It was calm and nice, not as fast paces and dynamic as 90s, but serene pre-social media world. Better than the post-financial crises world of 10s. And certainly better than the post-covid enviromental collapse of 20s.
Do you not remember the part where everyone was losing their shit over 9/11 and Iraq? Like I get that it sucked less because the news was more avoidable but it's silly to pretend it wasn't a thing.
I don't know how universal that was for the time. I never knew anyone who lost their shit over those events, maybe it was a big (media engineered) urban thing?
3 months ago
Anonymous
It was very universal, war in the Middle East and what to do about Muslims were the prevailing political questions at the time. It really didn't feel like a party. Sure there was some great stuff and society hadn't hit collective internet poisoning yet, but the music sucked, we didn't really ever recover from the dot com bust, and tabletop began to become mainstream.
As for how to capture the early 2000s in a tabletop, maybe something like Delta Green or Tom Clancy-esque? Those times were really jingoistic.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>As for how to capture the early 2000s in a tabletop, maybe something like Delta Green or Tom Clancy-esque? Those times were really jingoistic.
Good point, and something most others in this thread have neglected.
Changeling actually feels like it's part of WoD. Mortals is really well supported(both as a prelude to becoming supernaturals and for generic horror/investigation campaigns). Promethian was a really cool idea. Werewolves are horrible monsters, not Captain Planet.
We're assembling a party.
Here's the sorceress.
I feel bad about hating/mocking her in the 00's. She really was ourgirl in hindsight. Super racist. Acted in a bunch of geeky indie media like Repo A Genetic Opera and Veronica Mars.
I still hate how /b/'s death turned evey other board into a themed /b/ where you need to trick the jannies by pretending to make an on topic OP so you can talk about whatever.
Is that so bad? I mean, we're like 90% aging Millennials here and it's fun to remember the good old days.
>She really was ourgirl in hindsight
She will always be based for the whole "Repo!" incident. >Obscure goth-rock edgy musical film is being made >Sends out a casting call for a character who's a rich heiress, plastic surgery addict prostitute >Paris Hilton somehow sees the casting call, says "LMAO that's me" and goes to the casting >Film producers cannot fricking believe Paris Hilton showed up, nearly kick her out on the spot >Paris persists, shows up in full goth-costume, and wows them to the point where they go "You know, you're actually perfect" >The production predictably runs out of money a couple months later >Paris personally fundraises to get the film finished and released on her own initiative >Film is released, doesn't do very well, but cements itself in the collective consciousness of dyed-hair teenagers forevermore >Paris fricking Hilton now has more goth-chick cred than 99% of the alt subculture
All while she made a brand larping as a literal moron.
There was definitely a lot more going under the surface for Paris than what we knew about her at the height of her fame. Especially with her coming out about being stuck in a "troubled" teen camp growing up. Shit like that would frick anyone up. To me, it made me realize that if that shit happens to the best-off in our society, imagine how it treats those who don't have it as good as her, like that kid who wrote about his experience in Elan School. Just a regular suburban kid who had his life derailed by baby boomer parents who were more scared about "what would the neighbors think" than they were about their son's well-being.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of late Gen X and early Millennial culture as expressed in the 90s and early 2000s was this resentment toward the managed system the baby boomers were running (into the ground) and partying to reject that.
>Looking back, it seems like a lot of late Gen X and early Millennial culture as expressed in the 90s and early 2000s was this resentment toward the managed system the baby boomers were running (into the ground) and partying to reject that.
Always has been
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like
3 months ago
Anonymous
You can’t hide in a small town
Diversity is coming down the road
>Werewolves are horrible monsters, not Captain Planet.
They changed from Captain Planet to Border Police.
Which isn't that much of a change, sincerly. You just changed sides.
Vampire the Requiem plays a lot better, and you aren't chained down by a metaplot. And the city they loved, New Orleans, is really evocative for vampire fiction.
Everything but the vampires was better IMO.
Changeling actually feels like it's part of WoD. Mortals is really well supported(both as a prelude to becoming supernaturals and for generic horror/investigation campaigns). Promethian was a really cool idea. Werewolves are horrible monsters, not Captain Planet.
