Quote from: Aos;524045Actually, it's hard now in general. I've busted several plagiarists merely by googling a couple of sentences from their papers. We caught one kid three fucking times, and he was a senior in the department.

These guys sound like total dummies!

I remember back in the day, one at least wrote down the problem solution in one's own handwriting and own words, instead of copying everything word for word.

Are there no academic penalties these days for blatant cheating?

Quote from: ggroy;524050Are there no academic penalties these days for blatant cheating?

At CU Boulder if the instructor decided to get the administration involved you could be expelled. Getting forced out of the class was about the best one could hope for, and far less likely. They are really fucking serious about it there. Just thinking about it actually makes me smile.

At UNM disciplinary action was up to the individual instructor, which is how I managed to bust the same guy three times; the prof (the guy who really taught me how to seek out and bust cheaters) kept letting him off the hook for reasons I still don't understand.

Quote from: Aos;524058At CU Boulder if the instructor decided to get the administration involved you could be expelled. Getting forced out of the class was about the best one could hope for, and far less likely. They are really fucking serious about it there. Just thinking about it actually makes me smile.

At UNM disciplinary action was up to the individual instructor, which is how I managed to bust the same guy three times; the prof (the guy who really taught me how to seek out and bust cheaters) kept letting him off the hook for reasons I still don't understand.

Over the years I've heard stories from friends and colleagues still in academia, that cheating in undergraduate engineering courses is notoriously difficult to prove conclusively.  So they don't bother pursuing disciplinary action most of the time.

A friend of mine is a professor and he has a fun story about cheating: Youtube link

As for 'kid's RPG' like Mermaid Adventures and Faery's Tale... I'm not seeing them as inherently more 'childish' than Star Wars or anything else... I'm assuming if a young girl wants to make a bloodthirsty Mermaid (perhaps one of the 'shark people') she can.
I'm guessing the point is not to have the darker aspects built into the baseline setting... but the players are free to go there if they like. So there are probably no stats for Cthulhu or Deep Ones in the rules.

Quote from: Simlasa;524085As for 'kid's RPG' like Mermaid Adventures and Faery's Tale... I'm not seeing them as inherently more 'childish' than Star Wars or anything else... I'm assuming if a young girl wants to make a bloodthirsty Mermaid (perhaps one of the 'shark people') she can.
I'm guessing the point is not to have the darker aspects built into the baseline setting... but the players are free to go there if they like. So there are probably no stats for Cthulhu or Deep Ones in the rules.

Combat is the thing though.
Its been said , and countered, numerous times but if your rule book is 1/3 combat, 1/3 equiment you can use for combat and 1/3 characters who are all comabt balanced then chances are your game will have a lot of combat.

One of the key isues RPGs suffer from is the inability to really emulate much that isn't combat.
You get a bit of exporation
You get some investigation mechanics
You get some social mechanics.

The last two are roundly ciritised in toto by a lot of players.

RPGs emerged from wargames, you can't escape that and building a game that isn't focused or at least has a lot of time for, combat is very difficult.

I think you can do it. with discovery investigation clue /quest object type mechanics, like collect all the rainbow fairy colours or whatever

I also think a really good magic system that did more that COMBAT and had some depth. Something like combining elelments to get effects or whatever, again with the puzzle route might work as well.

Of course my daugher would still just chop its head off and eat it but then ....

I'm assuming Mermaid Adventures has combat/conflict of some sort. Perhaps it's not always 'to the death'... I don't know. When I say it avoids the 'darker stuff' I mean... well, the kind of stuff that usually draws me to a game... hideous monsters borne out of suffering, baby-eating madmen, anti-heroes made of feathers they've torn off of dead angels' wings. The sort of pixies that dance through my head when I'm listening to Skinny Puppy.
It would be clever if they had some sort of sub-game for costume design though... the developer's daughter seemed to think how her character looked was as important as what she did. Maybe some competition for bling resources and a supplementary set of paper dolls to display them.

Quote from: jibbajibba;524087I think you can do it. with discovery investigation clue /quest object type mechanics, like collect all the rainbow fairy colours or whatever

Or collect all the BASEBALL RUNS FOR THE WIN!!!!

