"You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but a book is no good if the cover says 'don't read me'"

>Uwe Boll
To the man's credit, he INTENDS to make shitty movies that fail. Germany has incredibly weird legislation where movies made in Germany are only tax deductible if they make a profit and you don't need to pay taxes over them if you don't make a profit or something. I don't understand the full details, but the more his movies failed the more investors he could draw in without needing to pay a single penny in taxes. This is also why he stopped making movies recently: the German law changed to no longer allow abuse of this loophole. Him blaming the audience was probably either trolling or a cover: he can't really say "my movies are supposed to be shit, you idiots! That's how I earn my money!".

Is that an actual thing? It sounds suspiciously like something someone would say in retrospect to save face.

cinemablend.com/features/Uwe-Boll-Money-Nothing-209.html
slate.com/articles/arts/the_hollywood_economist/2005/11/hollywoods_big_loss.html

Even a big company like Paramount used this scheme by having their movies "technically" shot in Germany.

It can be. Fellowship is a pretty mechanically competent game, but I can barely read it let along pitch it to anyone I know because the art is fucking atrocious. Absolute shit with a heavy cutesy, twee aesthetic that combines deviantart anime, tumblr "diversity", and some sort of barbie fairy princess shit. It's very unfitting for a game that's supposed to be broadly Tolkienian in inspiration

I feel you bro. There's even almost nothing so "diverse" or "progressive" about the actual text. Like, nowhere does it say the elves are black or the evil overlord is a tranny or whatever. It's literally purely the art, for no reason other than to pander to a specific audience (and a poor decision that was, since that audience doesn't play enough RPGs to be interested in obscure niche products). You could replace all of it with Arthur Rackham and it'd fit just as well and actually draw people.

After they changed the law he made a fairly competent movie about Max Schmelling, I was very surprised to see.

Nechronica. Undead loli yuri is a tough sell. But its not unfair or some weak shit like that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You need some barrier of entry, a filter. If your game tries to appeal to everyone under the sun then it has no real identity. “Safe” =/= “good”. Safe is bland, generic. I want unique. Eye-catching. A cover painted with two cute lolis, clinging to each other. Both missing large chunks of their bodies. I’m more than okay with the first nine normalfags passing that cover up. Because I sat down and read it, and ended up having a shit ton of fun playing a girl that would do anything to make sure the other girl, the target of her obsession, was looking at her. Even if it meant jumping in front of her, into the maw of ungodly abomination of meat and metal.

Right until Brian King releases another game about the childhood traumas of homeless drug junkies with mechanics that make Rolemaster look like Everyone is John and a writing tone that makes an IKEA instruction booklet look like Ulysses.

LOTW has managed to (Slightly) defy this but a lot of what caused it to fail was that the editing was so bad that succeeding in understanding the book was your first step to becoming a Youxia yourself. The other part was that the printing company in china ran off with the money so there was never any real numbers of physical books.

If that's what you're into, wouldn't you rather know that other potential players were also into that?

I don't know. I actually like the RPGPundit. Something like Blue Rose fills me with a kind of visceral disgust I can't quite quantify, the same feeling I got from reading WoD's Hurt Locker (and the Plain) as well as shit like the M20 Free Council.

He's abrasive, but he's right about negadungeons and how RPGnet is a den of leftists. I wish we had more conservative voices in the RPG community, but I'll take what I can get.

Ironclaw has very unfortunate cover choices. More so considering there is actually much better art in there.

At least half of any fantastical setting is worldbuilding. A major part of why you would choose any game over a theroteically-optimal game is feel, and feel is created in many ways by the art in the book.

A great example is Coriolis, a recently-released game. It's got a reasonably interesting Arabian Spacenights setting, though it provides scant details, and mechanically it is just Mutant: Year Space.

But fuck me the art is stylistic and gorgeous. Every picture instantly creates the exact feeling the world wants to have, and look at any one long enough and you will start to want to make that scene happen. Mechanically the game might be no better than a homebrewed Space Mutant, but it feels so utterly different because of the mood the art makes that it can't be substituted.

