Quality discussion aside, critical role has live events, stars, best-ofs and spin-offs, it is here to stay and I applaud them for that. How do you feel about Roleplaying games becoming pop culture?
Bonus question: Do you remember the kid that claimed to know someone who gets paid to GM?
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>How do you feel about Roleplaying games becoming pop culture?
It'll go the same way as videogames, so prepare your fucking anus for /v/'s dick.
I kinda like the video game scene right now. Autists screeching around in their teens buying EA 'n shit, hipsters in their twenties having their own, slightly more expensive games and the 30+ crowd has a full library of their favorite systems library from one to two generations ago.
Replace EA with D&D5, hipster games with Pathfinder and favorite system with oWoD, Cthulhu and aD&D
Great comparison, thanks for reminding me why I want to stab my friend every time he discovers some new piece of Steam-powered crap and tries to goad me into playing it.
Is there an age difference?
I find when playing with a younger group, it tends to go loldudeweed a lot. I use those groups as a rare treat, not to be overused.
I wouldn't mind the loldudeweed kids, actually. Few I've met had their head in the game more than the others.
And the Steam-asshole is in his early 30s but without any real future after he broke up with his gf of 4 years. Dude's regressing into a manchild.
And he's into Steampunk or what do you mean by calling him Steam-asshole?
That he's addicted to games on Steam, and will try out any piece of shit that's in their library.
>How do you feel about Roleplaying games becoming pop culture?
Unless you are in your late 50s, they became pop culture before you ever were born, you stupid millenial shit.
Daily reminder that one Critical Role fan is worth ten /tg autists because Critical Role fans actually buy merchandise and products the designers make, create a safe space for people to play and enjoy themselves and share their enthusiasm for the game via social media, Twitter , vlogs, YouTube, blogs and streams thus promoting the hobby as a fun thing for everyday people to do, not a niche, nerdy, scummy little boys club.
Meanwhile the so called 'superior' gamers on /tg pirate all their content so don't support the game designers and screech endless complaints out which only promotes an environment of hostility and negativity that nobody wants to get involved in, hence killing the hobby dead.
If the roleplaying system you are playing has not been out of print for more than 10 years, then you are what is wrong with the hobby.
Maybe where you grew up, but there are hobbystores in some villages now, rural critical role fans.
>le epic millennial meme
Fuck off and drown.
>Critical role
I watched 10 minutes of those tards on twitch once.
They needed to climb a tree to see which direction they needed to go.
One girl turned into a fucking bumblebee. On guy used massive strength.
They spent 10 minutes using various abilities to all climb.
Then they laughed and went back to texting on their phones.
Fuck. That. Shit.
As I said, quality discussion aside. I don't enjoy em either, but I can respect what they achieved nonetheless. I don't know their target audience, but I suspect we will get hordes of millenial roleplayers thanks to them.
I wouldn't doubt that you are correct.
I cannot for the live of me understand how people can listen to actual play podcasts. I draw or paint several hours a day, so I'm listening to a shitton of podcasts during that, but this? This shit is a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me. The only play podcast I can tolerate is a fucking Gamma World game with a DM that tries to be half-serious and the three players doing their best to fill the game with as much asinine bullshit as possible. One of the players is a squid stuck in a tank. But the ""serious"" bottom of the barrel improv theater is fucking intolerable. And they all sound like directed by Joss Whedon, what the fuck is up with that?
I started to watch them on youtube, first episode, thought that surely this must be at least somewhat good and entertaining, they are voice-actors and I like role-playing... cringed so hard I had to stop watching after 10-15 minutes.
The Joss Whedon-vibe is a spot-on description. The kind of 'non-offensive, trying real hard to be witty and edgy without being actually edgy'-vibe.
I'll fully admit me and my friends got into DnD because of Critical Role, I've had an interest for a while to no one to play with. My issue now is that everyone who has gotten into the hobby, even here in bum fuck nowhere Nebraska, expects their games to be just like CR. Me and my friends made that mistake the first time I DMed and we got bored after a bit. When I scrapped that campaign and had us start fresh with little to no influence of CR everyone started having more fun.
I don't mind CR anymore I listen to it to try and get better at painting a picture with words as a DM. While it does bring new people to the hobby, it gives an odd to bad impression of what DnD should be.
