The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[J.Quondam]

Why in blazes are we calling these things funnels? You know, the adventures where you take a bunch of utterly unqualified characters and shove them through a dangerous situation until most of them die (often hilariously) and then the survivors get to be real PCs from then on? Essentially a winnowing process for aspiring adventurers, most popular in the more DCC-flavored parts of the OSR community.

That's not how a funnel works. If I pour thirty ounces of a substance into my funnel I'd better get thirty ounces out of it, not four with rest being eaten by monsters. It's not even a meat grinder, where I still expect to get about two pounds of ground beef out if I shove two pounds of chuck in. The terminology is all wrong.

This is really alluvial mining here. You're panning for player characters. The dungeon isn't a funnel, it's a mining sluice, disposing of the hopeless sand and unlucky gravel and leaving you a precious handful of viable PCs. It's just using the blood of its victims instead of water to do the job, which is a mental image I'm sure funnel-lovers would appreciate.

So no more funnels. Let's start seeing modules like "Blood Sluice of the Gore Mages" and debates about whether sluices are a terrible idea or not and whether the whole concept is truly Old School or modern parody based on faux nostalgia.

I always thought of "funnel" in the sense of something that directs a flow, as in "funnel the hapless newb adventurers to unexpected new careers as chunky salsa."

That said, "Blood Sluice of the Gore Mages" is clearly the superior terminology, and also I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

None of the games that include funnels actually require them. It's just that funnel proponents are often extremely loud about how they're the "only" way to play the game.

 

[Deset Gled]

This feels very conspiracy theory-ish of me, but I can't help but notice how there are a surprising number of very old accounts that come back from out of nowhere just to post one or two random offensive/annoying things, only to go silent again.

What's more likely:

- There server was hacked an one point in it's history and someone is selling old ENWorld logins on the dark web. Someone (or a couple someones) bought the list and is trolling.

- Somebody(s) has an army of alts that they've been building over decades.

- A lot of people join the site once, feel like it isn't for them, then randomly decide that they're going to look up their old account details just to come back, then come to the same conclusion again the second time around.

Okay, probably the last one. Especially if the original dates match up the the 4e edition wars and people are coming back for the 5e sequel. But I still wonder some days.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

This feels very conspiracy theory-ish of me, but I can't help but notice how there are a surprising number of very old accounts come back from out of nowhere just to post one or two random offensive/annoying things, only to go silent again.

There does seem to be an uptick lately, but it might be my imagination. I actively avoid a lot of orange threads at this point so I may be missing a lot of them if it's edition wars related. OTOH, there have been a couple of pretty dreadful posts from brand-new accounts recently too, at least one of which was a pretty deliberate attempt at provoking a ban.

 

[J.Quondam]

There does seem to be an uptick lately, but it might be my imagination. I actively avoid a lot of orange threads at this point so I may be missing a lot of them if it's edition wars related. OTOH, there have been a couple of pretty dreadful posts from brand-new accounts recently too, at least one of which was a pretty deliberate attempt at provoking a ban.

"orange threads"?

edit: Ah, i bet this refers to the orange "Dungeons & Dragons" tag.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

"orange threads"?

edit: Ah, i bet this refers to the orange "Dungeons & Dragons" tag.

Correct. It's a handy visual filter for me. I still look at new ones but with a rare few exceptions anything with more than a few pages of posts gets skipped. I dislike the amount of cruelty to deceased equines that tends to arise after a fairly short while.

 

[Staffan]

https://99.234.14.10/multimedia/gallery/var/resizes/Chainmail/141102_tmstudios/Lauren_8002796.jpg

I really don't like games in which your character can die in the creation process, even when it's via game play. If I'm playing that character then they obviously survived. Traveller, and one other SF RPG that I can't currently remember the name of, both seemed to have that mechanic. In the one that I can't name my character, that I was building as the party's primary fighter, ended up having some sort of congenital illness that made him small and weak, all via dice rolls.

In Infinity, there is a random chance you'll die each "term" you run (slightly larger than 5%). However, in that game the effect is that you get your mind uploaded into an LHost body (think Westworld robots), and getting a good one (on par with a regular human) costs one of your Life Points, or you can settle for an outdated version (with -1 to everything).

 

[Ryujin]

In Infinity, there is a random chance you'll die each "term" you run (slightly larger than 5%). However, in that game the effect is that you get your mind uploaded into an LHost body (think Westworld robots), and getting a good one (on par with a regular human) costs one of your Life Points, or you can settle for an outdated version (with -1 to everything).

To explain, the image link was a mistake in that post. I was trying to figure out why my posts from Giphy are coming out as links, rather than images.

Seems I need to update my version of Traveller, though I don't have anyone to play it with these days.

 

[trappedslider]

The rest of the party appreciates it if I don't start the game in Cyberpsychosis.
Cannot start a Cthulu character with a pre-existing hatred of books, altars and cutlery.
Even if the rules allow it, I cannot start the game as pope.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]