Consider also that the pictures in your head are unique, but the pictures in the book are common. Great aesthetic art that creates a great aesthetic feel shares the feeling with the entire playerbase, giving you a mutual ground for the imagination, the hardest thing for a game to make with mechanics. Look at fucking 2nd or 3rd edition 40K. Turd of a game, but the feeling the art evokes is what got a shitload of people to play the bad game for decades, including me.

Plus consider this. If you are any type of gamer, you will read a thousand game books in your life, own dozens, and play maybe three or four. If you're experimental, six or seven. Mechanics only count when you are paying the game regularly - but good art can make a book worthwhile even if you never do more than read it.

It's also furshit, which turns off a whole lot of people. Which is sad, considering that the game is actually quite good and doesn't have to be played with animal people if that's not your bag

Eh, even if you stripped off the cover it’s still furries: the rpg. The mechanics are pretty good though I’ll give it that.

Is that visceral disgust because the game includes a designated good guy country that brainwashes its people to be egalitarian and the designated bad guys are gay bashing Christian caricatures?

If you said "yes", you're part of the problem. None of these things are true, even a shallow reading of the book could tell you that, but everyone believes that because Pundit said so years ago because feminists triggered him and since then it's held up as gospel rather than being verified.

God dammit, before I read the spoiler I was about to throw an autistic shitfit about that description and I don't even really like the game.

If you've got a good game and a cool setting you better have some nice art to tell me what it's all about. You need to sell me on the aesthetic of the game. Even if your game is setting agnostic you need to give me an idea of what sort of tone/level of grit/etc the mechanics strive towards.

Fundamentally, if I do not care about the setting you're selling then I am not going to buy your game, no matter how good your rules are. There are already dozens of elegant rules systems out there that I can use for a setting of my own making. You need to provide the full package, and your cover art lets people know what your game is all about.

It's more because I'm opposed to the entire concept. It's like Gatchaman Crowds: I've heard that it's not a bad series, but it disgusts me. I hate everything about it, from the homosexual / metrosexual designs, the female protagonists, the way the conflict's largely resolved by dialogue. It's the same way Arrival made me earnestly long for more Starship Troopers.

Oddly enough, that's something some friends and I have been pondering a lot with our own development of a game. We're thinking that a major thing we'll need to do it get some high quality art, at the very least for the cover/iconic characters.

I got nothing against people who've examined a concept and decided they didn't like it. My point was that with some particularly reviled ones, people decide that they hate them because of the bandwagon effect without ever bothering to check if any of their supposed reasons for doing so are based in reality.

>Arrival made me earnestly long for more Starship Troopers
Wait, really? There's like a billion "soldiers fight big alien monsters, and are good guys" movies. Not too many where a scientist in an obscure field gets superpowers from the aliens by doing their nerd thing good.

That does really disappoint me, because I actually like a lot of the ideas behind Blue Rose. Unfortunately, it comes across as a game that's saying "I'm not like those other fantasy RPGs" while being too scared to actually be meaningfully different. Alas, not a lot of people actually make those criticisms, and they get drowned out by people who don't think a game with Blue Rose's ideas should've been made in the first place.

The author's works seriously annoy me. More, the heroine chooses to have a daughter *she knows is going to die before her time*. That shit's just irresponsible!

It may not have been the intention of the original text, but it was a very Hillary-esque movie. It was competence porn for women. The only time I've felt this bored was when I read The Amber Spyglass.

>missing the point of Hannah this much
>AND shitting on the last of muh favorite books
>political silliness out of nowhere

Wew.

She was not competent, she was terrible. Chronically depressed and drowning in her work. Barely a human at all. She gave off the vibe of "the only reason I haven't killed myself is because I'm doing this job". Hannah is the catalyst that brings everything full circle, without Hannah she would have never understood the heptapod language/point of view.