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;524114Or collect all the BASEBALL RUNS FOR THE WIN!!!!

-clash

A fair point Clash as your Baseball game demonstrates.....

But, I mean. WW can't make a go of it anymore. They are basically done. GURPS can't.

They basically are not making any real, substantial product lines anymore.

What happened?

Video games happened.

Quote from: 1989;524229But, I mean. WW can't make a go of it anymore. They are basically done. GURPS can't.

They basically are not making any real, substantial product lines anymore.

What happened?

(a) The industry shrunk.

(b) The industry changed. (The RPG market jumped on long-tail economics faster than any other market segment and, due to its relatively small size and stagnancy, new products from established publishers were hit hard.)

(c) The decline of both GURPS and the World of Darkness arguably began when they released new editions. (4th Edition for GURPS and nWoD.)

The unfortunate reality with GURPS is that it was largely an industry dinosaur that continued to be a force due to it massive and comprehensive library of support products: Long before 4th Edition rolled around, there were lots of people saying things like "I don't actually play GURPS, but I do buy the supplements". 4th Edition rendered that entire library of existing material obsolete. I said at the time that this was going to pose a major hurdle for the game: It took two decades to develop that library; it would probably take just as long for 4th Edition to develop that same value. Unfortunately, due to the changing nature of the RPG industry that was never going to happen.

Ironically, GURPS was almost perfectly positioned for the transition to the long-tail / e-book reality of today's RPG market. Instead, they're still struggling to justify the development costs necessary to rebuild the library of material.

nWoD, on the other hand, is just another example of a maxim that is pretty much universally true in the RPG industry: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base.

This, BTW, is why D&D5 is almost certainly going to fail: I see no indication of a clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction among either 4E or Pathfinder fans with the games that they're playing.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;524236(a) The industry shrunk.

(b) The industry changed. (The RPG market jumped on long-tail economics faster than any other market segment and, due to its relatively small size and stagnancy, new products from established publishers were hit hard.)

(c) The decline of both GURPS and the World of Darkness arguably began when they released new editions. (4th Edition for GURPS and nWoD.)

The unfortunate reality with GURPS is that it was largely an industry dinosaur that continued to be a force due to it massive and comprehensive library of support products: Long before 4th Edition rolled around, there were lots of people saying things like "I don't actually play GURPS, but I do buy the supplements". 4th Edition rendered that entire library of existing material obsolete. I said at the time that this was going to pose a major hurdle for the game: It took two decades to develop that library; it would probably take just as long for 4th Edition to develop that same value. Unfortunately, due to the changing nature of the RPG industry that was never going to happen.

Ironically, GURPS was almost perfectly positioned for the transition to the long-tail / e-book reality of today's RPG market. Instead, they're still struggling to justify the development costs necessary to rebuild the library of material.

nWoD, on the other hand, is just another example of a maxim that is pretty much universally true in the RPG industry: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base.

This, BTW, is why D&D5 is almost certainly going to fail: I see no indication of a clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction among either 4E or Pathfinder fans with the games that they're playing.

I am dissatisfied with both Pathfinder and 4e. I want a gridless D&D again. That's all it will really take to get me back. Oh, and no dungeonpunk/cartoony stuff.

Quote from: two_fishes;524230Video games happened.

Yeah, I guess so. But what kind of video games have replaced WW-style, story-heavy roleplay?

Quote from: 1989;524257Yeah, I guess so. But what kind of video games have replaced WW-style, story-heavy roleplay?

Those have largely been replaced by easily available and cheap personal lubricant.

Quote from: 1989;524257Yeah, I guess so. But what kind of video games have replaced WW-style, story-heavy roleplay?

Backstory- and canon-heavy CRPGs, which means most of them nowadays. Major games often come with enormous setting bibles which the story-centric folks enjoy so much, and that doesn't even count fanon. The semi-interactive nature of CRPGs is a better vehicle for the story people than many tabletop games anyway - there is nobody to fuck up the carefully build narrative arcs. At the crucial junctures, you may choose between three or four outcomes, but narrative control is actually taken care of behind the scenes. I find that a lot of people who were into roleplaying for the WW stuff love that. That's why they are no longer gaming.