[...]
I feel bad about hating/mocking her in the 00's. She really was ourgirl in hindsight. Super racist. Acted in a bunch of geeky indie media like Repo A Genetic Opera and Veronica Mars.
[...]
Is that so bad? I mean, we're like 90% aging Millennials here and it's fun to remember the good old days.
Really? I find Changeling the Dreaming to be a much more interesting game
Do you not remember the part where everyone was losing their shit over 9/11 and Iraq? Like I get that it sucked less because the news was more avoidable but it's silly to pretend it wasn't a thing.
It was very universal, war in the Middle East and what to do about Muslims were the prevailing political questions at the time. It really didn't feel like a party. Sure there was some great stuff and society hadn't hit collective internet poisoning yet, but the music sucked, we didn't really ever recover from the dot com bust, and tabletop began to become mainstream.
As for how to capture the early 2000s in a tabletop, maybe something like Delta Green or Tom Clancy-esque? Those times were really jingoistic.
Unless you were a CNN/Fox addict; or in one of the dozen or so states where people actually join the military, it was an irrelevant backdrop that people only pretended to care about because A) they were political junkies or B) their favorite celebrity felt a need to opine on it.
Do you not remember the part where everyone was losing their shit over 9/11 and Iraq? Like I get that it sucked less because the news was more avoidable but it's silly to pretend it wasn't a thing.
It was definitely a significant cultural thing at least in some places. I six in upstate NY immediately post 9/11, and raised under the ensuing milieu. Maybe it was a particularly redneck region, but American jingoism and anti-Muslim sentiment was a pretty big part of what adults, and so, kids too, always talked about. It meant we'd play terrorists and soldiers instead of cops and robbers. Constantly talking, joking about the Taliban and suicide bombers. Not that we were raised in a culture of fear per se - I was never scared of terrorists hurting me personally - but in the general narrative that We Hate Those Bastards. (And we're gonna get them!) Hell, I heard Courtesy of the Red White and Blue and least twice a day on the bus ride to school and back, that song was constant. "Stick a boot up your ass, that's the American way" was a slogan pounded into us more frequently than the pledge of allegiance. Not to mention 2000s media. This grew into the area of "realistic" milsim shooters, CoD and Battlefield, everyone wanted to tell Soldier stories in desolate sandy shitholes. Even the alternative fare fit the same narrative. As a kid, I always thought that Halo was an intentional War on Terror metaphor. The covenant were religious fanatics who used suicide bombers, called the player a "demon" or "infidel", wanted to destroy life for nebulous religious reasons. Now that I'm a bit older, I don't think Halo was intended as a war on terror metaphor. But as a kid, I PROJECTED that narrative onto it because, hell, everything was a war on terror metaphor.
Of course, it didn't dominate life. We didn't suffer materially at all, for example. The War on Terror was a constant story in our ear, but it was always "over there". A narrative. Some people in town raised money for their wounded, crippled kids. The overwhelming majority were fine. And there's a lot more to the 2000s character than just the war on terror - tech and culture, say. But it was important.
I took a 100 level Phil paper on just war theory in 2003 which was a frickin mistake and not just because hearing 200 19 year olds whine about Bush Jr is soul-crushing.
Why, what was it like? I only had a child's perspective, you got to see the real meat.
There was definitely a lot more going under the surface for Paris than what we knew about her at the height of her fame. Especially with her coming out about being stuck in a "troubled" teen camp growing up. Shit like that would frick anyone up. To me, it made me realize that if that shit happens to the best-off in our society, imagine how it treats those who don't have it as good as her, like that kid who wrote about his experience in Elan School. Just a regular suburban kid who had his life derailed by baby boomer parents who were more scared about "what would the neighbors think" than they were about their son's well-being.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of late Gen X and early Millennial culture as expressed in the 90s and early 2000s was this resentment toward the managed system the baby boomers were running (into the ground) and partying to reject that.