When God turned out to be a retard who dissolved on contact with air, who was accidentally killed when Will was trying to help him, and the solution to the Dust problem was two underaged kids making out and / or fucking I just threw my hands up.

...

They literally named Lyra way back in the first book it was never going to play out any other way. And God was likely the first being ever to exist. It was more than reasonable he be in that state especially with how much of his power he was lending to Metatron/the fortress.

Nechronica is a good game ruined by its players.
Almost all of the players are weeaboo retards that have no connection to the reality whatsoever, making what may have been a unique experience yet another episode in my saturday japanese cartoon.

>GURPS
The entry barrier is so high to make it unfeasible for new players to juggle their way through.

I don't know if I can agree with that sentiment. Nechronica is strictly speaking a rather anime game, about as slife of life as the undead apocalypse can be while also having ridiculous combat things like gunkata and lolis wielding miniguns.

For me, the game that stands out as being unfairly brought down by its art is Nobilis 3e. I love that game, and I love some of its art, but so much of it is terrible, and there's no consistent vision. From what I can gather, they just got whatever art they could with their budget, and they ended up sacrificing quality for quantity. Which was a terrible idea.

Yeah, the fact that the most powerful angels were 'Almost as powerful as a mortal man' made them *terrifying*. Oh no, they might fuck us up with their close-to-mortal strength!

>Undead loli yuri is a tough sell.
Or is it?

It struck a good balance, at least to me. They are ancient, wise, and have an alien perspective. But they're spirit, while mortal races are made of sterner stuff. It's why they're called Watchers, not Doers.

I dunno, man. If I'm fighting the Lord of Angels, and someone tells me "Look out! He's ALMOST as strong as one of our guys!" that sort of takes all the fun out of it.

They are basically cosmic senior citizens, though. That's like expecting a good scrap from Oldman, the Oldest of Men

A noteworthy exception

You know, I'm just curious. The angels were men once, right? Metatron was explicitly some kind of human king. Doesn't that mean there's a kind of life after death that doesn't involve being a ghost who dissolves on contact with air? No matter how lame the "Look at me, I'm *almost* as strong as a teenager" thing is, they seem to have a decent quality of life.

Metatron was described as suitably powerful desu. He was just a horndog, made worse by the fact that a lot of that power went to his head.

You mean Vandal Savage?

Some angels were living beings that somehow became angels. Other angels coalesced out of the dust.

He got manhandled by a middle-aged man and Nicole Kidman.

See that is where you are wrong
While combat is a big part of the system slice of life is definetly the type of cancer that should not be in nechronicha.
It should be and it is designed to be a pschological horror game. Not something to indulge your loli zombie fetish.
But since you are so removed from reality you cant think anything else other than anime tropes. Therefore it is unfeasible to play a game with people like you.

user a major part of the game is social interaction with the other dolls to calm each others madness, and also finding fragments of your past. Step back for a second, lad.

The strongest middle-aged man in the known world and his wife, the ultimate serpent of a woman.

>social interaction=slice of life anime bullshit

Have you ever gone outside of your home and tried to see people IRL?

You might get an idea what social interaction is if you observe them long enough.

user its literally the same thing. You're overreacting because someone called it slice of life, likening it to some kind of cancerous animu that apparently raped you when you were a child.

It's too bad Lord Asriel wasn't Tom Cruise in the movie. If so, it would've been the power of Xenu that beat down Metatron.

