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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Surprisingly, I think I disagree with most of what you’ve said in this comment.

    While I understand that it can be discouraging for a creator to have the species and cultures that they have worked on not really be explored by the majority of players I don’t think it is an issue most of the time.

    It also seems a bit odd to me to lump elf, half-elf, and presumably also dwarves in with humans, given that they usually make for the hard core of fantasy races. If those aren’t considered distinct then I’d wager that maybe the issue isn’t that they are less distinct and cool compared to other races but something else. Either that races that are seen as “distinct” actually lean into some sort of “gimmick”, or that people simply pick what they think looks good, and they aren’t into how Gith look, for example.

    While I know there is a large group of people playing Human mainly, I feel like that reflects the fantasy that is being set up by most games that I have engaged with. Humans are the “standard” and other races are exotic, deeply different, and usually rare. At least that’s what seems to me like the most common fantasy setting type (and also my preference). That’s why I don’t mind when the majority plays humans, as that does reflect the story of the game. It seems more odd to me when the party strolls into town and they have a tiefling, drow, aasimar, and lizardfolk. When all those races are stated to be unique, strange, and alien to most people and those players don’t really get a chance to shine with their “weirdness” in the party because there is no baseline that they can compare themselves against. After all: when everyone is super, nobody is.

    The only time I can recall this creating a ludo-narrative dissonance is in Guild Wars 2, where humanity is supposed to be a dying (alien) race with few members left. By all accounts the people of the land should be a majority of charr (cat-people, basically). But of course, the “human female meta” as it is called (meaning people playing conventionally attractive human, female characters with “the sexy outfit”) is greater, and as it turns out most people are playing humans. The result being that what you see when walking around is mostly humans when it “should” be mostly charr. A lot of people just play characters they think “look good”.

    As for why people are playing humans. I think there is a reason that you haven’t touched on. I, for example, will play a human for almost every one of my characters unless I have a good reason not to. This is because I base my characters around a theme or a story and I want the focus on the character to be on that theme or story, and not on their species.

    I also don’t think designers make humans boring or bad on purpose to discourage players from playing them. They could just not include humans if that is what they wanted (Plenty of good examples of this. Mousegard and Humblewood for RPGs. Deep Rock Galactic, Dwarf Fortress and a ton others for video games). I think most often it comes down to people not knowing what to do with humans. Most fantasy races tend to be “human but x”, so when you are making a human you don’t really have anything “but”, meaning that you usually end up is a situation of “humans, well, we all know what a human is, don’t we? I can’t see anything special about humans that one of these other races don’t embody in a greater capacity.”. (Side note: I like how GW2 handled this. The 5 races have fairly good and distinct themes. Charr are militaristic, Asura are obsessed with knowledge, Sylvari are young and still figuring out the world, Norn are shapeshifting and spiritualistic, and Humans are devoted to their gods who brought them to this world.)


  • Sounds similar to the system they use in WFRP 4e. Also a system that is very elegant and far better than the system used in DnD 5e. Similarly to PF2e (as far as I gather with a brief search) items are assigned a value between 1-3 and players usually have a carry value of around 6 to begin. Any item that is worn gets -1 and items in backpacks/containers do not count towards the limit (but they have weight/bulk/encumbrance points themselves).




  • Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you’ve encountered a classic “sær skrivingsfeil”. (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called “særskrivingfeil”, “sær skrivingsfeil” means “odd/weird writing error” and is itself a mistake of the “særskrivingsfeil” type.)

    Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you’ve mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don’t love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don’t love it there is a perception that the langauge is “limited” or “boring”. I’d love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I’ve come across aren’t very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I’ll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook’s series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

    English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I’m talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn’t put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren’t as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that’s what the genre “sounds like”. I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.


  • Another Norwegian here. The sidene between the two is that words have stress, and compound words thus (generally) only has one (primary) stress. So “prinsesse pult” has stress on both words while “prinsessepult” only had one stress. (Also, in my dialect “pult” meaning desk is pronounced /pult/ while “pult” meaning fuck is pronounced /pu:T/ (capital T standing in for retrofleks t in this case) so pronounced that way “prinsessepult” becomes “fucked like a princess”)



  • I think if one is being nitpicky, the reading of the Ammunition Property is that it specifically calls out weapons with ammunition as being treated as Improvised Weapons (which would come with not being able to use the weapon’s properties or proficiency, or at least so it seems to me), rather than redirecting you to read a different part of the rules section. It would be odd (and honestly it is a bit odd with the normal reading as well) to have two distinct properties that qualifies something to fall under the same rule (being a Ranged Weapon and having the Ammunition Property), particularly when one is always going to contain the other.

    And the Thrown property on the Dart being useless only really becomes a problem if you take this very specific and nitpicky ruling to be good, which honestly mostly serves as evidence that reading the rules that way is not RAI. It seems to be the RAI intention that the Dart having the Thrown Property is to allow you to use your proficiency for the attack, which you would not be able to if you threw an Improvised Weapon (such as if you were to throw a Sickle).


  • If you look at the Ammunition Property it says “If you use a weapon that has the ammunition property to make a melee attack, you treat the weapon as an improvised weapon”, which I read as meaning your weapon is an Improvised Weapon rather than a Ranged Weapon. Although I do concede that the improvised weapons rule says that if you are using a Ranged Weapon to make a Melee Attack it will deal 1d4 damage, which I assume means that you can’t use the rule that says that you can treat it like another similar weapon, which I think is odd, but ok.

    (Also, if you want to be very nitpicky about it, the ammunition property says you can’t make ranged attacks without loaded ammunition, but any type of attack will spend your ammunition. However, I don’t think that’s a fair reading, and I think the ammunition property simply does not apply, because you are using it as an Improvised Weapon and therefore none of the Properties apply.)

    I suppose if you really wanted to get into the details, the rules in the Ammunition section would not apply to weapons that are Ranged Weapons, but do not have the Ammunition Property, like the Dart or Net. But I feel like it would be most reasonable to rule that these are also considered Improvised Weapons and not Ranged Weapons that deal 1d4 damage if used to make a Melee Attack. (Although the Net can not deal damage as per it’s Special Property, so that doesn’t really apply to it, so you would be left with the Dart, which doesn’t have the Heavy Property, and thus isn’t really relevant to the greater discussion here.)


  • This doesn’t really work as far as I can tell, RAW or RAI. While it is the case that in theory a Melee Attack with a Heavy Ranged Weapon would satisfy both criteria, there is no weapon that can normally perform such an attack, as far as I’m aware. Using a Heavy Crossbow or a Longbow to make a Melee Attack would be attacking with an Improvised Melee Weapon, which is both not a Ranged Weapon and does not have the Heavy property, so neither Feat would be useful.

    If we are being generous we could say that attacking with a Heavy Crossbow would be like a Club and a Longbow would be like a Staff, and per the Improvised Weapons rules we could use those weapon stats for our Improvised Weapon, however, note that neither of these have the Heavy property, so you would be unable to use either Feat in this case as well. (The Heavy property, particularly on Ranged Weapons, seems to be not about the weight of the weapon (an intrinsic property of the thing), but about the strength required to attack with such a weapon in it’s intended manner. In this way it would make sense that neither Feat would work.)