Web Find of the Day

Similar effect on the guy in the next office.

If you can ignore the Australian accent, this is fascinating

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Oi. :stuck_out_tongue:

Deane Hutton was actually my dad’s high school science teacher in the 60s (before he and Rob Morrison started hosting the Curiosity Show).

As a kid I thoroughly enjoyed watching that show.

I knew we had some Australians, but I couldn’t remember who :wink:

AH! SORCERY! KILL THE WITCH!

Burn the heritic. Exterminatus!

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Heretic_game_cover

Heretic was just Doom with a fantasy theme. :slight_smile:

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Still nice to play - but if you play it DOOM style, you got your a$$ whupped :slight_smile:

Also had a lot of melee and quasi-RPG elements, didn’t it?

I think it was still a Doom-style simple plot and scenario design, though.

There was definitely some melee.

Thinking about it, I think I played some Hexen but not Heretic. Apparently Hexen is a sequel, but then there was Heretic II, so it’s confusing.

Especially for the BigDinosaur Disco …

Dinosaurs with magnets! They’re adorable!

Christmas with the inimitable musical styling of William Shatner. The only saving grace is the presence of Billy Gibbons.

The other morning, on a local radio show, they mentioned Billy’s album and played part of Shatner’s nightmare of a song. Oh the horror.

Shatner should go back to the Enterprise :slight_smile:

This is… just… abhorrent. Whew.

Ryan Reynolds being Ryan Reynolds.

The classic 1977 version of the Traveller RPG is now available for free. The link below gives you some details and a link to the page at DriveThru RPG. On that site, there’s an ā€œothers also purchasedā€ link to ā€œGuide to Classic Travellerā€ that’s also free.

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Traveller’s weird. I didn’t read it until recently-ish (early 2000s?) when there were big compilations available that were in that weird landcape format (bound on a short edge) so I’ve got the main body of the original edition spread over a couple books. Being a product of that era, it also

Looking at Traveller with modern eyes, it’s interesting. Almost everything is (potentially) random, but in a way that has two distinguishing features:

First, it’s clearly designed in an era when computing resources were uncommon/limited. This means you have a lot of ā€˜manual algorithms’ with surprisingly few decision points. Character creation (which infamously has ā€˜you died’ as a possibly and sometimes likely exit) has an intentional second use as generating NPC stats for the DM. Generation is pretty ā€˜simple’ and has been done online. Here’s one tool: Classic Traveller Character Generator

The second thing that strikes me about the excessive randomization and process use is it leads to making shallow descriptions that the players and GM have to give life to. Characters can be very easy to note the essential stats, as can planets (both can be boiled down to a short list of pseudo-hexadecimal text strings). I feel like it could lead to situations where players make interesting choices of limited known data, like choosing between a primitive planet or a high-tech planet, but the GM has space to get creative with both of those to fill in details.

Both lead to something that as an 80s gamer was great, but now… Less so. There’s tons of room for ā€˜non-gaming play’ in the Traveller rules, in that you could use free time to generate characters, systems, ships, etc. Great at the time… But now I don’t have the same kind of free time.

With my position I’ve also stayed away from the arguments about editions and such. I do like that to my understanding there’s modern editions where they kept the randomness and ā€˜push your luck’ elements of character creation, but instead of dying with a failed role you pick up a serious lingering injury.