I don't know anything about the games John Wick has designed, but I assume most or even all of us agree he's a terrible DM.
My question is, what's the WORST thing you've heard about him doing?
For me, I think it's probably where he slaughtered all his friends' characters for the hell of it when he was a kid.
I've been watching some of his YouTube videos out of morbid curiosity and he said that he intentionally created a situation where evil forces are trying to kill one PC, then another PC is told "I have had a vision. He will die or you will die protecting him. You cannot both survive this night!" in order to create dissonance between what the player wants and what his or her character wants, because "that's a kind of drama that only an RPG can create." Yeah, but it's also the opposite of immersive and pulls people out of character. Plus it's GM fiat "one of you will die this session." Then he has the gall to shit on D&D for random encounters having the potential to be deadly!
Anyway, I'm bored and having a bad night, so can we just talk about how awful this dude is?
The weirdest/worst thing though is still a few mind boggling statements he's made related to samurai stories and Legend of the Five Rings.
The basic gist? He claimed that Ronin aren't important to Samurai stories.
If you know anything about samurai stories, you should be staring in disbelief at this point. Just one example of how astonishingly wrong he is can be found by looking up 'The 47 Ronin' (the classic tale, not the Hollywood movie) and its influence on samurai fiction in Japan and beyond.
Adrian Morgan
Aren't the vast majority of fictional samurai ronin?
Connor Parker
>Anyway, I'm bored and having a bad night, so can we just talk about how awful this dude is?
If you promise never to make another thread like this again, I will give you the entirety of Pimsleur Croatian so that you can learn a foreign language instead of making me think about John Wick.
Dylan Murphy
It's that video and the one that follows, rather. If I recall, that one introduces the "what's going on" and the next one introduces the "one of you will die and the other will live" thing.
Asher Ortiz
that's the joke.avi
Gavin Flores
Worst thing I know of him doing is crashing 7th Sea LARPS and bitching at people for doing things wrong (read: not how he wants them to).
He's probably the only designer that ACTUALLY crashes people's games to tell them they're having badwrongfun.
Eli Harris
Related to that "I'm going to 100% kill at least one of you" thing, one of the PCs had an ability that made them completely immune to all disease. So Wick decides that disease immunity (Something the player actually spent xp on) meant that he actually could get a disease, but was entirely resistant to the relevant medicines. So the character died to a disease they should have been immune to because their should-be-positive trait prevented the cure from working.
Justin Long
In this video, John explains how he sees RPGs as cooperative experiences and does not see the GM's role as being an adversary to the players:
He didn't just crash the LARPS, he crashed them while playing as his super powerful metaplot-relevant self-insert character and killed a whole bunch of their characters.
Samuel King
I believe one of the writers of WoD used to crash Vampire LARPs as Caine.
I feel like this is made especially shitty by the fact that disease immunity typically isn't very useful to begin with.
David Martin
He doesn't just do it in L5R, he does it again in a sidebar in Blood and Honor, his "historical" Japan RPG. Which along with a number of other mind boggling sections clearly displays his actual lack of understanding of samurai stories and that his work in L5R wasn't just deliberately trying to make things "more fantastical" as so many L5R fans claim.
Josiah Thompson
>I believe one of the writers of WoD used to crash Vampire LARPs as Caine. Yeah, but Caine is infamous enough that that's kind of fucking awesome. That's a fucking story. "I played in a LARP and the creators decided to crash the LARP as Caine."
Wick isn't that fucking important or cool. Nobody's going to give a shit if some moderately important powerful NPC shows up.
Hunter Long
Well, they DID kill his dog.
Easton Phillips
L5R fans claim it's not historical because the entire game dropped that line early on. Nobody relevant has tried to say L5R is anything but a fantasy setting for at least 10 years now.
Jacob Edwards
That doesn't change Wick's stupidity, that just shows Wick works best when other people are there to fix his stupidity.
Ryder Taylor
It's kind of a shame. Blood and Honour's mechanical predecessor, Houses of the Blooded, is possibly the only game by him I'd call good, and that's probably because as an entirely original property there were no preconceptions for it to screw up.
Nolan Martin
>houses of the blooded >good No.
Aaron Turner
Care to explain why? I've only played a little of it, but the system worked decently enough, the setting and setup was quite novel and altogether it seemed like a solid package.
Joshua Scott
It was just a fuckin
Dominic Jackson
I believe it was that all WW employees are considered to be playing Antidiluvian vamps at any event.
And if you knew V:TM Larping in the 90s then you would have no sympathy for them.
Michael Scott
It's made worse because this story was in a book that is dedicated to GM advice.
