Dresden Files

DFRPG is a great read, even if you never use it. It's presented as a draft of something the Alphas were writing to "discreetly spread awareness of supernatural threats", with Harry and Bob as consultants. It's filled with sticky notes and stuff they scribbled in the margins.

>Reminder that Harry once joined the Alphas' D&D campaign, then broke down into a rant about perfectly spherical fireballs being unrealistic.

I have been playing Dresden Files for a while. The game setting is pretty good, and there is a lot of extra background material (the Dresden File novels, pilot movie, 13-episode TV series and ongoing comic series).

However, after the first few sessions we were totally fed up with the FATE game system, and our GM ported the game into CORPS system. After that, the game was more playable.

>Reminder that Harry plays barbarian, because he likes to break shit
>Reminder that butters got a hot werewolf waifu for becoming gm when said waifu boyfriend got torn to shreds by an unspeakable horror

Man, that whole segment with the naagloshii was so fucking brutal. Worse things have happened before and after, but it was just so singularly cruel, malevolent and hateful. Gives me chills just remembering it.

>Worse things have happened before and after, but it was just so singularly cruel, malevolent and hateful.
Harry has gone up against some evil motherfuckers, but none of them have ever had as little reason for what they did as the skinwalker. Denarians, white court, red court, black council, even outsiders- they all have reasons. The skinwalker just wanted to eat, and even then, the majority of what it does just seems to be for pleasure

Also

>The skinwalker feeds on magical power
>It could have fed on both Harry and Morgan

>reminder that Morgan once killed a naagloshii by dropping a friggin nuke on it
I mean, I'm no Warden, but goddamm

>Reminder that Harry once joined the Alphas' D&D campaign, then broke down into a rant about perfectly spherical fireballs being unrealistic.
Wait what? I don't remember that. When was this?

The book that opens with a dnd session, he goes all batshit on verisimilitude a paragraph later. Then shit goes down.

He also complains about fireballs not setting things on fire.

In early books Harry used fire magic for everything, which frequently resulted in him getting trapped in burning buildings or otherwise screwing himself over through unintended collateral damage. Learning from this, he starts relying more on force spells as the series goes on.
So yeah, perfectly safe and reliable fireballs are kind of a sore spot for him.

Funny story, I was running a D&D game when the book came out and had gotten bitched at by my players a few weeks earlier for their stuff catching fire after they failed saves vs fire spells.

This is one of the many times when someone tries to bring something from the Dresden Files into a game without realizing that there's a reason most people don't really like the Dresden Files.

>Nixies make awful wedding guests and worse hors d'oeuvres
>Billy you need to stop reminding me that you fight crime by eating it
Holy crap you were not lying this is great stuff.

It gets better. Whenever text in the PDF is covered by something or scribbled over, you can see what's underneath by copying and pasting it somewhere else.

Then there’s the Almighty, the “capital G”
God, and Jesus Christ, who may be constrained
from action in mortal affairs except through
careful “non-manipulation” of their mortal
agents. (By the way, if you’re reading this, we
sure bet you feel clever!)
See also the Knights of the Cross (page74)

Powers: All of these gods, when active, range in
power from not much stronger than the average
wizard up to the supernatural heavyweight
class. Their powers generally vary due to their
individual portfolios. It’s entirely possible their
powers have something to do with Jim Butcher’s
ideas.
Weaknesses: Varied, due to their individual
portfolios and divine enemies. Also, and this is
pure theory, lack of mortal worship and belief
in them may have made them go dormant, or it
could have been something that the author isn’t
ready for us to know about yet. So sit on your
hat!
Heh, thanks for that heads up, user. Just in time.

Was one of my favorite things about the last novel, showing that not all Sasquatches are good and not skin walkers are ravenous monsters.

That book also cemented Listens to Wind as my favorite Senior Council Member. Dude could talk trash.
"Mother says you have no place here. Father says you're ugly."