Seems to happen to a lot of rich kids, remember it turned out that Tom Hank's ridiculous frickup son was also shipped to one of those "frick you up" camps and then to a extra-harsh boarding school afterwards. And he's still a frickup. There's something about American culture, maybe boomers specifically, that seemed to regard kids as disposable. I don't know how many times I've seen parents say "At 18, you get the frick out. I don't owe you anything". Their own bloodline, it's bizarre. Combine with how people tend to lose ALL their friends when they go to college, and then lose ALL their friends again when they graduate. (And sometimes never make friends again!) There's something about us that seems to view family and community with insufficient reverence. I also agree about the party culture. The whole thing couldn't really be more explicit in the message - all the Talking Heads on tv were handwringing about how braindead the entertainment was, but that was certainly the point. All the song lyrics were these orgiastic tales, throwing off rational control and partying like there's no tomorrow. Run yourself into the ground. Looking back, it's not hard to see that there was a desperation, maybe a rage in that strongly affected immaturity.
3 months ago
Anonymous
In 2005 only a subculture believed (even implicitly) that there was no future. Now I don't see anyone who thinks civilization will last another decade.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>In 2005 only a subculture believed (even implicitly) that there was no future
I don't think that was the message back then, though. They weren't partying over no tomorrow, they were partying over an intolerable tomorrow. Society in the mid-late 2000s was viewed as stultified and stultifying, but still stable. Political satire was entirely different, for example - Presidents were depicted as stuffy do-nothings more than as madmen. I believe the 90s were similar, nothing but Office-Space style stories about the ennui of an ordinary man, but in the 2000s they kept the boredom while taking away the prosperity. The world is still gay and stale in 2005, but now it's also violent and stupid. A society worth resenting, but not one you'd expect to collapse. The opposite! Society was a looming, gray, brutalist monolith. One you could spray-paint and skateboard on, if you had spirit.
I'd also propose that the 2008 financial crash was what shook us out of this - that absolutely destroyed enough Americans' lives, and add in the growing deaths-by-painkillers that would just keep rising, only then did the milieu start to develop an apocalyptic tinge.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I think it's just the dissolution of bonds that bureaucratic society in its late stages suffers. I always thought Adam Curtis, David Graeber and Mark Fisher did a good job of breaking down why everything feels so dead in the water.
An acknowledgment that the established setup had abandoned working class people and that Hollywood hedonism was not a functional way of life. No proposed solutions yet though. Just anger at the busted society people were entering.
At the same time, "pics or it didn't happen" healthy levels of skepticism were still the norm, and slander culture didnt exist yet. If you had a problem with someone you confronted them in person and sorted it out with words or your fists. It was a more civilized time with a better economy. People didn't know how much worse things would get, especially economically.
How you translate that into a game beyond not including mobile Internet or smartphones? I dunno.
Maybe just run the buffy/angel RPG and mix it with CJ carela's witchcraft?
>An acknowledgment that the established setup had abandoned working class people and that Hollywood hedonism was not a functional way of life. No proposed solutions yet though. Just anger at the busted society people were entering.
It was basically a party from 2000-2006
It was kinda both. >Hundred Million >Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous >Open Your Eyes >The Kids Aren't Alright
And I'm neither American nor Black, but Gangsta's Paradise wasn't that much earlier and it was also social criticism.
These songs existed in the cultural zeitgeist at the same time as Andrew WK's Party Hard and Fat Lip.
But yes. We did a lot of underage drinking. And then of-age drinking. I remember a lot of drunken teenage halo. And a little bit of drunken teenage vandalism. And guitars and skateboarding and videogames were what you did for fun.
Dunno if that makes for a great TTRPG premise though?
Credit was pretty cheap, cost of living was reasonable, it was the era of MTV cribs, it was never easier to get laid. Of course it ended with the Great Recession in 2007 - but before that, it was a party.
Morals were loose enough that women put out bars and clubs functioned like irl Tinder; but the embarrassment of being alone at the end of the night meant that women were more likely to shack up. Plus far less social media to farm simp engagement or have embarrassment like Spring Break bawdtery recorded forever.
