General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
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Disclaimer: I helped generate a portion of the material for this text, providing a few derro items and one of the monsters. However, I did buy my print copy of this book. My PDF was provided by... [Read More]
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The first thing that grabs you about the Imperial Gazetteer is the cover. Malcolm McClinton has once again put together a gorgeous image that wraps around to the back. It's fantastic piece of art and... [Read More]
This is not the first Doctor Who RPG. The first one published was a system created by FASA back in the mid 1980s, which used a similar system to their Star Trek RPG. I used to run that game back in... [Read More]
This Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX is the sort of player that’s very very good at being a player. Just don’t ask it to be a Philips DVD GM.
“So, brave soul! You would enter the realm of Undervix? Choose your class wisely, because only the bravest of heroes will... aw, Billy, you’re not supposed to be rolling yet!”
“Hank, I don’t want to read the manual. I want to start right now!”
“Billy, I told you! If you want to be a Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX, you have to use the rules in the 1st Edition Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX Manual! I’m the GM, what I say goes.”
“But it’s boring, Hank!”
“Come on, I gotta read it like this! It’s in italics! That means it’s important!”
“That’s what you said about Twilight 2000 too. Remember that? We took six weeks to make a character and he died in ten minutes. It was more like an accounting simulator than a war game.”
“Yeah, well. The guy at the hobby store said this one was different. Come on, it won’t take that long. Step forward! says the mysterious voice. I am the Ultra Certifier, master of this world! You must identify yourself, so that I can assign you a proper quest. Are you CD, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD, DVD, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-Video, DivX, MP3, MP3-CD, MP3-DVD, Audi- Billy, why are you picking up your coat?”
“This is just like Twilight 2000, Hank. Just like it. You’re gonna make me do all this crazy stuff and then kill me off as fast as you can. I don’t want to play this stupid Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX game anyway. Why don’t we play baseball?”
“Baseball? Billy, you don’t know what you’re saying. Who ever heard of gamer style number crunching in baseball? That’s ridiculous!”
“You’re right, Hank. I’m just mad. But can’t we just, I don’t know, jump into it?”
“Well… okay. I guess you can be a DVD+R full of JPEGS that grew up among DivX files. That’s a good mix, you can see in the dark and shoot lasers from your eyes twice a day.”
“Do I have armor?”
“You don’t until third level, but you do have blue skin and black eyes.”
“Cooooool. What’s next?”
“Ahem. I, the Ultra Certifier, do command thee! Venture into the HDMI Passage, which, even though an HDMI cable is not included, is a single cable connection that provides easy installation and a quality transfer of eemaj-”
“Image.”
“It says ‘eemaj’, Billy.”
“Yeah, but that’s just how they write it. It’s pronounced image. As in ‘The Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX gives a quality image that upconverts a normal signal to HD.’ Image, Hank.”
“Whatever. The eemaj is what you must capture. Head, brave warrior into the tunnels! But before you go, to begin what will be the grandest adventure of all, I give you this and the guy gives you a bag.”
“I open it! What is it?”
“Inside you find a Blade of 12 bit 108MHz video processing, Bracers of Dolby Digital, and 1080p.”
“Wow! I’m rich!”
“Go, now, warrior! Conquer the HDMI Passage! Fulfill your destiny! So what do you do?”
“Well… I go left!”
“Left? You mean west?”
“Yeah! I go west! Oh, and I use my new blade too!”
“Okay. But you didn’t say you had a torch out so you don’t see the big hole to the west. And you die.”
“What?”
“Sorry, Billy, nothing I can do. the hole’s right here on the map. Maybe if you’d let me do things the right way, you would have learned the Holefind skill in Adventure School, and I could have told you about the hole, but you wanted to breeze through everything and get right to the fun of being a Philips DVD Player w/1080p Upconvert & DIVX, and so, now, you’re dead, and we have to start again. There’s a reason for the rules, Billy. See? The rules are to protect you.”
“I hate Saturdays. Why can’t we have school year round?”
“So, brave soul! You would enter the realm of Undervix? Choose your class wisely, because only the bravest of heroes will...
Last edited by Umbran; 27th October 2009 at 05:29 PM..
Reason: Edited to fix the link.
__________________ Kosmon tonde, ton auton apantōn, oute tis theōn oute anthrōpōn epoiēsen, all’ ēn aei kai estin kai estai pur aeizōon, haptomenon metra kai aposbennumenon metra. . . . Panta gar to pur epelthon krinei kai katalēpsetai.
From what I can see, this is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to say that DM's who rely on rules are idiots and full of badwrongfun and that real DM's don't need no stinkin' rules. Or something like that.
More just bizarre.