The books are such pulpy trash I can't help but love them.

The RPG however just looks painful to play.

Sorry, meant to agree with you, but hit post too soon.

>there's a reason most people don't really like the Dresden Files

It highlights how bad the setting is for anything except a campaign centered around one character, and the character creation rules also make the "trash" part of "pulpy trash" particularly stink.

Instead of "here, this is how you can make a deep and involved character" it's "here's how to make a mary sue, but don't forget to add some negative things to make them even more unlikable and somehow even more shallow."

...

Veeky Forums, what is your consensus on The Dresden Files? I personally love them, they're just dumb fun.

About the same for me. They're just really fun reads. Kind of depressing to be fully caught up, to be honest.

They're incredibly niche, and sold more for the "wizard detective" part then the actual quality of the books.

They're a guilty pleasure at best, absolute trash at worst.

I disagree somewhat. I think Fate works fine, but it takes a lot of extra effort to make it work that way, and the groups that have that kind of tacit agreement and understanding of how to share the story are probably already doing it with their system of choice.

The setting itself doesn't preclude team games, but, ironically, it means you can't play any of the games like the books, because those are all solo-character focused. Which means you basically have to make most of the shit up yourself anyways, which brings up the question, "Why are you playing in this setting?"

Pulp trash, but well aware of it and thus forgivable.

Fate is good on its own for a lot of applications, but it just brings out the worst parts of the Dresden Files.

What would be a good alternative?

It's shit, and the people who like it are all terrible people. You'd need to be in order to enjoy such a poorly-written fanfiction-tier power fantasy.

You do know that's RAW in most systems, right. It's not something I took from DF, I just got tired of my players torching everything and started enforcing all the little things that get overlooked.

The only real problem I had with the books was that the author drags the fight scenes too much. I can't help but to skip pages of fight description to get to the actual story.

Finally, it's good to hear I'm not alone in my opinions of the books. Usually these threads turn into massive piles of fanwank.

I love some of the ideas in the books but there's a lot of trash in there.
Anyone running or going to run a game?

Strange as it may sound, my biggest issue was how long he spent going over the women in the book. I had a few on audiobook going in the car. Listened to them as I did my errands or drove the kids places. Listening with the kids in the car. . . Not my best decision. I had to skip ahead since he seemed to be enjoying himself.

It's cause Harry is pretty backed up for most of the books. Short stories from other characters perspective don't focus on women much.

That. . . Makes more sense than I was expecting

I'm kind of hoping he starts making more books with gimmicks like the last one, the whole "Dresden's Eleven" Heist scheme in Skin Game was pretty fantastic.
Maybe the next one will be Buddy Cop, or a Road Trip type story.

>the current book is a clunky mess from before the writers understood Fate

Harry learns a lot of things the hard way over the course of the books, one of which is "it's easy for people to kill you while you're distracted by boobs". So while it never quite goes away, it is toned down a bit as Harry gets older and more vigilant.

And as said, other narrators don't do it.

Isn't the dresden files simply World of Darkness RPG but in novel format?

>we will never get a scene from Molly's POV where she goes on and on describing Dresden
I'm almost disappointed.

It's worse, if you can imagine that.

What's funny is that Thomas, despite being a sex vampire, doesn't notice women the way Harry dies either.
Instead it's more like he instinctively thinks of ways he could get them alone, but the description more closely sounds like he's going to eat them.

Which I suppose is actually true.

No, but instead when she thinks of Harry at all it's painfully clear how in love with him she is.
Murphy too, though she pretty clearly tries to deny it to herself by pointedly NOT thinking about him.

That is going to be one awkward situation to resolve.

There's a story in side jobs from Murphy's perspective and her descriptions of how Harry behaves are pretty amusing.

Least I think it was side jobs, I don't think any books had non-harry POVs.

