Quote from: gleichman;282231Besides profanity...

Shades of Gray, it's even more cliche and over-used now than the classic good/evil conflicts of tradition. And far more boring.

Yup, gotta agree with that one. Gone beyond fashionable to snooze...

I don't know what else, the last 25 plus years seems to have had a lot of filler in everything.

I recall going to the rpg shop in the 90's and seeing a lot of things that seemed like anti-matter whenever I popped them open. Lot's of various genred blandness. A subject followed by pages and pages of obvious reiteration of common ideas as if nobody knows what a robot or a werewolf is. Thats what really has been done to death. Too much moron for moron talk and not enough intelligently prepared self-contained game grabs. GURPS in general is a fine example of these "filled with dork talk" books that I can't stand.

A specific example of where I'm coming from is the original drow of the underdark book from the 90's, you could have gotten everything and more from the original adventure so why did I have to buy this to find out there is nothing really worth playing in here? Its like someone played the module and has had musings on it that you could never use unless you were constantly feeling very unimaginative.

Another classic type is the gazetteers that go on and on and never touch down to a simple adventure. Like RIFTS. I could punch Siembieda in the face for making it interesting enough to absorb but once you're on the tenth book you feel like an asshole for buying into it all.

Thats really been done to death.

Quote from: J Arcane;282226-  Exterminatus.  I'm sick of the cliche that the Imperium just goes around sandblasting every bloody world with the slightest hint of anything it doesn't like.  It's stupid, and it isn't even true in the setting.

Loudly agreeing with this one. I'm personally quite pleased that the various Dark Heresy groups I've played in haven't fallen into this trap, because it strikes me that the whole Exterminatus thing can all too easily become an excuse for the PCs not to actually follow through on an investigation.

The one time I've actually seen Exterminatus come onto the table in a Dark Heresy game was actually extremely tense and exciting: we'd stumbled across a world which had been corrupted from the top down, an Adeptus Mechanicus Forge World where the local Tech-Priests had become drawn into the worship of the dark gods of the Necrons, and had been grooming the planetary population to become delicious nibbles for said gods.

Even then, we'd have considered just purging the local Mechanicus, except the gods were enroute to begin a binge of eating and assimilating, and we realised we wouldn't get enough Imperial Navy forces to the system on time to effect a defence of the planet - so the Exterminatus was intended to deny the Necron gods their source of food and bodies, rather than simply punishing the planet.

And even then, we bent over backwards to find an alternative to Exterminatus, to the point where we effectively suicided the party in order to save the system and prevent the invasion.

In my view, if the threat isn't serious enough that the PCs are willing to go this far to stop it, it's not serious enough for Exterminatus to even be on the table. That shit is rare.

Quote from: noisms;281424Elves.

I second that shit... I also despise fat troll-like people that just have to play elves. Like playing a beautiful magical creature will change the fact that they are awkward ugly humans.

I hate Half Whatevers... Half Dragons Half demons Half bullfrogs... I say be all of one thing or be nothing. Very few things in our world can interbreed.

Hating on paladins.

Really, get over it.  Hard enough to play one right when everyone--often including the GM--is out to fuck you over and make you lose your status.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;282376Hating on paladins.

Really, get over it.  Hard enough to play one right when everyone--often including the GM--is out to fuck you over and make you lose your status.

I don't think I'd mind paladins as an advanced class, but I never came to terms with the idea of a "level 1 paladin".  So, you've done nothing with your life yet, you have exactly 0 Xp, and you are already a champion, a hero beyond compare? Nice gig!

In the end it comes down to one of those ugly D&D misuses of words, like the Medusa somehow becoming the name of a race rather than the name of an indivudual gorgon.  And let not even get started with gorgons.

You can explain it away and people who played AD&D for 20 years I am stop noticing it at some stage, but wrong is wrong!

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;282376Hating on paladins.

Really, get over it.  Hard enough to play one right when everyone--often including the GM--is out to fuck you over and make you lose your status.

There so geared perfect for solo play that it doesn't even make sense to have them in a group of individuals creating their own thing. The worst is when entire "weenie" campaigns have congealed towards that class.

"Well...we have to start in a good city..."

That kinda "crap think" just misses the point of playing in my opinion.

There should be a "diet paladin" default. Where the fighter character has to become the paladin (or anti-paladin/assassin or something else alignment based) through play.

I've had the same problem with clerics with their on demand miracles for every bonehead that sees them as a "heal pump". In the 90's I abandoned clerics totally. In recent years, I let them slip back in because the way i did it was off. I've decided to make them extinct the proper way by giving them no reason to be played for healing.

Quote from: Gene Weigel;282482I've had the same problem with clerics with their on demand miracles for every bonehead that sees them as a "heal pump". In the 90's I abandoned clerics totally. In recent years, I let them slip back in because the way i did it was off. I've decided to make them extinct the proper way by giving them no reason to be played for healing.

Would you care to develop about the status of clerics in your games (maybe in a new thread) ?

Quote from: boulet;282484Would you care to develop about the status of clerics in your games (maybe in a new thread) ?