The movie doesn't exist what are you even talking about

Virtually everything by Vajra Enterprises (Fates Worse Than Death, In Dark Alleys, KidWorld, etc.). Brilliant ideas, unique and gloriously detailed worlds which often feel like every individual facet thereof could've made an amazing game all by itself... All wrapped up in art so bad it looks like a parody, writing so bland, clinical and detached it feels like a medical document, mechanics so autistic the creator himself admitted he rarely bothers with them, and a seeming conviction to focus only the most deliberately provocative, politically charge, offensive themes possible so that NOBODY could possibly exist who would be able to finish a book without finding it too disgusting to continue at least at one point. Seriously, In Dark Alleys is a fucking masterpiece in that regard. I've never seen a book which managed so well to make people from every side of the political spectrum so goddamn furious by page 12. And mind you, because of the atrocious way the books are written and edited, all those fuckups compound each other. So you got a book that already deals with, say, enormously disagreeable themes that have been carefully chosen so as to offend anyone and everyone, and it proceeds to handle them with Vajra's signature "sociopathic serial killer's grocery list" flat, toneless writing. I know it doesn't sound like anything, but you've never felt that kind of dissonance until you've tried reading In Dark Alleys.

Like, imagine an unnatural hermaphrodite who has transcended human physiology through an intense enough hatred of sexual norms as they channel orgiastic power to give birth to a bloody, fetus like alien servitor. You could imagine that being written by James Raggi: he'd revel in the over-the-topness of it all, the sheer, cheesy celebration of the shocking and gory. You could imagine Greg Stolze writing it: he'd focus on the fucked up, the bizarre, the merging of the sacred and profane, the alien and familiar.

Now imagine the situation being described in one line by an emotionless robot who seems to be more interested in the architecture of the room than the event taking place in it.

This is the writing of In Dark Alleys. It's a magnificent game, but it takes a very weird person to be able to finish reading it.

Tell us more

You got to give it to Brian King: he knows what excites him. He's into urban exploration, historical architecture, psychiatry and pharmaceuticals. You can feel the sheer love and passion when he's talking about obscure drug interactions or the nuances of the art deco movement in Los Angeles.

"Child abuse? Meh, I guess that's also a thing that happens."

D&D 4e. A system literally destroyed by lies.

Look his games up on the share thread. They're the epitome of what this thread describes. I can GUARANTEE to you that if you manage to finish Fates Worse Than Death or In Dark Alleys with an open mind, you'll find a new favorite system. I can also almost guarantee to you that before you finish the first chapter you're going to run into a paragraph so infuriating you'll drop the book right then and there. Doesn't matter if you're /pol/, SJW, capitalist, communist, Buddhist, whatever. You will become too enraged to continue. The dude has a gift.

That's what happens when you're as autistic and scatterbrained as Brian King and appear to be legitimately more interested in writing about architecture than whatever this "game" thing's supposed to be about. Even the organization of the book is the fucking platonic antithesis of intelligent.

Again, with In Dark Alleys, a game about controversial ideas that managed to somehow be too controversial for anyone not to hate. Literally the most controversial, triggering, rage inducing idea in the book: The Androgyne Path.

Want to know where the discussion of the Androgyne path is? PAGE 11. The book STARTS on 5. But because Brian King has the people smarts of a Roomba, he decided that it just makes sense to do things alphabetically.

So six pages into the book, you're going to run into an idea so universally offensive 99% of your potential readers are going to throw the book out the window. The rest could be pure genius, but they'll never even get there.

This is not good organization.

What side is he even on?

People don't give GURPS a chance because of the idea of it having a bunch of math. Not only is this not true, but it's the complete opposite. In the 4 games that I am in, only a few times did we have to do an "equation" to figure slam damage ((HP x yards moved last turn)/100). Any math that needs to be done is done by me, is the symptom of figuring the cost of an item at a discount, or is brought by inventory management - all three are things that are found in other systems.

The biggest problem (if one could call it that) people should have (if they are new to the system) with GURPS is the front-load of rules for character creation. It requires a bit more thought and planning than other systems to build a character "from scratch." This is, of course, assuming the GM hands you the book and nothing else and tells you to build a character. As a GM, I provide example characters and templates to aid character creation, and also personally help new players pick out fitting traits. I've helped a completely new guy make his character in an hour, and most of that time was him figuring what he wanted to do.