Not really.
World of Darkness at least tries to keep it's supernatural stuff hidden for it's own safety.
Dresden Files does shit right out in the open more or less and then people in universe come up with their own shitty explanations as for what happened and banks heavily on human ignorance and unwillingness to believe in something that disagrees with their preconceived viewpoints rather then deliberately hiding.

They're dumb fun, but Butcher needs to learn how to not spend half of each novel reminding people of what happened in the previous seven novels.

I get it, Thomas is unbelievably hot. You've spent four paragraphs telling us that each book he's been in, Jimmy.

Also, every time Harry inner-monologues about how dames are precious beings, usually a couple paragraphs before a female villain stabs someone with a handful of fishhooks or something needlessly cruel like that.

Murphy's short is actually an excellent example of how Butcher clearly thinks with his dick much less then folks assume.
She NEVER notices how attractive or good a man or woman looks in her narration; she instead sizes up a person and decides if they look guilty or not and for men she seems to immediately figure out if she could toss them around in a fight if she needed too.

It's believable that Murphy is a better detective then Harry because she is paying a LOT closer attention to shit then Harry is, as Harry is always kind of mentally racing ahead or really distracted by something else.

>Also, every time Harry inner-monologues about how dames are precious beings, usually a couple paragraphs before a female villain stabs someone with a handful of fishhooks or something needlessly cruel like that.

It's deliberate.
The PoV's of other characters never bring that kinda shit up at all. Harry actually IS pretty old-fashioned mentally and early on in the novels it is a glaring psychological weakness that gets explioted over and over again that notably NONE of the other characters with a written PoV actually have.

Harry gets better about it in later books.
Actually he comes to learn to be immediately suspicious of attractive women he meets, which isn't really such a terrible policy considering how his life works.

He just needs to learn how to write in general.

He's never grown out of a sophomoric style.

>it's shit
>"IT'S SHIT ON PURPOSE!"

That makes it worse, not better.
And, you're going through some intense defense mode right now.

One of the funniest PoV's is Marcone.
Mostly because he turns out to be the most straightforward character in the series with no real "hidden depths"; what you see with him is EXACTLY who he is and there is zero internal conflict about it.

His bodyguard Hendricks however apparently liked to quote philosophers and poetry quite a bit when nobody else is around and also acts as Marcone's external conscience.

No, I won't claim it's good or bad.
I'm old enough now to recognize that my opinion is irrelevant and literally dies forever when I do, and thus everything I "objectively" think about subjective matters such as quality of entertainment is entirely subjective.

>SemiAutoMagic
things like this make me giggle.

so that's one vote from me for "dumb fun"

So then what is your SUBJECTIVE opinion, you smarmy asswipe?

>It's deliberate.

I'm not saying it's badwrongfun for other people to like it, I just prefer my pulp Howardian, rather than from the perspective of an awkward highschooler given magic powers and rent payments.

>Characters having traits that I don't personally agree with are shit

The new edition is written by Ivy with Kincaid snarking in the margins

It's silly, irrelevant, entertaining for some, alarmingly stupid for the vast majority, and wildly self-refrential to the point of being extremely obtuse at times.
So basically it's Veeky Forums itself, which means I find folks who hate it on Veeky Forums lacking almost entirely in self-awareness because they WILLINGLY waste time on a website who fits all the traits of the books.

Did I like them? They were fun I guess.
Entertainment value reminded me of similar late-90's fantasy/urban fantasy show things; amusing but usually nothing to write home about.

That actually seems a lot funnier.
Kincaid is one of the more amusing characters because he actually seems to appreciate Harry's astoundingly stupid sense of humor.

I have to post that entire section to show how good and bad this is just in one. Good, dumb pulp fun.

>Then Listens-to-Wind smiled. He hunkered down and rubbed his hands in some mud and loose earth that lightly covered the rocky summit of the hill. He cupped his hands, raised them to just below his face, and inhaled through his nose, breathing in the scent of the earth. Then he rubbed his hands slowly together, the gesture somehow reminding me of a man preparing to undertake heavy routine labor.