The way I did was to make the magic available for magic-users as it is but it didn't make sense as some spells were stilted earlier for different classes, etc.

So I introduced a different class. I have to type it up for publication in some form.

Quote from: Gene Weigel;282252Another classic type is the gazetteers that go on and on and never touch down to a simple adventure. Like RIFTS. I could punch Siembieda in the face for making it interesting enough to absorb but once you're on the tenth book you feel like an asshole for buying into it all.

Thats really been done to death.

Well, RIFTS books underwent a kind of evolution, from good to bad to ok to good again; the last one to my surprise as I've just found this out now that I'm running a RIFTS campaign for the first time in 10 years.

When RIFTS first came out, the main book itself was awesome, groundbreaking, and incredibly fun and playable.
Sourcebook 1 was good, Vampire Kingdoms was OK, and basically the sourcebooks were great; Triax, Mindwerks, and Mercenaries (even Mechanoids) and Atlantis was the culmination of high-powered awesome.
Then after that you had a one-two punch of several really awful sourcebooks: England, Africa, Wormwood, and several others which seemed to fit the pattern you describe of "interesting but useless", sometimes without even the "interesting" part.

This was followed by a long period of relative crap, stuff that was at best repetitive in feeling (like Japan, China, South America, etc), or at worst just useless shit. Eventually, the Coalition Wars came along, and though I hate metaplot with a passion the books as SOURCEBOOKS for RIFTS were some of the first good stuff to have shown up in years.  And since then, in the last few years, you've had a number of sourcebooks which have gotten back to that early-book feel and usefulness; I guess its since now they've run out of "area" sourcebooks they've actually gotten back to detailing stuff for gaming rather than detail what's going on in "RIFTS Indonesia" or "RIFTS Southeastern New Zealand".

RPGPundit

Oddly your opinion of the RIFTS books seems to match mine very well, though I am rather fond of the various geographical expansions personally (I LIKE South America 1&2, though there was some obvious self-rip off shit going on there...and a bunch of wacky stuff on top, with too little focus on the cool and too much on the fringe whack... but still food for gaming).

I, however, have sort of gotten to the point where I can re-read a book (like... Russia...) and see all that is wrong with Mr. Siembieda as an author and even, I hate to say it, as a person.  Formulaic political layouts, bad guys always better/cooler than the good guys, someone secretly planning to betray the only good guy worth a shit in a fight, but feeling bad about it... whatever.

Never mind an utter lack of logistical support for any of these 'super-powers' (nations, I mean... NATIONS, Put.The.Cape.Down.), and a shocking lack of uncontrolled territory to squeeze in all the wild man stuff they put in there...

Miine them for ideas and toss the text... yeah

Are cool bad guys such a bad thing, though?
I mean, I don't know what Siembieda's motives are for that, and I agree it happens often in the RIFTS books, but there's nothing worse (and shit that has been more done to death) in a sourcebook than "totally awesome super-powerful GOOD guy who essentially makes the PCs pointless"!

Whereas, having a totally awesome super-powerful BAD guy means that the PCs have a challenge worthy of them in front of them.  The "awesome" good guys are supposed to be the PCs themselves.

RPGPundit

The problem I had with Rifts' "cool bad guys" was that they started glorifying what were basically Nazis, and that shit just creeps me the fuck out and makes me want to run far far away.

You may've been fond of the Coalition War Machine/Siege on Tolkeen stuff, but to me it was the final stroke that said "Fuck this shit, I'm getting out before the nutters start pouring in".

I misuse the term cool. I should say it more accurately that the loving detail given to the badguys is what grates.  The worse the badguy, the more love he gets almost.  Its vaguely masturbatory even when the bad guys aren't nazi's in nazi drag...

Quote from: J Arcane;282557The problem I had with Rifts' "cool bad guys" was that they started glorifying what were basically Nazis, and that shit just creeps me the fuck out and makes me want to run far far away.

You may've been fond of the Coalition War Machine/Siege on Tolkeen stuff to be great, but to me it was the final stroke that said "Fuck this shit, I'm getting out before the nutters start pouring in".

And pour in they did.

My solution is to just turn up and layer in the crazy.  Everyone knows that they are xenophobic and manaphobic (slightly less so for psi).  No one seems to take much notice at their quiet, but open, sexism.  (Few, if any, women in positions where getting maimed, crippled or killed is an occupational hazard; they're all kept behind tall, thick walls and guarded jealously by the men and their dogs- and they're not idle; they handle the staff work.)  Even fewer are at all noticing their quiet, covert racism. ("Pure" = "WASP"; this makes the bulk of Coalition subjects mutants, but acceptably so, which--combined with ruthless and pervasive propaganda and a truly illiterate population--makes it easy for their eugenics/genetics program to proceed unimpeded to recreate Humanity as an Aryan super-race.)  Only the Inner Elite knows that there is both an Inner and Outer Elite (following Strauss), and the Inner Elite holds all true power- they're the successors to the pre-Rifts imperialist elite in North America.

Why play it this way?  If you're going to have a synarchist power bloc as one of the big villains, don't go by half-measures.