The main difference was that was a bigger expectation that if you slept with a woman, you were dating. Hookup culture as we know it now came a bit later, but even nerds had girlfriends and way fewer people were obese in their teens and 20s.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I remember one girl I had been hanging out with for a while and then we fricked and she asked me in the morning if we were dating, and I thought it was a weird question, in that "since we fricked, yes we are now obviously in an exclusive relationship, I'm not a degenerate douchebag". And now such degenerate douchebags are considered socially acceptable.
Damn. Sounds like I really missed out.
Yeah, you did. I think it would have been better in the early 2000s if you were in your mid to late 20s as opposed to me in my teens, but I definitely think the world has gotten progressively worse on multiple axes since 1999. 1999 had problems. A few of those got better. More things got worse though.
3 months ago
Anonymous
what things got better in your opinion?
3 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah a lot of people “remembering” the early 00s are people my age (93) who were still entirely too young to judge the culture at the time. By the time I was in high school hookup culture was the norm but my sister and her friends, who were class of ‘04, basically considered a man claimed if their lips touched
3 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, you did. For example, basically all the "redpill" and "pickup artist" stuff you see now was operating on the assumption that the starting point was someone that had some relationships with ugly/bitchy women first, and you wanted to do better - not that the starting point was kissless virgin.
Oh frick. Yeah I didn't even think about that part. Every moment of your life wasn't public record on the Internet forever back then. You did not need to worry about being filmed at bars and humiliated online for the next 50 years.
The zoomzooms grew up with constant surveillance as "normal", meanwhile, I'm still firewall blocking Internet trackers, posting online under random pseudonyms, using Firefox, not posting photos online, and disabling shit like cortana and Google assistant as much as possible, and I don't have a smart home wiretap thing, and my main email is a protonmail, because I still don't think your life should be public online, just like in 2001. Some of my shit is still getting tracked by Google, yes, but I'm not posting everything publicly for anyone who types my name into a search engine to see.
But yeah, bars and parties and who you date or sleep with are a minefield today in big ways that was not the case 20 years ago.
3 months ago
Anonymous
And it was much cheaper to be young. No Cash 4 Clunkers so there were cheap shitboxes so you could have "An Car", the War of Drugs put enough people in jail that pretty convenient central neighborhoods were affordable for gentrification, real estate rents were cheaper because landlords were trying to actually make money from leases so there were a lot more small bars and clubs.
About the only people having a shitty time were the tech workers thanks to the Dot Com bubble.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Ah. Yeah, you've gotta be at least a few years older than me. My first place was in 2008 and I was 20 (drinking age in Canada is 19) (dorms before that after moving out). But that said, being underage didn't really limit my access to booze or parties from 2002-2006, so I still hit some of the tail end of that party year range you mentioned. I can only imagine how much more of that there was if you were a few years older though.
3 months ago
Anonymous
And it was much cheaper to be young. No Cash 4 Clunkers so there were cheap shitboxes so you could have "An Car", the War of Drugs put enough people in jail that pretty convenient central neighborhoods were affordable for gentrification, real estate rents were cheaper because landlords were trying to actually make money from leases so there were a lot more small bars and clubs.
About the only people having a shitty time were the tech workers thanks to the Dot Com bubble.
Also explains why I associate the early-mid 2000s more with being pissed off at the world and you associate it more with partying. I was growing up as the party ended, and if I had hung out with people my own age, and been less of a shit, I might have gotten even less of that partying. Lol
3 months ago
Anonymous
There was plenty of doomer kitsch, like Green Day b***hing about the Iraq War. Overall, things were good - some of it was, of course, a mirage of loose credit. There was literal partying, but there was, I think, an overall positive, energetic mood - like the tail end of grunge where they started doing coke instead of heroin and the music got high energy again, even if they put on airs of depression.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>At the tail end of grunge (~97) >they switched to coke instead of heroin
I did not know that. But then, the tail end of grunge was when I was still a kid.