>He rose to his feet again, and said, calmly, "Mother says you have no place here."

>The naagloshii bared its fangs. Its growl prowled around the hilltop like a beast unto itself.

>Lightning rumbled overhead with no accompanying rumble of thunder. It cast a harsh, eerily silent glare down on the skinwalker. Listens-to-Wind turned his head up to the skies and cocked his head slightly. "Father says you are ugly," he reported. He narrowed his eyes and straightened his shoulders, facing the naagloshii as thunder rolled over the island, lending a monstrous growling undertone to the old man's voice. "I give you this chance. Leave. Now".

>The skinwalker snarled. "Old spirit caller. The failed guardian of a dead people. I do not fear you"

A few more bants follow, and then there's a shapeshifting battle.

>poorly written character soapboxing author's beliefs for pages at a time
>it's just the character

That's nice. Still doesn't make for good reading.

I'm probably going to get torched for admitting that, but I love them. I can't really speak about the writing, with english not being my native language and all, but it works well enough for me, and I like both the story and the characters.

It's far from being the best, sure, but I still find it to be a pretty enjoyable read.

I don't think he actually does.
In fact if there's any character that does I think it's Molly, since her family dynamic is pretty close to how Jim Butcher's real family was; huge family slanted in the direction of a single gender (make for Molly and female for Jim Butcher; apparently he's the youngest child out of several older siblings who are all sisters)

>i'm a dumb fan of a bad author

That's nice. How else will you try to overlook the countless issues in his writing, I wonder?

You complain about soapboxing but then soapbox yourself. Be self-aware if you're going to be critical at least, you seem more then intelligent enough to do that.
I'm guy; I found the books kinda fun, but largely forgettable when you compare them to all the other examples of the genre it belongs in just like all the other examples of the genre it belongs in.
It's silly and meaningless and fun for some but weird and stupid to others, much like a Veeky Forums activity.

I guess my opinion is "it's a thing".
I don't really feel particularly strongly about it one way or the other because there isn't much there worth feeling strongly about in the first place.

Then why come onto the thread at all?

Because I've played the trpg you and wanted to give my two cents on the rules system and point out the upsides and downsides of it and pre-warn the person of the difficulties he or she will run into.

You know?
The entire supposed point of this fucking board?
I

Why'd you play it if you didn't like the books?

Because my group wanted too?
I hadn't even HEARD of the books before I played the DFRPG, and later my wife convinced me to read them.

>you complain about soapboxing but then soapbox yourself.

I didn't know I was writing a novel here.

>Why'd you play it if you didn't like the books?

If it's what his group plays why wouldn't he try it? I'm currently playing M&M because my group is and I can't stand general capeshit.

>Almost threw a lot of the Dresden books down because I gagged at their awfullness sometimes
>Still can't wait for the next one since I want to find out what happens with Harry

Is it so unreasonable to say that while the books are far from perfect I still enjoy them?
>No release date on Peace Talks yet

I reread them recently, and I saw a whole lot more mistakes than when I read them originally. But I still enjoyed it. What is it about this book series that makes it enjoyable?

No.
No, but you certainly seem intent on proving yourself "right" as if you opinion on a subjective piece of enterainment is somehow more valid or even relevant to this discussion or board, in addition to trying to turn people into strawman just so you can feel more "right".
I wasn't invalidating your opinion of the novels, it's as valid as any opinion. I was merely correcting your facts, which were misinformed or incorrect somehow.

Now if we can move past the astoundingly inane discussion and get back to the actual reason you came onto this thread, namely the trpg I should think?

What kind of magical autist are you?

Dumb books have a lot to be complained about, and all you've got is fanaticism that lets you gloss over those issues.

Spare me your preaching, especially since you don't seem to understand your own hypocrisy.

