1. Game system is always less important than who you play with.
2. Dungeons & Dragons is the most widely-played RPG.
3. Anyone who likes any edition of D&D should be able to understand all they need to know to play Lamentations of the Flame Princess (or any other retroclone or old-school game) in minutes and will be within a stone's throw of a premise and theme that they've already signed on to.
4. Due to the art and marketing, LotFP offends more boring people than any other game.
5. LotFP offends no interesting people.
6. Therefore if you sit down to a table with people who've agreed to play LotFP, you have screened out a larger percentage of boring people than you have by choosing any other game while still drawing players from a diverse pool due to the bar for entry--mechanically and thematically--being extremely low.
QED
-
-
-
It's rules-light and the modules are superb, but dismissing people as boring is a great way to make no one want to play your game.
ReplyDeleteTom you're not making any sense and should apologize in your next comment for saying things that make no sense.
ReplyDelete1. It's not "my" game. It's James Raggi's game.
2. Dismissing people as boring is one of the main ways the game has been talked about by fans and they keep playing it--so it is objectively a TERRIBLE way to make "no-one" want to play it.
3. It is not intelligent to assume my goal in writing things is to make nerds buy things. I understand that there are RPG nerds who prioritize selling games over telling the truth (either because they are greedy or bc they have no other source of income), but I am not nor have I ever been one of them. I write to tell the truth, not market things.
4. That you apparently _want_ this kind of discourse is weird "Please lie to me so that you (or your friend) will make money" is a bizarre thing to say to an author. And caring whether James makes money or not is even stranger.
Ah, I was thinking of it from a DMing perspective - dismissing types of players as boring - rather than about lotfp, which I think's great. Maybe our definition of "boring" players are different though?
DeleteMy experience with con games confirms this statement.
ReplyDeleteIn almost 35 years of playing RPGs I've determined that people who are *offended* by LOtFP, Vampire 1st edition (or V5 for that matter), Kult, issues of The Unspeakable Oath, or any other Horror game (or movie, novel, what-have-you) are not people I will enjoy playing or socializing with... especially the more neo-puritanical ones.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, anything that helps us (both them and me) figure this out BEFORE they get to the table is a good thing in my opinion.
Lothar Tuppan
I really like the skill resolution. I definitley pulled it into my personal hack.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it.
ReplyDeleteWhat's there to be found in Lamentations that is so offensive, as compared to any other given retroclone?
Ironically, I'm kind of intimidated by LotFP just because of the high quality of its materials. Coming up with something better than a typical D&D module or Pathfinder adventure path is easy peasy. With LotFP I feel like I need to bring my A game if I'm going to run it at all.
ReplyDeleteThere's a good post elsewhere on this blog on running a sandbox game, the advice for the start is especially good, just plonk a few cool dungeons here and there and have the PCs wake up in one. Then as the players play and their characters or npcs develop you can make more personalised sessions from that. A classic example would be running death frost doom and then working out how the players deal with the threat that running that dungeon creates (or what changes in the world if they don't deal with it). As for generating monsters, I found both red and Pleasant land and maze of the blue Medusa really good, there's so much in those that no one's ever going to encounter everything whilst they're in the dungeon.
Delete@Tom
ReplyDeleteMaybe.
But whatever that definition is, you're better off with players you like