As a long time listener/watcher you really only stay for Sam and Travis. Mercer is good for helping new DMs learn how to describe their world but he has some habits from pf, especially early on, Travis is stuck playing a retard, despite being the smartest of the lot, because Grog is literally his first character. Sam's whole stick is a quick joke, some pop culture references and pointing out how bad the group is at planning.
>When I scrapped that campaign and had us start fresh with little to no influence of CR everyone started having more fun.
Gratz user. I am glad you had the senses to figure that out. Many don't.
I hope you have a shitload of good times.
Matthew Mercer is contributing more to the downfall of the D&D community than anyone else in history. Not even Monte Cook, not even Lorraine Williams, not even Michael Mearls, not even Gary Gygax himself have done as much damage to D&D. Mercer has made the game palatable to the kind of person who spends his Friday nights playing Cards Against Humanity while slobbering microbrews all over his beard while his wife's son is sleeping in the next room. The kind of moron who thinks mirthful laughter is the end goal of everything, and fails to understand the potential that RPGs have as a fulfilling hobby. Instead, he shits on that creative potential by turning the entire game into a joke, refusing to take anything seriously and making gimmick characters, bringing along his fat girlfriend to make a shitty elf druid character that she hardly roleplays, screeching autistically whenever she rolls a natural 20 because that is the only aspect of the game that her tiny female brain can comprehend, taking copious pictures of the game and posting them to Snapchat and Instagram to show what a geek she is, before getting tired at 11 and tugging at her cuck boyfriend's shoulder so that they both leave and disrupt the immersion even further, because the game doesn't matter to these people at all. It is a mode of entertainment, nothing else. And by entertainment, I mean they consider it nothing more than a Netflix special that they can pause at any time, because it is meant entirely to pander to their enjoyment and make them laugh to cover up how empty their soulless lives are. This hobby used to be full of passionate people who cared about the game and weren't afraid to show it. Now the hobby is being diluted by hordes of casuals who couldn't give a fuck.
Originally it was because none of us had any clue what we were doing so it was fun, then the polish wore off and I could tell people were getting bored. Luckily i get bored in my free time so I'll have random YouTube "DM tips" playing in the background while I'm doing whatever.
It's really the biggest thing that needs to be addressed with new players coming in, don't pretend to be a bunch of professional pretending to be their characters, don't expect your DM to be Mercer. Make your own thing, yes if you take inspiration that's fine, but don't get bogged down trying to play someone else's character. Also the nat20 meme needs to be addressed, I don't know how many times I've had people complain because they don't auto succeed some social encounter because of "dude nat20!" Mercer has gotten better at this but the damage has been done unfortunately so it'll take a bit for people to catch on.
The issue is that RPGs are being turned into a venue of entertainment for the masses, sacrificing everything on the altar of 'is it funny?' The vast majority of us are not actors or comedians, and shows like Critical Roll implant the idea that you have to be and it is the expected method of play. It is not.
That being said, if you want to play comedy games, congratulations, the number of people who expect you to entertain them instead of engaging with them is rising daily.
Every GM should have a session 0 where they sit down with the group and go over expectations.
I mean isn't that always the best approach to a hobby?
First you enjoy something from afar, then you watch some other people do it from up close and then you find a way to make it your own.
I used to listen to NSync and Backstreet Boys, which motivated me to try singing, failed, and found the violin for me.
This is the cancer right here.
Most live play shows/podcasts are both heavily scripted and played by one-bit voice actors or theater people. They get their role, do their stupid fucking voice and "play" the story that is a one-way railroad, as dictated by what the DM thinks is fun for the audience.
>That one Vin Diesel Episode that is just two hours of sucking Vin Diesel's dick
Also this
Yes, and?
I know more "rural" players than I know "city" ones. And it was been like this as far as I care to remember. Maybe, just maybe because the kids in the village had to find a creative and relatively cheap, one-buy-makes-you-happy-for-decades, way of killing boredom.
Seriously, what the fuck, user?
If you just knew what millenial means, you would understand why it fits the context.
Unfortunatelly, you think it's a meme.