GURPS is incredibly easy to play. If a player asks if he can do something, there's a huge chance that a skill or attribute roll will cover it. Riding? Roll Riding. Cooking a gourmet meal? Roll Cooking. Having your character figure an equation to find the correct trajectory of launching a rock at a castle wall, but he's not actually on site, but instead writing a book on the subject? Roll Physics. It's that easy.

That, and the obnoxious fanbase.

>obnoxious fanbase
Veeky Forums isn't the only place GURPS fans hang out, dude. The forums and the discord are extremely helpful and civil.

Came here to post this. Still haven't found a group to play, but half of that is because I'm worried that just showing someone the book may have lasting negative repercussions.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a really good game but because there's one spell that makes people shit themselves to death everyone thinks it's "FATAL lite".

>Veeky Forums will never get shit done and create a nonfurshit version of ironclaw

Imagine the monstergirls. And it'd be relatively easy, just a big editing job.

>How awful that this good game is currently designed to first and foremost appeal to an unlikable fetishist fandom of cartoon obsessed weirdoes
>We could fix it, you know. We could make it designed to first and foremost appeal to another unlikable fetishist fandom of cartoon obsessed weirdoes

This is why no one likes you guys, You always gotta whine about it, you just can't accept that furry is shit. Always got a play the victim, always got to make ludicrous claims about how other things are "just as bad" or "even worse". Just give it a rest, guys. Seriously. Maybe people would hate furry less if you backed off for a while.

It's the other way around, perescutioncomplexanon. I am neither a furry nor a monstergirl fan, I think both crowds are equally cancerous, and I don't know whether to be angry or amused that both think they're so much better than the other. It's like that story about the two frogs arguing about which one is the supreme being before being both eaten by a bird.

You and the furries both live in mud eating flies.

Sure, user. Sure.

It's at fault for its presentation sometimes too though. The example Skill challenges are really bad and, especially for a new DM, can be interpreted as meaning the challenges should be like Skill bingo where people are punished if they use their initiative.

>I am neither a furry nor a monstergirl fan, I think both crowds are equally cancerous, and I don't know whether to be angry or amused that both think they're so much better than the other.
I think monstergirls are marginally less cringey simply on the grounds that they usually have a human head and thus a human voice, but yes they are still both cancerous.

I think monstergirls are less cancerous because monstergirlfags don't embarrass themselves in public as often.
is fucking retarded though.

He has a point, though, it's not retarded. If furries could leave it alone they might not be as reviled.

>outright insults fetish A and says fetish B is objectively superior
>"wow fetish A, if you'd just back off people would like you better"
bruh

Well, furry being the bottom of the barrel is kinda reasonable. Sure you can point out some messed-up fetish things out there, but you can also make them worse by making it furry.

Really though I don't think this bread is the place for this discussion.

Char creation is the problem and most GM's i came across told newbs '' Here is the rulebook and here are some example characters, i am expecting your chars by the weekend,have fun ''

You're missing the point but whatever.

Exactly what I stated. The GM should know the character creation is a hurdle and should provide templates and step-by-step assistance for new players. It's what I do for my games.

> Be Phillip Pullman
> Hate CS Lewis
> Write edgy atheist screed about defeating God
>Realize that angels are traditionally really powerful with all kinds of reality controlling magic.
> Protagonists can't deal with this
>Make angels a bunch of impotent geriatrics
> Characters defeat the spiritual equivalent to a nursing home.
> So brave

LotfP is equally good at annoying everyone. If you're from the right, you'll find the constant female power thumping to be grating. If you're from the left, you'll find the fetishistic violence offensive.

The fact that you use female protagonists in the pejorative really says a lot about you, never mind the fact that, for whatever reason, those other things are a largely just personal hangups that paint you in a similar light. But either way, while Crowds does fall off by the end, and the second season is poorly written in general, it really is worth a watch, if only because it's fun and a little bit different than all the other shit coming out of Japan nowadays.

His own. Bait is free advertising.