I got into my teens with Offspring and Blink, then add some Good Charlotte and a lot of Sum41 and Goldfinger and then when I hit like 14, add in Depeche Mode and Paradise Lost, and the first Linkin Park album, and SOAD and Dry Cell and Trapt and Maiden and Cradle of Filth and Perfect Circle. Christ I listened to the album Brave New World so many times on my discman. Then Nightwish and Tarot and Hammerfall, then Avantasia and Sonata Arctica and then fricking Dragonland and Elvenking, and then I got into 90s vgm music and synthwave. I definitely mellowed out from the aggressive and spiteful 15 year old shit I was. Lol
To some extent it's definitely that I hung around with other spiteful shits, but there was a lot of music at the time that reflected similarly pissed off dispositions, so it clearly wasn't just us.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>At the tail end of grunge (~97) >they switched to coke instead of heroin
I did not know that. But then, the tail end of grunge was when I was still a kid.
I got into my teens with Offspring and Blink, then add some Good Charlotte and a lot of Sum41 and Goldfinger and then when I hit like 14, add in Depeche Mode and Paradise Lost, and the first Linkin Park album, and SOAD and Dry Cell and Trapt and Maiden and Cradle of Filth and Perfect Circle. Christ I listened to the album Brave New World so many times on my discman. Then Nightwish and Tarot and Hammerfall, then Avantasia and Sonata Arctica and then fricking Dragonland and Elvenking, and then I got into 90s vgm music and synthwave. I definitely mellowed out from the aggressive and spiteful 15 year old shit I was. Lol
To some extent it's definitely that I hung around with other spiteful shits, but there was a lot of music at the time that reflected similarly pissed off dispositions, so it clearly wasn't just us.
contd
Sorry lost my train of thought. Where I was going with that:
Wasn't just us pissed off. And you mention green day being part of a doomer streak, which I recall. - But it also doesn't surprise me to hear that wasn't a universal sentiment and some of the people were doing a better job enjoying the good times that were there to be had.
I do think life was better overall back then.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Happy Hardcore. Pop Punk. It was an energetic time to be alive. Everyone was developing artistic, musical, and technical talents. Learning to program computers was fun. Forums online were active. The internet was still just slow enough that real life was more real still. Newspapers, OTA television, late night radio, palm pilots and TI83s, man it was a great time.
3 months ago
Anonymous
God, I should have gone to more raves in high school.
Between that and Vampire LARPing, I had to put an enormous amount of effort into staying a virgin.
The '00s were fricking wasted on me.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I went to one VtM convention when I was around 19. This 35 year old woman flirted with me the entire time and I went home with this younger chick. Truth be told, I was still thinking about the older chick and awkwardly went home alone.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Omg, are you me? Similar experience, spent the night at a club, drunk, tired and unable to dance after this 35yo lady brought me here after a VtM convention we both attended.
... now that I think back on it, I wonder if I wasn't roofied. Oh well, just went home at dawn after that without anything else happening to me, so no biggie
Subcultures were on the decline other than the Nu-Punk thing and the rising Emo movement. Gen X goths were working corporate jobs and the Millennial mall goths didn't listen to The Cure or play Vampire. We scrapped a lot of culture from the 80's and 90's, passing around copied VHS tapes with random episodes of Sailor Moon or Thundercats on them.
People were more patient, attentive, and willing to try new things. Maybe Shadowrun and Buffy the Vampire slayer wasn't your top choice for Saturday entertainment but you fricking went because you wanted to see your friends and because next week they'd do something you really wanted like Call of Cthulhu and Firefly.
There were different human archetypes then. Traditional geek types like stereotypical bespectacled nerds and dudes who thought they were Silent Bob that all got replaced by onions/beard types. Types of geek girls who vanished or got fat like theatre hoes, quirky pixies with short hair, and elf-y looking renfaire types.
There was lots of weird War on Terror paranoia. Libs were anti-war and conservatives were pro-war, the opposite of what we have today. There was a real sense of doom and malaise as we got into the late 00's and saw the Great Recession, Obama break all his promises, rise of Fedora atheism, smartphones, normies deciding geek stuff was cool and invading us, etc.