>I can't roleplay, so I will bash anyone doing so
>Lel, who needs roleplaying if you can just roll dice
It must be sad being you.
It's stupid shit, it's for normalfucks who think RPGs are all about "le ebin natural 20" and laughing hysterically. Holy fucking shit, the amount of retarded sperg laughter makes me want to drive my fist through the wall whenever I listen to it. If I was in a Liam Neeson situation where there were armed men coming to take me and I needed to get psyched up to kill, I would just watch about 30 minutes of Critical Role and their stupid fucking laughter would be enough to whip me into a blood frenzy. The cunts are the worst, they are airheaded, stupid pieces of shit, lack self-awareness, they are everything that is wrong with women, they are why I gave up on dating because every cunt I met for coffee was so goddamn fucking boring I wanted to kill myself. Left one of them with the check once and just went to my car and drove home and deleted her number and facebook. Also Matt Mercer is hardly a good DM, given the amount of work he has to put into this. For fuck's sake I barely prep sometimes and I DM as well as him, description and everything. The only thing he has is a good voice. He looks like a greasy skater fuck, too. His hair is trash. Marisha whatever-her-name-is is so fucking stupid she's a prime example of why eugenics should make a comeback. And thanks to Critical Roll, I now have to DM for hordes of normoniggers and roasties who come into the store. I wanted to run fucking Curse of Strahd and figured I'd help out the FLGS at the same time and now I'm fucking trapped in hell. These pieces of shit come in two groups: video game autists who treat it all like a video game, and normos who don't even understand what's going on, but they liked a bunch of critical role nat20 pages on Tumblr and upvotes nat20 stories on Reddit so now they're nerds and shit. Fucking hell, this crap has started creeping into my other games, too. I am so sick of players saying "lol I just rolled a CRIT on my spot check" well it's a 23 but it doesn't matter cause I rolled a CRIT.
>I draw or paint several hours a day
NEET?
CR main character power rankings:
1. Taryon
2. Grog
3. Scanlan
4. Percy
5. Vex
6. Pike
7. Vax
8. Keyleth
9. Tiberius
Will they finally end the campaign today? Will Matt hold back and let them all live?
Will Keyleth gust cantrip her way into a true final fight with the Raven Queen for Vax's life?
Oh my fucking god, Keyleth WOULD try that shit, too.
Explain? Technically Vax has two sneak attacks per round, Keyleth has a lot of shapechanger options, and Percy's max DPR is way higher than anyone else's.
underrated post
>How do you feel about Roleplaying games becoming pop culture?
if it leads to other RPGs becoming household names, it's great. if not, it's utterly plebish.
>Dude's regressing into a manchild.
Not actual character power, but the characters I enjoy most on the show.
I think its all a mistake and makes my job as a GM harder, especially CR. The mainstreaming of nerd stuff is a godsend, but the mantling of nerd culture by corporate funded outsiders is a blight.
There are some good reprints out there, user, but you're mostly right.
>as a long time listener
Kill yourself before the disease spreads.
This, because I dont have the time to type out a diatribe of my own.
Check out Stars Without Number
Yes but most people aren't getting pasted the "watch some other people do it from up close". They've developed the idea that that is DnD and if it isn't like that then it's wrong some how.
Even if they are scripted people still enjoy them and it gets them into the hobby. The issue comes up with most people not trying to make their own way or feeling they are doing it wrong because it's not like CR. What needs to happen is more people need to be active in helping newer players realize "hey every game isn't going to be CR, if that's what you want then you're probably not going to have a good time." Also I do agree that episode was obnoxious as fuck.
It's ok, I'm a DM and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
I think what more people should realize is that no game should be CR. See above tirades about tone.
I'm in agreement the issue is some people are utterly confused by this. They think that IS DnD, if someone seems reasonable then yeah you explain it but sometimes people just need to learn the hard way.
I find that often people dont learn, and that you're better off trying to court normies that enjoy a good story than meme-nerds who collect popcap figures and worship le-ebin-nat20.
Ive only go so many hours of free time and I wont spend it re-teaching people. I think the problem CR creates is that it makes DnD entertaining for people who should never play it in the first place.
critical role is heavily scripted and put heavy expectations on the few GMs in existence. that is bad but if it brings in more gms and players that understand that critical role is the porn of sex in the rpg world, then good.
