice.

Okay, but Superman would wreck Goku.

>Despite arguing about this for the last hour, I have no stake in the outcome. No, really.

I'll be running a low magic game and encouraging players to have as much ability as they can in both ranged and close combat.

I'll probably include the possibility for it to crash into the canyon walls on a critical hit. Or damage dealing double it's DR perhaps. But the chance of it crashing I like a lot.

>All dat terrain shit
That is harsh. Its also odd that I've decided in my mind to set it in almost opposite weather. Sand, dust, potential rock falls and everyone rolls reflex.

Silver Age Superman would, Golden Age Supes against pre-Saiyain saga Goku would be a more even fight. Of course the whole argument is silly since they'd end up being buddies anyway.

Rocks could work, but I like that dust. Who doesn't love sand in everyone's everything? The crashing is thematic especially if you also use a young dragon, maybe have it roll against the damage to recover and stay airborne?

(also weirder still I literally just unpacked my new Hellfrost a Land of Fire book. Which is literally brutal arabian nights the deserting).

>Of course the whole argument is silly since they'd end up being buddies anyway.
Disagreed. Goku would want to spar far too much which would really irritate Superman. Superman would TOLERATE Goku, but friends is pushing it.

Superman would also find Goku to not care enough about his surroundings or protecting others, thinking too much about fighting.

In the end I think if Goku was somehow put into a world with the justice league, I think Superman would convene with Batman for a way to take Goku down with minimum casualties or a simple way to restrain him.

Fact is at the end of the day, Goku is altruistic to an extent. But his real drive is to get stronger and fight stronger people. Superman, while I'm unsure on all his gajillions of incarnations, is far more of a hero of the people than Goku, both internally and externally.

I was picturing more western than Arabian, but the idea of Arabian nights also works nicely. Thanks for the inspiration user.

Glad to help. Though now see I'm just imagining deadlands now. Same fight except at least 1 player dies on round 1 because one of his magic items has begun spraying acid into his eyes. The martial artists has become a human drill to escape as gongs ring in the distance, and the 3rd player's bullet proof vest explodes upon failing to soak the breath attack.

Not DBZ Super Goku

Genuinely laughed at that.
I didn't need soda in my nose user, but that is precisely how it would go.

Spoony giving (extremely poor) "The only tabletop RPG I play is DnD, I treat every RPG I play like it"-tier advice or stories about how he threw an autistic shitfit is up there.

Another is Wil Wheaton's one but that's mainly because I dislike Wil.

But Tableflip is true terrible, even if you actual like the black hole of humour and chemistry that is Susy.
>What if we sat a bunch of people down to play a boardgame but cut out the vast majority of the board game so you can see how WHACKY we are?
What's worse is the parts that they show aren't even funny. It's mostly just screaming. What's the point of having a show dedicated to board games if you're going to make the games unfollowable due to editing?

>stories about how he threw an autistic shitfit
Sounds fun, got links?

It's just multiple stories of his that are meant to be "gotcha'!"s on his parts where he did something juvenile rather than leave a game he disliked. But if you want true Spoony autism you need only look here, friend:

youtube.com/watch?v=GJb7ed3ueLk

It is the culture war. Tabletop gaming is one of the few spaces that men could escape to and not have to deal with women. That was fine when there wasn't any money in it, now there is money in it thanks to TBBT and Marvel.

Ignoring them won't get rid of them, they will just make sure you can never find new players who want you to use their pronouns.

P.S. Here is the team behind Roll 20. and this is not the photo with the pink haired guy with a half shaven head.

See You fucking grognard, women in gaming isn't a fucking problem and nor is your pissant little online squabble.

Humour does not work if it isn't unexpected. Out society is so degenerate that to actually be shocking you need to hit something like rape or niggers.

Now GTFO. This is Veeky Forums, home of the rape joke.

>Tabletop gaming is one of the few spaces that men could escape to and not have to deal with women.
So, it's a safe space?

>Muh Safe Space will be invaderd by boogeymen
I hope this is a troll, because if not your lack of self awareness is fucking superb.

Women in gaming is a problem when there are no places for men to meet other men without women being around. Which is basically impossible these days.

Men need to figure out what it means to be a man without having to compete with each other. To compare experiences and bond together so they work better in aspects of life you need men to do. By removing all the male spaces you end up with Numales trying to redefine what it is to be a man because they never had a male space where men could help them understand the male perspective and how to live in a world that doesn't give a fuck about you.

