I love it when Tina role-plays for me

In a good group, there's a lot more role-playing than dice-rolling.>> ^eric3579:

Wow, I had no idea. Is this how everyone plays D&D(minus the crowd)?

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Epic-Win-A-role-playing-game-to-do-list

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by Hybrid. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

As an ex-Mormon, I'm going to do something a bit weird and quote myself from 2 years ago when this topic came up. I wish the guy in this vid had talked more about his reasons for leaving; I would have been interested to hear more about why he thinks their church is not honest or why it doesn't have integrity. Original comment posted for this video.
>> ^SDGundamX:

I was a Mormon for several years (lived in a rural area, was the closest church in town until I was about nine and a new Presbyterian church was built closer). I have to say I'm a bit confused at all the hate that's delivered towards them. Of all the churches I ever attended (and I attended lots as a kid), theirs had the most caring and active community I've ever seen. If you were sick, church members were there the same day with food and asking what they could do to help. They had lots of great family activities all year round, such as picnics and camping trips.
But what impressed me the most about the Mormon church is that they basically taught me the morals I hold true today. They didn't just teach the kids in Sunday school not to lie because "God says so." They explored the consequences of things like lying and stealing. We'd do role-plays where they'd make us think about the consequences our actions had on other people. Like, for instance, if you shoplifted a toy you really wanted, how would the toy store owner feel? How would he feed his family if people kept stealing the stuff in his shop? The fire-and-brimstone Christian churches I later attended never impressed me much with their Bible beating compared to this style of teaching.
This is not to say Mormons aren't without their flaws. In some ways, they do resemble a cult. When my family left, they hounded us for years trying to "save our souls" and get us to come back. They would just show up unannounced at our house or call at random hours. It was more annoying than anything else.
Another downside was the whole proselytizing thing--I distinctly remember being told as a child that if I wanted to be able to play with my friends in heaven that I'd have to convince them to become Mormons too. Otherwise I wouldn't see them there. To put that into perspective though, my Dad's priest (he was Catholic as a kid) told him the same thing about his Protestant friends back when he was a kid. The Mormon religion hasn't got a lock on the conversion market by any means.
All things considered, I find the Mormon religion to be relatively harmless. Yes, they believe in some odd things like the Book of Mormon, but at the end of the day, unlike a lot of self-proclaimed Christians, I found the Mormons to do more than just give lip service to their values and actually practice what they preach.

I'd also say that the "roleplaying" part of MMORPG seems like just a small niche community. The majority of players do not really 'role play' their character.

For me at least, it's not really an 'alternative world' at all. It's a way to contact and play with about 24 people that, for the most part, I've been playing and chatting with for nearly 6 years now. I know most guildies by their first names, instead of whatever name the character has they are playing at this moment.

But yeah, of course it's a form of massive escapism. None of the things we do matter. But raiding for 4-5 hours in a night does keep real life away for a bit. But I guess that also applies to watching America's Got Talent or reading a book.

I'm far from a connoisseur of comedians, but female comedians always seem to be holding back just a bit to me -- a little less willing to shock, and a little less willing to really make fools of themselves.

I mean, in this clip I thought the funniest thing the women said was something about knitting cakes, which on the surface sounds self-deprecating, but in reality it's a satirical slam on men's bigoted views of women, and the much funnier rejoinder was one of the men talking about how women are always laughing at his penis (real self-deprecation!).

I suspect gender roles play some part, but it seems to me that the best comedy has to do with painful truths about life that we all experience but seldom talk about, and women should have just as much insight into that kind of thing as men.

>> ^MilkmanDan:
But really, I'd love to see an RPG where a max-level veteran is statistically only 3-5 times stronger than a completely fresh noob. But realistically, I know that the only way that system can work is in an open-world sandbox style game, and those seem to be rapidly falling out of favor. A pity, at least to my tastes.


It's interesting that this sort of progression seems to be part of every genre *but* RPGs. In Zelda 2, for instance, you can only double your health and magic. You grow a bit more powerful as the game continues, but you can still be killed by scrubs if you're not careful.

I don't know if you're into tabletop role playing games, but Legend of the Five Rings exhibits this sort of growth. Even combat masters are only statistically two or three times more hardy than a commoner, though they have special techniques they've trained over their lifetime. Even so, a group of five or six starting characters could cut them down in most cases. It's interesting to look at and fun to play, but as it's a tabletop RPG, it does fall into the category of open world.

It caters to the generation's more extreeeeme people.

>> ^cybrbeast:
Sometimes I was a jerk, I played rather neutral. Which is another thing Yahtzee rightly complains about, you are only rewarded if you play renegade jerk or pure paragon, which kind of goes against the idea of role playing.
>> ^Krupo:
You have revealed you didn't play as a "jerk" in #1 then...

Sometimes I was a jerk, I played rather neutral. Which is another thing Yahtzee rightly complains about, you are only rewarded if you play renegade jerk or pure paragon, which kind of goes against the idea of role playing.
>> ^Krupo:
You have revealed you didn't play as a "jerk" in #1 then...

The Morrigan-slapping reminds me of what good role playing games are like--a world where you're free to turn a situation on its head and see what results. Bad role playing games are ones that remove your ability to choose and force characters into your party even after they subtly insult you for a minute straight.

Back in the early days of emergent behavior and cellular automata (Gödel, Escher, Bach) there was talk of applying these ideas to npcs in role playing games - apply a few very simple rules to a few very simple personality traits to produce rich unpredictable interactions that ebb and flow across the game world.

No one seems to be working on this any more.

Oh man he is NOT going to do well in prison... it's very possible fellow inmates with web access will have seen him in both a pink clown wig AND a sailor hat. He's going to be 'role playing' for sure.

>> ^chilaxe:
It makes the most sense to me to not teach kids anything made up... no Tooth Fairy, no Easter Bunny, no Santa Clause.
Reality is still good without them, and life is hard enough without believing things that aren't realistic.


i dunno, what about all those people who love role-play fantasy and dress up as lord of the rings characters and have loads of fun just recreating that whole world with each other? i think there's something lovely and innocent and harmless about that. whether or not they 'believe' in that isn't even a question.. maybe in some sense they're believing in the shared reality for the time that they're acting it out... but beyond that i think they're just indulging that part of us that needs fantasy and playfulness and whatever.. point is, i don't have a problem with it at all.. as long as they don't hurt anyone or force anyone to do something they don't want to do... i think ricky is expressing something similar here.. it makes 'em happy.. whatever.. who are we (as atheists) to deny them that? in the words of karl-head-like-a-fucking-orange-pilkington "its about bein happy, innit?"

>> ^StukaFox:
>> ^Payback:
Yes, I agree, what the Hell IS up with the game industry and Africa?

Because we already done all them other places:
Germany, Ukraine, New York City, LA, The Blue Mosque, Hell: First-person shooters
Middle Earth, a lot of places roughly modeled after medieval Europe, radioactive wastelands: role playing games.
The 9th level of hell, a godless place seen as an unending sea of child molesters and furries: Peggle.
So Africa was all we had left over. And Antarctica. But who wants endless random encounters with Leopard Seals and bored NOAA meteorologists?


Gunship 2000 also had an expansion where you flew choppers in Antarctica. Ah white-outs. Awesome.