That implies that CR is even that good. Its entertaining, but Id never want to play a game GMd by Mercer.
The first part absolutely
>meme-nerds who collect popcap figures and worship le-ebin-nat20.
These are the ones that I normally just turn away because they are dead set in that they know how it works. If they learn good on them if not no skin off my bones.
>Ive only go so many hours of free time and I wont spend it re-teaching people.
This is understandable, personally I haven't run into too many situations where I have to completely reteach. Mostly it's teaching from square one or just correcting a few bad habits.
>I think the problem CR creates is that it makes DnD entertaining for people who should never play it in the first place.
That is a really good point I hadn't thought about, it explains the people who try a game or so and think it's completely shit because it doesn't live up to x show.
I'd only do it if Travis is involved, but that's because I have a man crush on him.
lel, i wanna see that
Let me give you an example of somebody who should not be playing:
Ive been running a bunch of one-shots to try to find some new folks for my big game Im going to run next year, and there's this one guy. This guy doesnt understand the concept of personality. He doesnt understand that two characters with the same stats can act differently. Its the craziest thing. Ive tried explaining it to him in the simplest terms and he just doesnt get that theres more to a character than what's on the page. Its people like that who would normally be a million miles from anything creative that CR throws into my wheelhouse on a weekly basis.
Doing tryouts for a new party has given me a new appreciation for the damage Matty bo batty has wrought.
>He doesnt understand that two characters with the same stats can act differently. Its the craziest thing. Ive tried explaining it to him in the simplest terms and he just doesnt get that theres more to a character than what's on the page.
Jesus fucking Christ that sounds horrifying
it's not hard to out-GM Mercer because his plots are really mediocre trash. where he excels is in narration and voice-acting. you'll find it hard to beat him there but writing better adventures and better settings isn't hard.
that said, i find the dude likeable even if i can't watch the show because it's waaaaay too gamist.
Its not even gamist, the show lives well beyond the fourth wall.
Yeah, luckily I realized that early on, it doesn't help that WotC is really trying to keep them in the spot light because of their success and the attention it brings.
There's another DM in my area who hasn't and tries to inject CR references and campaign style as much as possible.
I talked to him and he basically believes that there's one personality for each spot on the alignment chart, and even went so far as to categorize everybody in the party IRL to prove his point. When I brought up things like specifics in background and motivation he said, I shit you not "how am I supposed to know about their past experiences?".
Does he have a mental problem? That sounds like a lot more than just being new. I'm curious now how he functions in everyday life.
It's pasta
>There's another DM in my area who hasn't and tries to inject CR references and campaign style as much as possible.
>Do you remember the kid that claimed to know someone who gets paid to GM?
That's pretty true.
Although Marisha and Keyleth is everything that is wrong with casual players in RPGs. She's definitely the worst. I'd love to play with everyone else in that group, but not Marisha.
Doesnt make it less true.
He owns a small landscaping business in the local area. Average intelligence is a horrifying things, below average is positively mortifying.
Easy for the reasonably ealthy intellectual to say he didn't give a shit. Most people have to give a shit in order to survive or live at least a normal life.
That's a problem with the player, not the game, cunt.
i just took a glimpse into a random episode and, damn, Mercer's pacing is poor there.
Its a problem with the player base, which is arguably tied to the game. What the relation between the two is, well thats up to you.
You know I never see discussions on the homebrew classes that Matt made in these threads. What are your thoughts on these classes?
Pt 2.
Pt.3
The gunslinger is poorly designed & under-powered. A crossbow wielding battlemaster fight do both do more damage and more trick shots, with less of a headache in terms of book keeping.
Isn't that a port from Pathfinder? Seems ok to me, even if it did come from Pathfinder.
According to 5eg they're all shit.
Gunslinger takes Pathfinder-type design of big pitfalls compensating for big benefits, which is bad.
Nobody really cares about the other 2. Blood Hunter seems OK from some of the subclasses, but I forget which ones. Make sure you have the correct version, it's been revised a lot.
>A crossbow wielding battlemaster fight
But crossbows aren't guns.
>According to 5eg they're all shit
According to 5eg, 5e is shit.