>Muh safe space
>Muh masculinity is being attacked by cooties
Yeah, this is a troll.
Or else someone too profoundly stupid to bother my arse talking to.

>Women in gaming is a problem when there are no places for men to meet other men without women being around.

GAAAAAAAAAY.

Not an argument.

See
Literally so few male spaces left that it's assumed any man who wants to hang around other men must be gay. Which means men don't get to figure things out together. We have fatherless boys living in a feminist culture with no male role models of any kind. And you think I'm trolling for pointing out a huge problem in our system that is falling apart because of it.

This but it is also important to note that it's also best to have an opinion, which many people sharing this sentiment seem to forget. It's possible to be against one without taking a stupid fucking side and becoming just like them in levels of obnoxiousness. You can be against the Malifaux writers removing a reference to a female computer scientist because some cunt on the internet thought it sounded too much like a pornstar without pissing and moaning about brightly coloured hair and septum piercings.

How about you form your own group of men to play tabletop games with then, dummy. Nothing stopping you. Women aren't even the issue. Woman have been into this shit for years. Years. The issue is identity politics, which you're playing into with this retarded nonsense.

>Women in gaming is a problem when there are no places for men to meet other men without women being around
Why should there be?
>Men need to figure out what it means to be a man without having to compete with each other
Relying on other men to tell you what it means to be a man is pretty unmanly, wouldn't you say?

Yes yes, the evil ladies are ruining your secret clubhouse, look out for tthe SJW monsters under the bed. You sure are convincing.

>No male spaces left
>Women aren't the problem it's been this way for years.

10/10 fucktard. You proved my point. Men have no spaces left any more.

Why should people who have a unique experience in life not be allowed to discuss it? The people who are disposable? Yea, lets not let the guys who have to carry all the weight of society figure out how to handle that and instead isolate them, that'll end well. We'll call it the sexodus.

They will either completely drop out or start trying to act like women, both of which signals death for your society.

My favorite is how he got so annoyed that everybody didn't agree that rolling for stats was the only good way to make characters (and that anybody who wasn't doing that was having bad/wrong fun)

and then he spent an entire episode passive aggressively trying to explain his reasoning on a video with comments turned off.

>sexodus
You don't want to be taken seriously do you?

...

>Why should people who have a unique experience in life not be allowed to discuss it?
Why should they do this in the context of a completely unrelated hobby? There are men-only discussion groups.

>guys who have to carry all the weight of society
If this is what you believe, then how about working to spread that weight across both sexes then?

Of course not. The point is to provoke a negative reaction that convinces the individual that they being dismissed/persecuted not because they're wrong but because people hate them for being right.

You see it with every stripe of extremist, religious or not.

>The extremists are subconsciously deliberately retarded to further their persecution complex
I never thought of it that way, but that makes a whole fucking heap of sense.

A polite reminder:

Report and ignore off topic posts. Do not respond, that only encourages.

If only we have people writing articles on how boys are performing worse in school and dropping out of society entirely in favour of porn and video games. How they don't feel valued or wanted.

But you can't even.

Because I'm not stupid enough to believe in equality. Men and women evolved differently, they're not equal and they cannot perform equally. When you give women too much freedom they destroy civilization as we're seeing in ours now.

Affirmative action discriminates against white men
Scholarships discriminate against white men
Diversity quotas work against white men
White men are the constant punching bags of society and are the ones paying the most taxes and working the hardest. But of course if two people say they're victims both must be attention seeking, one can't be an actual provable victim.

It's not even just the SJW part of them that pisses me off about them.

They've literally created "Tabletop Day", aka free marketing for them that everyone seems to have blindly accepted.

The only thing that they have going for them is the whole "bringing more bodies into the hobby" thing, but I'd argue that that's not necessarily a good thing.

>A hobby is a space
A community is a space. You can make your own community easy. If you're playing Veeky Forums is literally a prerequisite to create a community to play with, unlike college campuses (for example) where you can't just make your own and the inequality in things like what is considered consent is actually important. That's where one needs spaces. A hobby isn't a fucking space.

You're not only continuing their fucking retarded identity politics for them, you're missing the entire fucking point of what you're meant to be 'fighting' for.