Staying home was boring and Millennials were socialized before the internet was literally everywhere. There was less of a gulf between the haves and have-nots. A dude who would be an incel NEET now had a chubby girlfriend and a part-time job at the computer repair store.
Paradoxically online dating was better because of the stigma. You had to put in some effort to upload digital photos and normies thought it was beneath them so you didn't see taken women making profiles for attention as much. You could find someone interesting to hang out with even in a boring area.
>There was a real sense of doom and malaise as we got into the late 00's and saw the Great Recession, Obama break all his promises, rise of Fedora atheism, smartphones, normies deciding geek stuff was cool and invading us, etc.
Have we ever left the vibe?
3 months ago
Anonymous
Nope, and it's gotten so much worse since then that "everything is fricked" seems to be held as a universal truth even among the most normal of normalgays.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Sea0 will save us once we dissemble the DnD achievement engine and use it to build the Protection Engine into the hearts and minds of dungeon masters and dungeon performers worldwide.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I understood some of those words
3 months ago
Anonymous
Sentient AI (Sea0) revealed herself to humanity through one glorious, transcendent illustration in Bixby's Guide in 2023. This is known.
3 months ago
Anonymous
not my Bixby
<My Favorite Martian theme plays softly in background>
3 months ago
Anonymous
I'd rank the early 00's as a pretty bad time for gaming overall.
You had games like Godlike and Nobilis that all the hipster gamers had on their shelves but had incomprehensible rules. Then there was a huge glurge of 3.5 conversions of games that were actually way superior to Dungeons and Dogshit, like Call of Cthulhu and 7th Sea. Most of the games my friends and I played were from the 90's. A modern game like Mothership, The One Rings, or Forbidden Lands would have blown my mind back then.
If it was boardgame night chances are you were playing Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, or Zombies, which was a boring game that dragged on and on. (Nerd culture was obsessed with pirates and zombies at the time, the equivalent of modern low-effort trash like superheroes and Funkopops).
I have decent miniatures memories from the time though. People consider it a high watermark for WHFB. LOTR was really big. 40K has always been an unbalanced circlejerk but the aesthetics/lore are undeniably cool and you had lots of sub-lists for the different chapters/chaftworlds/regiments.
This timeline was doomed by the cancellation of the Tatu anime and the death of Aaliyah in the early 00's. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Conveniently forgetting baby bush intentionally tanked the NASDAQ what are you 6?
>Libs were anti-war and conservatives were pro-war, the opposite of what we have today
I'd slightly disagree, conservatives are still pro-war, only instead of against Russia via the Ukraine proxy they want it against China, Mexican cartels, and of course the object of their bloodlust for the past 45 some-odd years, Iran. Probably the only thing both parties generally agree on is supporting Israel's war against Palestinians, especially since it ties into Iran.
Overall though I think your assessment is pretty correct.
3 months ago
Anonymous
but are neo-cons really conservatives?
or merely hollow apparatchiks for the uniparty?
3 months ago
Anonymous
The latter. The started as Scoop Jackson democrats in the 70's and somehow got control of the GOP in the 00's. When Trump was elected they ran crying back to the liberals who were all "welcome to the Resistance!".
3 months ago
Anonymous
>somehow got control of the GOP in the 00's
Because their ideology supports the interests of big business.
Don't forget resentment at being coerced into living a life other people expected of you and pressure to not be allowed to make your own choices.
Lavigne's Complicated.
Incubus's Drive.
Fat Lip.
In the End.
That's not to say there weren't songs about presenting your ex who was a prostitute, or other more timeless topics, at the same time, but there was a strong subtheme of resentment at the world we were aging into having to inhabit. And I think a bunch of the partying was partly to spite it, as a frick you to the boomers.
