Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[Kugelfisch]

Who is this Schwab fellow who looks like an evil Peanut M&M?

All of our common enemy.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Found something stupid for the capeshit thread, but let me get on a vaguely related tangent here:

The Autism of Mutants & Masterminds

You may or may not have already heard of Green Ronin's capeshit system Mutants & Masterminds. An evolution of their True20 system, it was one of the darlings of the first wave of OGL products. Like its predecessor True20, it's a bit of an oddity in the realm if D&D derivatives in that it only uses d20 rolls. Damage and similar effects have generally fixed values, and the defender has to Save vs Not Getting Fucked.

The most recent 3rd edition always had a bit of a rough start, incremental improvements notwithstanding. It strangely kept some ambiguities from 2nd edition which that edition already had to clarify, and its default setting shifted focus on a new city which few people seemed to really care. Probably didn't help that the accompanying Adventure Path for the setting took forever for the next chapter, which kinda sucks since there wasn't really info of a specific part of the city until the Adventure Path bothered to cover it.
Fortunately the edition started with an actual bang in the form of an offical license for DC shit. A shame they lost that license long ago, but don't worry, they're about to repeat this with Valiant Comics, if you care about shit like this.

Then there was some drama in their official forums, mostly because the modders became woker and more totalitarian, turning a dumb argument between two longtime forum members into a dumpster fire that ultimately led to the whole forum being shut down. All because some modder perma-banned a user before she had time to apologize

Over 5 years later they finally bothered to update the main spotlight of their default setting - Freedom City - to 3rd edition.
Unfortunately during this time Green Ronin had fully succumbed to the woke, so things get a bit weird.
Now, admittedly, some changes were just ported over from that 2nd edition sourcebook which - among other things - detailed a future version of Freedom City.
Some of their new ideas however including turning quite a few B- and C-list with a gadget- or generic-superpower-gimmick into some kind of supernatural critter. Apparently there's some metaplot reason for this, but how many evil ghost villains do you really need in your capeshit setting?
Then there's the big one: the new Lady Liberty.

Lady Liberty is basically a cross between the DC heroes Green Lantern and Uncle Sam. Essentially a succession of legacy heroines powered by truth, justice and the American way. Any time the current Lady croaks or retires, another one is chosen.
This is Current Year, however, so the most recent Lady Liberty to be chosen is a Mexican dreamer troon - except I don't think the artist really got the memo regarding that latter part, since "she" is drawn like any other (de-sexualized) female.

Does this look like a troon to you?Show

Also why does "she" dress like a patriotic Kamala Khan? This has got to be islamophobic in some way

Aside from working on rendition of their rules for Valiant Comics, they're mostly keeping M&M on life support with mini-supplements like this.
>A small guide for running adventures centered around a parade
>Of course it has their Budget Justice League front and center during a Pride Parade (the shirtless guy is Literally Gay Flash, btw)
>Of course the list of potential adventure seeds include "Safe Independence Day fron nationalist scum" or "Protect the Pride Parade from a literal Ku Klux Klan Ghost"

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

For D&D's 50th anniversary: A wolf in sheep's clothing. And no, I'm not talking about the retarded monster that looks like a bunny sitting on a tree stump.

>reprint of the earliest version of D&D
>exclusive correspondences of the original creators

Hey, this sounds great. Can't wait to-
>annotations and historical context
Oh.

There's a very high chance this book will be closer to an annotated print of Mein Kampf where the annotations ensure you that what you're reading is, in fact, evil.
I mean, it's not like WotC actively hates white people (at least the ones not currently in charge of WotC).
Or that they have slapped "THIS IS PROBABLY PROBLEMATIC" labels on every storepage of an older D&D product.
Or that the woke spectrum of the hobby is always trying to demonize Gygax, be it because of evil orcs (aka black people), evil Drow (aka more black people), or whatever other kind of bullshit they come up with (I think a recent one is shitting on Rule 0 because it like gives too much power to the GM or some shit).
Or that they have already announced that the original D&D does not conform to their current Doublethink standards, and the Fighter being called "Fighting Man" is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
Or that the current staff of snowflakes have made a "Thank You" video where they congratulate themselves and leave out all those old white men who created D&D in the first place.

tl;rd: I can't wait to get a totally legal copy of this book to mine for quality annotations.
Also I'll eat my fedora if the book doesn't end with a bottom line like "The only ethically acceptable edition of D&D is the current one".

[Le Redditeur]

Fucking WotC is going to release a Mahvel MtG set next. They can all go to the Seven Pits of Hell and never come back.

[wulfenlord]

I thought Lego x D&D was next :3

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Give me Steven Universe cards or give me death.

[Kugelfisch]

Fucking WotC is going to release a Mahvel MtG set next.

If I hadn't considered Magic dead and fucking boring years ago I'd be absolutely livid.
Now I just want to see how shit they can make it.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

WotC is doing so well financially that they'ce decided to stop translating D&D into Portuguese.
I guess Brazil will survive. They've always had a thriving regional tabletop industry, which probably includes at least one D&D clone.

[Le Redditeur]

Oh my. I still have the translated D&D first edition box that was released in 1992 - even when TSR was bankrupting itself, they still could afford to license the localization rights to a big tabletop distributor here. And that was during the hyperinflation period before 1994-1995, so I suppose negotiating that in dollaridoos was a goddamn mess. The Wizards of the Tiny Hats decided to release the translated versions themselves, like they're doing with MTG, only to find out that tabletop RPGs and card games are in fact not the same.

There's always the old editions, and Pathfinder, and whatever d20 OGL version the guys behind Tormenta are doing. But it is the end of an era.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

D&D had some wild foreign releases back when TSR essentially just sold the license to the locals.
Like the Japanese release of the Rules Cyclopedia. It's usually a 300 page hardcover that consolidates the BECMI box set line, but the Japanese turned it into multiple volumes of manga-sized softcovers (probably easier to print over there), complete with original manga art.

Nowadays everyone prints their tabletop hardcovers in China, so the logistics are less of an issue.

I think WotC went completely batshit in this regard around 4th edition, when they yanked the license from the German publisher and translator (without replaxing them with their own service, effectively leaving Krautland in the hands of Pathfinder).