Quote from: Kyle Aaron;887653The only way you can get to high level while being stupid is if the DM fudges things to keep you alive, or lets you start new characters at the level of the one who died. Which is to say, stupid players have characters who get to high level because the DM let them.

If games were run as Gygax said Greyhawk and Blackmoor were run (in his "D&D is Only as Good as the DM" article in The Dragon), it should have been a rare, excellent as well as lucky, player who had got a character to such high levels as recommended in the few years since D&D was published.

A lot of campaigns had DMs who gave away XP and magic items, rapidly pumping up the characters to demigod status while only lessening the already feeble challenge to the players.

My friends and I were not like that, but we had no problem treating what we regarded as a crooked game as a non-event ("It was just a bad dream!") and continuing to play those characters. Why people who have really turned the whole thing into a joke should suddenly be too pure for that is baffling. If they couldn't stand to risk their precious pawns, why not play the pre-gens included?

It's just a game, kids!

Look, I'm not going to get all, "Are you crying? There's no crying in D&D!" on people who really are too tender. I've just got to wonder what kind of jackass would do that -- or did until the 'friend'-burning Wick revealed his majesty.

Quote from: Lunamancer;887668This seems to assume the characters have leveled under the same DM, or in the same campaign.

It's a fair assumption. Certainly DMs worldwide tend to be suspicious when a new player shows up with his 43rd level drowlesbianstripperninja - "levelled up from 1st, honest!" - and get them to roll up a new character.

Quote from: Phillip;887716If games were run as Gygax said Greyhawk and Blackmoor were run (in his "D&D is Only as Good as the DM" article in The Dragon), it should have been a rare, excellent as well as lucky, player who had got a character to such high levels as recommended in the few years since D&D was published.

A lot of campaigns had DMs who gave away XP and magic items, rapidly pumping up the characters to demigod status while only lessening the already feeble challenge to the players.

Sure. Both are true. But the point is that DMs tend to be consistent, at least when you average it over the great number of sessions to go from 1st to 10th level. So with the Hardarse DM you'll rarely get to 10th level, and Tomb of Horrors won't be a novelty for you. With the Gimme DM you'll get high level quickly, but that DM either won't run ToH or will soften it. And the DM is consistently hardarse or gimme, or wherever in between - if not within a session, then over time. And players generally adjust to this.

So it's never going to be as the guy described, "haha, FINALLY I get to punish you for your stupidity! Haha!"

I think most of the 10th level characters who went through ToH were rolled up on the spot as 10th level characters - and played through the module and were never played again. So the players largely weren't concerned if the module was ridiculous or not, it's just a one-off, and we'll put up with all sorts of silliness if it's just once.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;887733It's a fair assumption.

Maybe for you. Not for me. I run an open table.

QuoteCertainly DMs worldwide tend to be suspicious when a new player shows up with his 43rd level drowlesbianstripperninja - "levelled up from 1st, honest!" - and get them to roll up a new character.

How about with about 40 zillion RPGs now, each tailor-suited to scratch a precise itch on gamers ballsacks, it gets pretty fucking hard to stick to a game long enough anymore to get the kind of mileage to level the characters to begin with. This is also a sad reality for gamers worldwide.

If I want to apply your consistency argument, running an open table increases the number of legitimately high-level characters available.

As I described, I require adventures that are self-regulating to handle the open table environment. This module meets the criteria.

The flip side of the real jokers getting a comeuppance -- So you're the best, the champs? Let's see who actually comes out top in the rankings at Origins! -- is that it was a good challenge for Ernie Gygax and his ilk.

As an aside, while I referred to a "few years since D&D was published," apparently the tournament was at Origins I in 1975 -- the year following D&D's public debut.

Already there were not only real hotshots such as Ernie the Barbarian, but also people proclaiming the game's possibilities exhausted so quickly because they had rocketed to umpteenth level and killed off a pantheon of gods and took their stuff.

Great, Lunamancer. Well, to your next game I'll bring my 78th level dwarf paladinassassinillusionist. Straight 18s, except I got unlucky rolling Con and only got 17. He has a Machine of Lum the Mad in his extra-large Bag of Holding, and a +6 Vorpal Sword which gives immunity to undead attacks, and 95% Magic Resistance. Also Field Plate +6.

Was all rolled up 3d6 down the line and I fought him up from 1st. Honest.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;887738Great, Lunamancer. Well, to your next game I'll bring my 78th level dwarf paladinassassinillusionist. Straight 18s, except I got unlucky rolling Con and only got 17. He has a Machine of Lum the Mad in his extra-large Bag of Holding, and a +6 Vorpal Sword which gives immunity to undead attacks, and 95% Magic Resistance. Also Field Plate +6.

Was all rolled up 3d6 down the line and I fought him up from 1st. Honest.

So what you're saying is that when you bring your fraud character to my table and we run Tomb of Horrors, you'll lose all your shit when it's teleported to Acererak's chamber, then the character will die when he crawls into a demon mouth. Meanwhile, the level 6 character whose player is much smarter since he had to earn the character will get to take your shit when he loots Acererak's treasure.

Yeah. That's exactly the fucking point of why I demand adventures of this kind.