>What is it about this book series that makes it enjoyable?
I like the overarching conspiracy plot.
I'm excited to see the other wizards do cool shit. We already had one cool scene with Listens to Wind vs the Naglooshi.
I also like Mab.

I don't like the pantheons of Gods joining the Fray though, seems too much to me but maybe its personal taste.
I love Nicodemus but I don't understand why he's doing what he's doing other than because hurr durr bad guy,.

I think it's just the language sometimes that I hate.
Dresden has access to a subconcious instantaneous wikipedia of sorts when on his island.
Jim decided to name this interesting power "Intellectus".

INTELLECT-US.
Fuck you Jim you lazy hack.

>What kind of magical autist are you?
The kind who's on Veeky Forums right now and not Veeky Forums. Tell me, what board are you on?
>Dumb books have a lot to be complained about, and all you've got is fanaticism that lets you gloss over those issues.
I don't even care. The fact that YOU care so much is what weirds me out.
Like I said, I can't even really recall the details of the novels because they blend together with every other thing in the genre. I've ever read of watched; I genuinely couldn't tell you if a plot was from Dresden book or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode or that one novel series that the author uses as therapy and mastubatory fodder or what.
I remember Harry, his apprentice, his brother and the cop. That's about it.
>Spare me your preaching, especially since you don't seem to understand your own hypocrisy.
What AM I preaching? Exactly?
What is it you think I am trying so desperately to convince you of?
Use clear and defined terms and clarify.

Whoa dude, sorry that someone said something to hurt your feelings about your favorite book series.

Ah, I see.
Well played Sir.

>mfw Listens to Wind proceeds to no sell everything the skin walker throws at him and then beat it at its own game. Can't get enough.

Don't mean to bind or banish you, old ghost.
Just gonna kick your ass between your ears.

How long before we get to see the next high tier wizard throw down?

Probably next book I think?
Peace Talks will likely involve many council members.

The DFRPG takes place in your town and you are the main characters who are clued in normies, wizards, werewolfs, fey or what have you.

Before you play the first game, the entire group participates in world building. You decide where magical hotspots are and what not.

For example, a hotel in town is a known front for the Red Court, a local bar is a typical magic user hang out, a gym is the local hangout for roid raging werewolfs, a bus station is actually a pretty commonly used entrance to the way and connects to the winter court, shit like that.

Common names around town are the faces for magic, beasties, and fey.

The DM and the players all work together to establish this right off so everyone knows what is where, who is who, and is on the same page plus everyone is invested in the world you made to make it a little more personal for each person at the table.

After that is established, THEN the players make characters and you start dicking around with story ideas, overarching threats, and all that jazz as a DM.

It is a shit load more of a set-up than pretty much any other RPG I have played, however, it does make it a pretty solid world and makes for really good story telling because everyone is on the same page and less likely to just burn shit down because then they are fucking up their home town, loved ones, and dealing with legitimate at home problems.

>It is a shit load more of a set-up than pretty much any other RPG I have played, however, it does make it a pretty solid world and makes for really good story telling because everyone is on the same page and less likely to just burn shit down because then they are fucking up their home town, loved ones, and dealing with legitimate at home problems.
Basing an RPG around where you all live is a pretty cool idea as opposed to generic fantasy land 1437.89

The old rpg is really fun. I didn't know they were putting out an Accelerated version. Sounds interesting.

Morgan was objectively one of the most awesome dudes around.

pretty sure Wind's was reciting a Navajo prayer there, but i could be wrong.

They're perfectly fine for what they are. Certainly better than his other series. Fun books with some decent world building and neat characters.

So how many of you figure he gets with molly, at least once? I say probably. Got one kid with a vamp (sorta), one with a fallen angel. Probably won't get a kid with a mortal, but i could see kid with a fae, and molly is prime candidate. That or he already made one with Mab.

>And this is my new daughter, guess who's the father
>Daddy!
>Oh hell's bells.

He would never. Everything time they're together he'd see Michael in his minds eye, shaking his head.