Recent content by VelvetViolet

A lot of my initial criticisms are undoubtedly kneejerk reactions that I would change my mind on after time to cool down and reflect. Other times, I don't change my mind from my initial reaction but instead become better able to articulate and defend it. I'll give an example of the latter...

That is one of life’s great philosophical mysteries. All art is subjective. Therefore, isn’t criticism subjective also? All I can say for sure is that my negative experiences have made me critical of the concept of intellectual property. If fans don’t like the way that companies alter or cancel...

I wish I could be positive like you, but I just can’t. All of my experiences with lore are negative. If I invest in it, then it gets canceled before it gets anywhere, retconned because of some new writer whims, or rots into slop. If I don’t, then I get cyberbullied. It’s no a win scenario. What...

No. I was mistaken. The D&D lore certainly doesn't satisfy everyone. However, fans can publish their own campaign settings under OGL. They can build curated communities that way. Other games generally don't allow that and they usually fall prey to this dogmatism that alienates me. If you enjoy...

Agree to disagree. I think that’s a completely valid motivation. Paizo did it and to great success. I think grognards should do that instead of complaining and bullying. I never had an issue with WoD lore before its fans bullied me into hating it. If they had left to live in their walled garden...

Tell that to the WoD grognards. I’m sure they’ll take your words into consideration and change their behavior accordingly… not. My advice is to move on and make your own franchises. We’re already seeing that with the new wave of WoD heartbreakers like Curseborn, Nightborn, Blood Ties, and...

I generally despise lore as irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction. That's one of the reasons why I dislike World of Darkness and preferred other games like C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness, and Nephilim. I adore WitchCraft for its broad flexible...

From what I understand of the original Forge definition, a "heartbreaker" is basically a type of ripoff or a homebrew campaign that the GM decided to spin off into a published book without publishing it under the OGL. The part that breaks the reviewer's heart is that it has just enough...

Indeed. That’s one of the reasons why I lost interest in D&D. It is designed to represent itself, not any of the genres that inspired it. Because a bazillion authors worked on it over decades and never slaughtered any of the sacred cows or went back to the original inspirations, the end result...

Yeah. I know GURPS is the biggest and even though I don't use the system, I find their books useful due to all the non-game info they provide. It saves me a lot of time on doing research. Yeah, this is one of the main flaws with that system. It's not universal like GURPS or AFMBE or NBA or...

No offense taken. What are the examples you can think of? I’ll take a look when I get the time.

I don't know if this counts, but there's a lot of rpg settings/premises I liked that got canceled and I've never been able to find suitable replacements from any settings that are still supported/still have fandoms. These seem to fall on genre lines, I think. Universal Scifi rpgs. Not counting...

I long since realized that the only person who can write a setting I'd like nowadays is myself, but that hardly helps when I want to chat with other urban fantasy fans. Unless I publish my setting, they won't have a point of reference.

That might be a relic of the fact that the vampires, ghosts, werewolves, etc. only got playable rules in supplements, so the core rulebook couldn’t really integrate them into the setup without feeling unfinished. Most of the associations don’t discriminate against them and allow them as members...

Ok. I’m more interested in the idea of WitchCraft since I got into rpgs after it was canceled and only learned it about a decade after when the fandom was already largely vanished. What would you find interesting then? Tell me. Maybe I’d like it too. I’m not satisfied with the current...