Quote from: Lunamancer;887670A good aligned siren companion?

A gem worth 100,000 fucking gps?

A siren you have a really good chance of not getting due to how that trick is set up. The Efreet is easier to find.

I did mention the treasure was worth more than the magic items. Theres alot of secondary EXP in that module.

Another thought about Rokugan occurred to me in the shower. Are the etiquette rules there any less relevant and byzantine than the ones in Tékumel?

Quote from: Omega;885049Apparently the PCs dropped the crown on the skull and then tapped it with the death end of the rod. The judges werent sure if that would work and called in a TSR member. Gygax. Who said "Yes. That would destroy him." and thus the villain was done in by his own cleverness.

Quote from: Omega;885094He boinked it again with another diamond and this time I settled the disc under the skull. Sure enough it settled down onto the disc. We still had the Efreet with is and I asked him to make us a tunnel from here to the entrance. And we marched the thing all the way back to a certain green devil portal. You can probably guess where this is going right?

This is what I think scenarios like ToH should be about, and I'd love to play such a game, but how do I know when it is such a game? Because ToH obviously doesn't enforce it.

Quote from: Omega;886978Its alot like many sequel and knock-off movies and comics. The producers havent a clue what made the first interesting and so focus on one element people mentioned and then wonder why the knock-offs arent met with the same welcome.

If all someone sees in Tomb of Horrors is "kill players" then they have totally and abysmally missed the point.

To be fair, sometimes what makes a design compelling is not the same as what makes it identifiable, and the intersection between the two can be really complicated and hard to sort out.

Quote from: Omega;886978And from posts right here some people have willfully missed the point so they can have an excuse to bitch.

How can you be sure? I mean, besides the fact that this discussion is taking place on TheRPGSite

Quote from: 3rik;884986We once had a sports event in high school where we lost all the games on purpose,

But losing on purpose is winning in secret.

Quote from: TristramEvans;885346People have a habit of getting their history lessons from Hollywood films.

Or worse, the History Channel.

Quote from: Lunamancer;887327Take anime. A lot of them have interesting stories, interesting characters, interesting premises. But what actually defines the genre?

Nothing, because it's a medium, not a genre.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;887781This is what I think scenarios like ToH should be about, and I'd love to play such a game, but how do I know when it is such a game? Because ToH obviously doesn't enforce it.

ToH does enforce it. But as with every RPG and board game and whatever, someone may totally ignore that advice. And as shown. They have.

How can you tell. Because your characters arent dead from thinking things through. The DM hasnt started a countdown without explaining what just happened. And so on.

Probably unintentional. But the module also ends up being a character test for a DM.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;887781Nothing, because it's a medium, not a genre.

No. Animation is a medium. A specific style of animation is a genre.

Genre - a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;887738Great, Lunamancer. Well, to your next game I'll bring my 78th level dwarf paladinassassinillusionist. Straight 18s, except I got unlucky rolling Con and only got 17. He has a Machine of Lum the Mad in his extra-large Bag of Holding, and a +6 Vorpal Sword which gives immunity to undead attacks, and 95% Magic Resistance. Also Field Plate +6.

Was all rolled up 3d6 down the line and I fought him up from 1st. Honest.

He could still say no.

Quote from: Lunamancer;887839No. Animation is a medium. A specific style of animation is a genre.

You would be incorrect.  Because within Anime there are several genres, like boys, girls, action, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, horror, family, adult, pretty much the same range as the U.S. Movie Industry.  Or are you saying that the U.S. Movie Industry is a single genre?

Quote from: Lunamancer;887839Genre - a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter

Again, the only thing that makes anime 'unique' is it's country of origin, not the art style, which is actually quite varied.

There is something to Anime as artistic style...

Quote from: WikiIn 1987, Hayao Miyazaki stated that he despised the truncated word anime because to him it represented the desolation of the Japanese animation industry. He equated the desolation with animators lacking motivation and mass-produced, overly expressive products which rely on fixed iconography for facial expressions and protracted and exaggerated action scenes but lack depth and sophistication because they do not attempt to convey emotion or thought.

He's identifying a type of artistic style of Japanese animation tied closely to the use of the word anime.  It's really the fixed iconography of facial expressions that nails it.

Personally I call it the Ranma style, which gets used in tons of anime.  For a lot of people who say they don't like anime, that style is what they mean.

Quote from: CRKrueger;887905There is something to Anime as artistic style...



He's identifying a type of artistic style of Japanese animation tied closely to the use of the word anime.  It's really the fixed iconography of facial expressions that nails it.

Personally I call it the Ranma style, which gets used in tons of anime.  For a lot of people who say they don't like anime, that style is what they mean.

Which is highly ironic, because Mr. Miyazaki uses the same techniques in just about every anime he put out since.  Which means, he's probably changed his opinion since 1987.  What, you don't think his statement is a little out of date now?

No, anime has always been considered a medium, in fact his studio's movies and productions are also considered Anime, and have been since he started making them, and no amount of whining really changed that.

And anime has had a wide range of styles within in, from the depressingly realistic Grave of The Fireflies to the outrageously flashy Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, so much so that it really is a full on medium.

For speakers of English, animation would be the medium and anime some sort of subset of the medium.