Awesome Pictures Thread

[Sky]

Don't worry, we only have one or two more generation before we all die out anyway: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/07/2678945.htm

Not much time to generate before 2012 when Sarah Palin (or maybe Michael Palin) escorts the chosen ones to eternal glory.

[Mrbloodworth]

geography-of-jobs

[Merusk]

MY CHILD IS IN AN INFLATABLE UFO! 

I'll call the tv stations... that will save him!

Humanity is a continual letdown.

The bigger let down being that it looks more and more like a publicity stunt by a pair of douchebags.

Better still.. balloon boy, puking on TV.  Thanks NBC!

[lac]

geography-of-jobs

What's so cool about Phoenix?

[K9]

geography-of-jobs

What's that bubble that pops up in Michigan straight after Katrina

(also in b4 politics)

[IainC]

geography-of-jobs

What's that bubble that pops up in Michigan straight after Katrina

(also in b4 politics)

That's the US car industry imploding.

[Mrbloodworth]

Watching it to the end is like nukes going off. It wasn't the subject matter that i thought was awesome, it was the resulting imagery.

[Paelos]

[Murgos]

Watching it to the end is like nukes going off. It wasn't the subject matter that i thought was awesome, it was the resulting imagery.

It's very dramatic but I would like to see that redone with the scale set to +/- % of total jobs per area.

[Brogarn]

Furry spy was better.

[Bunk]

I'm watching it progress along, thinking it all makes sense - what you'd expect to see in Flint Michigan, the Katrina event, all of it makes sense.

Then you get to 2008  

It's like someone walked away from Missile Command while the game was still going.

[Draegan]

It's a video, but it isn't useless.  I thought it was cool even though I don't play PnP.

http://vimeo.com/7132858

[Soln]

It's a video, but it isn't useless.  I thought it was cool even though I don't play PnP.

http://vimeo.com/7132858

that's a Forgotten Realms campaign.  Hm.

[bhodi]

I saw that earlier today and thought it was fairly god-awful.

You want to make that thing useful? Discard everything except that overworld map function, keep the battlemaps with the grid lines, and allow the DM to fog of war stuff as things get explored. Then, use it as a placemat for your miniatures. THAT is what would work decently.

Though, it's slightly to small to really do that, too - any time you'd reposition the map you'd have to move the figures too. If you had those magnetic markers built into the base of your figurines, you could have big arrows and circles telling you were to reposition them... but then you'd have to do all the monsters too. It would be a small hassle, I guess.

All the rest of that garbage, especially the dice roll and the creature move would have to go. Could you imagine trying to play a game like that? It would be unbearably, unusably slow. It's also clearly not really designed for it, you can see how carefully and slowly he is moving the d20. Requiring that little magnetic marker and that popup radial menu? Unusable.

[Ingmar]

It just needs to be about 2x-3x as large in each dimension I think. (And yeah the die is dumb.)

[KallDrexx]

He did say (Throughout the whole thing) that it's a proof of concept.

Pretty sweet I thought.

[Tarami]

And the proof is that the concept is stupid.

Seriously though, the mild bookkeeping you have to do in PnP RPGs isn't a dealbreaker. I wager it's not even annoying for most, it's part of the gameplay. Personally I get a great sense of tangibility by having my character on a few sheets of paper. The annotations and scribbles in the margins tend to tell a story about the character, and I would miss that bit of "meta history." Oh, and having a space to unleash my creativity (i.e. draw stick figures.)

I imagine it would be a lot MORE laborious to keep two sets of data updated, the one you got on paper (because you don't want to skim on that regardless) and the one on the computer. Then of course you would need some way to enforce house rules, make exceptions and.... well, my point is that the flexibility is such a large part of why PnP RPGs work to begin with; it's a kind of shared sandbox more than it is a game proper. Having a software enforce rules on you would make it less interesting rather than less annoying or faster to play. All in all, trying to make some kind of digital interface that actually significantly HELPS the GM and/or the players is pretty much an exercise in futility, because it's so fundamentally adverse to how RPGs end up being played.

[Broughden]

I think it was awesome. Only improvement I would make is to speed up the die roll....and since the monsters are part of the graphics they move when the map moves...then make the players miniatures part of the computer program as well so they move as easily.

[Soln]

I liked it for the maps, and it could obviously give a 3d layout for miniatures.  Die rolling I expect would be faster the old fashioned way (and more fun IMO).  I gathered the DM had a laptop for off-camera management.

[Sky]

Ditch the dice rolls, keep real dice. Otherwise it's got some cool potential. The MS Surface table is pretty small for the application, though. We used to run minis on an 8'x4' slab of plexi.

[NiX]

I liked it for the maps, and it could obviously give a 3d layout for miniatures.  Die rolling I expect would be faster the old fashioned way (and more fun IMO).  I gathered the DM had a laptop for off-camera management.

That's what I thought, it would be better served as a medium for delivering the visuals only, but isn't the point of DnD to stretch your imagination around the setting and what's going on? At least they're thinking beyond restaurant ordering.

[lamaros]

What the hell has happened in here?

[IainC]

What the hell has happened in here?

A nerdgasm.

[Goreschach]

Ditch the dice rolls, keep real dice. Otherwise it's got some cool potential. The MS Surface table is pretty small for the application, though. We used to run minis on an 8'x4' slab of plexi.

Ditch the fucking dice, period.

[Signe]

What is wrong with you people?

[01101010]

What is wrong with you people?

Something very similar to this happened when I was a kid. I'd go to the local bar with my alcoholic grandfather and see this type of "discussion" among the other retired old men in the bar about just about anything. For the life of me, I can not nail down the word for it.

[Simond]

 

[IainC]

I don't know what that is a picture of. Please explain the awesome.

[NiX]

How to figure out if something is awesome only to the poster:

Their avatar + Posted Picture = (Awesome)

In this case..



+


=

(Awesome)

[Slyfeind]

I want that surface thingie! It's not so much the functionality as it's just a damn cool toy.

[Murgos]

Something very similar to this happened when I was a kid. I'd go to the local bar with my alcoholic grandfather and see this type of "discussion" among the other retired old men in the bar about just about anything. For the life of me, I can not nail down the word for it.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/garrulous

[Prospero]

[Lantyssa]

I don't know if the blank text is on purpose, however the avatar following the previous few posts is definately awesome.

[bhodi]

I don't know what that is a picture of. Please explain the awesome.

I think that is Junpei Todoroki from Rivals Schools, RYoma from Getta robo, Domon Form G Gundam, Sanger from SRW, Axel from SRW, then top row is Jin from Cyberbots, Guy from GGG, Kamina from Gurren Lagann, and Kyoji from Mazinger. In the far back it's old Simon from Gurren Lagann.

Awesome? I dunno. Obscure? definitely.

Is that fan art or is someone making a game?

[Mrbloodworth]

How to figure out if something is awesome only to the poster:

Their avatar + Posted Picture = (Awesome)

In this case..



+


=

(Awesome)

We can do that? This counts?!