Much like the Pathfinder general, that's a containment thread.
But I like it there...
Yes, with all of the Pathfinder design baggage associated with it as well.
There's this thing called "imagination" and reflavoring items/abilities. I'd suggest it.
>There's this thing called "imagination" and reflavoring items/abilities. I'd suggest it.
Cool, so I want my class to be a gunslinger, not a fighter. So I make my own class.
What is a gunslinger?
A chucklefuck who insists on having their cake and eating it too, I.E. throwing around fireballs and lightning bolts while Two-Gun Tony-ing it like it's the Wild West.
That doesnt even sound like a gunslinger, that just sounds like a wizard with a winchester.
It is, gunslinger is not chucking fireballs around, at best they are dealing arrows worth of damage.
>I'll pretend to be retarded that'll show them
Sorry, clarification. I didn't mean they were flinging spells, I meant they existed next to people flinging spells. Swords and Sorcery, not Wild West Witches, y'know?
Not that that sounds bad or stupid by any means, it's just not D&D.
Fine, whats wrong with just playing a crossbow fighter and fluffing the crossbow as a gun? What changes? Dont they have hand-crossbows?
Reload speed for one. Two, don't tell me how to have fun just because it doesn't fit into your preconceived notion of what 'good fun' and 'bad fun' are.
1. Quick reload feats.
2. Play a different game then.
I have nothing against you having your kind of fun, the game does and you can only bend a broken system too far before you're just freeforming with some weird shapes on the table.
Well, I will preface this by saying I've never run a game where someone asked to be a Gunslinger. Currently I'm playing with a guy who is a Gunslinger, but he couldn't care less about the campaign and doesn't want to be there, so he's pretty much a non-person.
To get to the point, my guess is that many people would argue that "a gun should do more than D6", and "should have more range than 60 feet". God forbid they want to channel Percy (a character from Critical Role) and be the chucklefuck in question who invents gunpowder in the first place. Bonus points if they're unwilling to put anything more than a 10 in INT.
Mary McGlynn is and always will be best guest
> it's just not D&D
We're talking about the same game system that has literal space ships flying to other totally not planets (but they're really just fucking planets) so you can fuck green alien space babes. Everything is D&D. Just because it doesn't fit your narrow as fuck definition of generic stagnant medieval Tolkien doesn't make it not D&D.
How you gonna throw shade at System Mastery and not mention the podcast name
Also it's fucking Gamma World, how are you supposed to be serious about the game?
>2. Play a different game then.
No, you go fuck yourself.
1. People who say that probably dont know how accurate smoothebore firearms are and how range works in D&D.
2. Damage is an abstraction, they can get bent.
>Waaah, I want to play a gnome in VtmB.
>Waaah, I want to play a sentient mouse in Engineheart.
>Waaah, I want to play as a conquistador in Paranoia.
I've never played an rpg just war games I came across this show on twitch and watched an episode or two.
It just seemed .... so fake? It had the greese ball manlet DM with long hair trying to be be cool, I thought he was ok to begin with but the longer it went on the more I disliked him, he seemed to over act alot of the voices I dunno hard to put a finger on.
Some attractive women that barely seemed interested in being there. Typical hipster faggot with bow tie and generally retarded looking clothes that no normal person would wear. Some buff dude trying to show that they can be closet nerds epic XD too and to top it off token person of colour also dressed like a hipster faggot.
It seemed very contrived and designed to appeal to normies. I wasn't sure if this is how normal dnd plays but I assumed not. The way the game was portrayed in stranger things seemed more genuine than this pish.
Normies ruin everything. They will ruin your hobby too, the extra exposure and new blood it brings doesn't outweigh the sheer cancer that comes with it. Neckbeard autismo's have always been a part of tg but they don't have the power to completely take over your hobby and shit on it from every angle.
It will slowly start forcing shit like making it more inclusive, using more pc language an other such nonsense terms.
if a game is a reprint, is it still out of print then?
What episode did you watch?? The whole cast is white.
Percy is a whiny fag
Keyleth is a dumb bitch
Tiberius is a bro
Grog is an alpha and LITERALLY the brains of the group
t. someone who started the first episode about a week ago