Quote from: Pierce InverarityStill, Der Ruf des Warlock looks fairly cool. If you're into Manowar.

Corrected that...

Sosthenes made the most important points already, so let me just add on that.

I guess the root of all evil lies deep within the beginning of TDE. The designers weren't wargamers (while the guys behind Midgard were), they didn't understand the origins of D&D, so their rip-offs were doomed from the beginning to be bad pastiche.
For instance, there isn't even a single one well-made dungeon for TDE. All dungeons for that systems are dull and straight-forward affairs - no intersections, no interaction except for hack&slash, no impact of PC actions on the rest of the dungeons (as sounds which trigger guards), not even a functional ecology.
As their dungeons turned out as dull and boring experiences, the designers didn't recognize that their design was made poorly. Instead, they blamed the very principle of dungeon-crawling as "roll-play" and "untrue role-playing" - and so they settled for the story rail-road.

In addition, the mechanics suck. Skill checks take way too much time (roll 3d20, compare each d20 with the corresponding attribute, use skillpoints to compensate failed roles, keep the number of skill points left as grade of success), and combat is tedious, dull and non-tactical.
Therefore, add these memes to the damnation of dungeons:

"Combats suck in our game, so they aren't fun and true role-playing."

"Rule usage sucks in our game, so it isn't fun and true role-playing."

They repeated this meme over and over agin. Hell, there is an official  rant named "Auf ein Wort" which glorifies the Swinish way in which rules, combats and dungeons are despised and atmosphere, mood and story are glorified, combined with fudging, cheating and Golden Rule as universal tools to reach this "True Role-Play(TM)" stuff.

In addition to what Sosthenes said about metaplot sight-seeing, there was no fucking instruction to build your own adventures. All what was left was this:
a.) Buy the official adventures (which brainwash you further to be a Swine)
b.) Buy other games, learn from them how to write adventures.
c.) Try your best to write your own adventures

Luckily, as a poor pupil whithout parents who blow sugar into my ass I settled for c and later b. Many others settled however for a+c, which reinforced the whole story-oriented "True Role-Play(TM)" rail-road stuff.



The memes TDE produces are strong. Most gamers haven't seen a good dungeon, let alone a instruction to build good dungeons, for their whole life and despise adventure gaming, without knowing good adventure gaming. It's like we have a whole nation which hates Soul music, simply because it only knows Destinys Child and has never heard of James Brown.
TDEs assumptions creep into everything else. Even playable, although crude games as Shadowrun get fucked up because the memes above creep in "because that's the way gaming has to be run - look, TDE is true role-playing, and combats aren't fun there, and you can only reach drama and mood by cheaty-storytelling, so must it be with SR too".

We have no counter-weight here - Midgard was to obscure and turned more and more into an exclusive club for ever-aging Midgard veterans, while D&D suffered from incompetent German publishers. (Even the current publisher Feder&Schwert sucks golf balls through hoses, translates poorly, doesn't have a German SRD and threatens everyone legally who wants to set up a German SRD - the only ones responsible for the current success of D&D are the original designers and WotC.)
TDE Swinery is the baseline in Germany, and everyone who deviates from this baseline had the luck to get be introduced by an other game, to shrug off the TDE memes or to have shaken off the memes after having seen that they come from a badly designed game, not from role-playing as a whole.

Quote from: SosthenesCorrected that...

But surely that could be drifted towards Black Sabbath / Slayer / [Your favorite Death Metal band here]?

Quote from: Pierce InverarityBut surely that could be drifted towards Black Sabbath / Slayer / [Your favorite Death Metal band here]?

Ever so slightly. IIRC the game _starts_ with a Manowar quote. To the rest of the world: Some Germans take Manowar seriously. As if liking Hasselhoff hasn't ruined our reputation enough...

Quote from: SosthenesIIRC the game _starts_ with a Manowar quote.

:eyecrazy:

Jesus Christ.  Fucking germans...    :eyecrazy: :spank:

RPGPundit

I found this...

//www.thedarkeyerpg.com

If that's the game, then the game system looks interesting. I have my doubts about the setting, but it looks like it could be easily homebrewed. I'm not very interested in metaplot or railroady adventure modules, but the game system itself seems to show some promise, if the website is any indication. It doesn't look nearly as cool as Warhammer though. :raise:

I'm sorry for being childish, but whenever I see "The Dark Eye", I just keep thinking of "The Brown Eye".

Well, the literal translation would be "The Black Eye". Any better?

AH-HA! That is the Dark Eye adventure I really liked I think!



(not sure, though. Hence me posting it. Any German-speaking gamer on the forum willing to tell me if that's what I'm thinking about, i.e. a rather vast dungeon set-up with a huge magical garden type of area where adventurers get attacked by carnivorous plants and such?)

That´s the one, huge garden, only half-serious, many dungeon elements. A little bit railroady on the hedges.

I'm scouting eBay.fr right now to see what I can get in France that'd be awesome to take back with me to Canada.

Quote from: RPGPundit;110828So what I want to know is where does the "Swinishness" of DSA show up?

I know Sett hates the game, and blames germany's large swine-ratio on it. So any ideas as to what the game has that might create these swinish habits as seen by Sett?

RPGpundit

Come on, you know as well as anyone else:  Sett says a lot of things.

Sett just wants to be Mirror-Ron, and DSA gives him an easy way to do it while playing both sides of the field.  It's popular as hell in Germany, so he gets to be all high-and-mighty and better than those ignorant jackasses who play the mainstream game there, but then he can come over to English-speaking boards and play the victorious populist by glomming onto D&D as his personal Sorcerer.

For what it's worth, I found the computer game based on the RPG to be loads of fun, with a nice 'old school' feel to it (not much magic, or even hints that there was alot of magic anywhere at any time).