After a brief dissection of what just left us feeling so dyspeptic while reading and reviewing the Great War of Magellan, we set our sights on the new and improved “System Mastery FAR TOO MANY QUESTIONS LIBRARY” and begin our long trek up question mountain. If you sent us something and we didn’t get to it this week, despair you not, for we kept the questions and are going to just keep going in a while. Thanks for listening and writing in!
System Mastery 
OMG, the opening to this episode was sublime.
About Violence, that actually predates Haven…City Of Violence by something like 4 years. It’s more a social commentary on anti-social gaming behavior in D&D (before murderhoboing became a common term) as well as the first few pre-3D Grand Theft Auto games that were becoming popular. The game was written by “Designer X”, but it becomes quickly clear it’s from famed gaming designer Greg Costikyan, who designed Toon for SJG games and Paranoia and Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game for WEG, among others. The game itself is available on Costikyan’s website for free (because it’s more of a lengthy rant than an actual game) under the Creative Commons license: http://www.costik.com/Violence%20RPG1.pdf
Damn, I knew I had some more to talk about this episode.
I recently have gotten the urge to run Rifts again. Just happens every five years or so, I guess, but this time, I was recalling that Palladium is heavily built off AD&D, which is where a lot of the stuff about Weapon Proficiencies and percentage skill bases is taken from. I could come up with a quick conversion using something like the Conversion Ruleset that popped up during 3.5. The simplest thing I could have done was just reduce skills to 5%==+1, but my sperginess went further and attempted tried to make things compatible with 3.5/Pathfinder by using the same ability scores and use the generic class attack/save progression in place for stuff like fighting styles. I fear for my sanity. Part of me wants to continue on this route just for the sake of getting a less number-crunching and more interesting experience, but it seems I’m replacing player crunch for my own crunch. What would your thoughts be?
I know you guys are Californian, which may explain it, but I feel you don’t understand what racism is…
Advice on spice collection – go to the “ethnic” markets. I’m sure you got a bunch that market toward the Latino population in SD. They have these walls of spices that come in little plastic bags and only cost about a dollar each. You’ll probably have to get your own spice containers unless you don’t mind keeping them in the plastic bags.
“Crit One” doesn’t find that podcast on iTunes. Look for CriticalOnePodcast.
Counterpoint: If you can’t fill your fictional Japan with ninjas, samurai, geishas, kaiju and undie dispensers, why even have a fictional Japan? Isn’t that the point? A lot of these ethnic tropes are simply the coolest and most recognizable things that culture is known for, and you likely want cool and recognizable things in your stories.
There’s other cool stuff from Japan you can fill Your fictional setting with other that “stuff that 12-year old American boys like”. Shinto lore. Corporate culture and the underground counterculture that resists the “salaryman” stereotypes. The post-Meiji Imperial period. Murakami-style Magic Realism. Just a couple of examples right there of stuff that hasn’t been done to death. More to Japan than just anime tropes.
Dr. Magnethands is not an RPG for the same reason that FATE isn’t an RPG – they’re both games about telling a story, rather than games about playing a role.
You make some good points about racist stuff in game settings, but I can only agree with you up to a point. Another guy pointed out how putting in recognizable things from a given culture is legit, and … well, for example you guys love Book of Five Rings which focuses entirely on mysticised and exaggerated aspects of samurai. And that’s fine – vanilla DND does the same job on European culture. And, like with Ravenloft, adding in gypsies is party of that horror movie atmosphere.
Including a real world culture, even if you focus on certain aspects of it’s mystical traditions, does not automatically equate to racism. And I can 100% believe that in am apocalypse some people would try to revive certain cultural traditions like knights and samurai to try and survive.
You are absolutely correct about Chrono Trigger, though.