__________________ Best line from current campaign:
The pirates assembled on your deck are wearing an assortment of fishnet stockings, high heels and fashionable earrings. They brandish dim and dented cutlasses.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
This post, right here? Post #2 in this thread? It's about as bizarre as the first one. The difference is thus:
The OP is a long and hilariously incongruous juxtaposition of old-school D&D anecdotes and the world of user-unfriendly DVD player/converters, and conveys a valuable subtext/review pertaining to the product at hand.
Meanwhile, machpants' creation is a short and jarringly humorless juxtaposition of hostility and bewilderment, conveying only curt notification of offense. Like a Singaporean-language traffic citation in your name coated in unidentifiable goo.
Last edited by Inyssius; 27th October 2009 at 08:26 AM..
It's not spam. It's a very strange (and rather funny) ad for a DVD player that the OP found on sellout.woot, which is a non-traditional e-commerce site.
Clearly someone on their staff plays or played D&D.
It's a bit weird though 'cos when I go through that link, I don't see what JRR has quoted.
Didn't you write this?
__________________ Best line from current campaign:
The pirates assembled on your deck are wearing an assortment of fishnet stockings, high heels and fashionable earrings. They brandish dim and dented cutlasses.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
Ahh, that makes a bit more sense then. WHen I look at it, I get a wifi digital video recorder. Which made JRR's post seem pretty strange.
__________________ Best line from current campaign:
The pirates assembled on your deck are wearing an assortment of fishnet stockings, high heels and fashionable earrings. They brandish dim and dented cutlasses.
I double-dog-dare you to make your game sound super cool without comparing it to other editions. - paraphrased from Umbran.
It's a bit weird though 'cos when I go through that link, I don't see what JRR has quoted.
Didn't you write this?
He didn't. The link no longer works because it's a new day and, thus, a new woot. You can still find yesterday's woot here.
There's no disguised criticism of anybody's play style or anything like that, folks, just a randomly hilarious product review.
__________________ Kosmon tonde, ton auton apantōn, oute tis theōn oute anthrōpōn epoiēsen, all’ ēn aei kai estin kai estai pur aeizōon, haptomenon metra kai aposbennumenon metra. . . . Panta gar to pur epelthon krinei kai katalēpsetai.
It's a bit weird though 'cos when I go through that link, I don't see what JRR has quoted.
Didn't you write this?
No, Woot changes items at midnight. I could care less if anyone buys the damned dvd player they were selling. I just thought the ad was funny.
Also, I really didn't want to post the entire ad, but I figured someone would click the link after midnight and see a blender or something for sale and go "wtf?" Clearly, I underestimated my ability to present wtfness.
Last edited by JRRNeiklot; 27th October 2009 at 08:51 AM..
Lol at the op and lol at the responses in this thread. Lots of fun ...
__________________ Pablo El Vagabundo
"Mercy!? You want MERCY? I'M CHAOTIC NEUTRAL!!!" One of my rituals is soon to be published in Goodman Games's Book of Rituals... Yey...
There's no disguised criticism of anybody's play style or anything like that, folks.
Indeed. It is not disguised, it is plainly visible and a slap in the face of their long-term customers.
Obviously, Phillips is firing me, a rules-abiding individual, as a customer. I wonder why? Is my money not good enough for them? I have been using their products for a decade or so, and have probably more Phillips devices in my home than the average customer, buying new Phillips products every month*!
I guess I got to old for them, and they now want to appeal to the kids, who don't have the attention span to read a 200 page manual badly translated from Chinese over English to German.
They are dumbing down their products for the younger generation, as it happens so often. But customers like me, that enjoyed using Babelfish and Google Translate to figure out how the glaring translation errors came to be, we get left out.
So be it. I am done with Phillips. *)Actually, I am not sure if I have any Phillips products in my household at all. And I certainly don't buy new electronic appliances every month.
Thoughts of the Arch Chancellor - My weblog on EN World - containing game related material, like: house rules, design theories, reviews, play reports, adventure ideas
Secret Member of <Think we would just hide our secret with a spoiler tag, eh?>
Yeah, wtf? I thought it was hilarious, thought I'd share it. If I broke some rule, I apologize.
You didn't break a rule, but you posted in a manner that matches that used by your garden-variety spammer. And we *do* get spammers that use gaming references in their ads, so that's not really a help.
Next time, a little personal comment that you know this is an ad, and you are reposting it because you thought it was funny would be in order to keep folks from mistaking your post for spam.
It's not spam. It's a very strange (and rather funny) ad for a DVD player that the OP found on sellout.woot, which is a non-traditional e-commerce site.
Clearly someone on their staff plays or played D&D.
I can definitely confirm that some woot staff plays or are at least interested in D&D/RPG's as I ended up sitting next to a couple of the Woot staff members during the 4th Edition Extravaganza that announced Dark Sun as the next campaign.
__________________ "Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." –Raistlin Dragons of Autumn Twilight
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