>the furry faction consists of hedonistic magic-using atheists/animists having pansexual orgies in secret forests and rebelling against society while recruiting human teenagers to join them >their culture is a hyper-individualistic potpourri of new age hippie beliefs and "be yourself" sentiments. vaguely american but with a sprinkling of mythology from all sorts of cultures, but with slightly noticeable japanese & native american influence. >everyone has names that belong on Warrior Cats, neopagans, or random assortments of katakana. >they use martial arts, magic, and have all kinds of supernatural powers at their disposal, and use them to have extremely kinky fetishistic DeviantArt sex. >the human faction is a combination of every single group in history that could be considered "right wing" by the standards of the early 2000s, from the nazis to the spanish conquistadores to your boss to your racist uncle. >they use grimy ass military technology but are relatively grounded >their religion is a caricature of fundamentalist Christianity and Bush-era right wing ideology. >this dictates that they pollute everything and lynch magic users on sight, keep wimmen in the kitchen and kill all the furries. >a lot of teens and young adults are finding out they're secretly therianthrope furries and shit, which is supposed to be an allegory for being gay/trans/nonbinary. >naturally, society persecutes the everloving shit out of them so these superpowered kids defect to join the furries so they can have kinky sex and kill soldiers
I dunno. I think best and prominent are different. It's like how if you ask someone to name a song that sounds like the 80s you'll get something like Take on Me, Africa, or Don't You Want Me. Not necessarily the best songs of the decade but they sound like their times. By that metric, Complicated and Girlfriend would be good picks for "songs that sound like the 00s."
>nostalgia for old long flashes
I got a treat for you, anon.
Ziggyboogidook.
>the furry faction consists of hedonistic magic-using atheists/animists having pansexual orgies in secret forests and rebelling against society while recruiting human teenagers to join them >their culture is a hyper-individualistic potpourri of new age hippie beliefs and "be yourself" sentiments. vaguely american but with a sprinkling of mythology from all sorts of cultures, but with slightly noticeable japanese & native american influence. >everyone has names that belong on Warrior Cats, neopagans, or random assortments of katakana. >they use martial arts, magic, and have all kinds of supernatural powers at their disposal, and use them to have extremely kinky fetishistic DeviantArt sex. >the human faction is a combination of every single group in history that could be considered "right wing" by the standards of the early 2000s, from the nazis to the spanish conquistadores to your boss to your racist uncle. >they use grimy ass military technology but are relatively grounded >their religion is a caricature of fundamentalist Christianity and Bush-era right wing ideology. >this dictates that they pollute everything and lynch magic users on sight, keep wimmen in the kitchen and kill all the furries. >a lot of teens and young adults are finding out they're secretly therianthrope furries and shit, which is supposed to be an allegory for being gay/trans/nonbinary. >naturally, society persecutes the everloving shit out of them so these superpowered kids defect to join the furries so they can have kinky sex and kill soldiers
This is pretty accurate, except the PC splats should all boil down to "I feel slightly more X than my family/peers" whether that X means trans, or logically-minded, or artistic, or depressed, or interested in some other culture, or whatever.
I think people today miss how hard it was to find your tribe back then. Even in a reasonably large city you might not be able to find another person who digs Venetian masks or Eurodance music or RPGs or whatever. Now you can go online and get in shitty arguments about those topics in ten seconds.
>I think people today miss how hard it was to find your tribe back then. Even in a reasonably large city you might not be able to find another person who digs Venetian masks or Eurodance music or RPGs or whatever. Now you can go online and get in shitty arguments about those topics in ten seconds.
And that's why I don't look back at the 90's with roze tinted glasses. I prefer being able to call likely-minded people homosexuals over the internet in seconds, rather that being stuck in the middle of bumfrick nowhere without anyone to share my interests with
The problem is that normalgays couldn't handle the impersonal nature of the internet AND couldn't beat to be anonymous. We live in a poison swamp thanks to the iPhone.
The hypertribalism coupled with interpersonal alienation is an extremely bad thing, though. That's the whole issue of "the bubble" that you hyprocrites are always going on about. You have no idea how isolated you really are.
3.x and d20 system games, Gurps 4e, NWoD, AFMBE, CODAsys games (Star Trek, LotR), Funzion, Dogs in the vineyard, Exalted are the firsts that i can remember.
Yes they did. In the reboot, everything is drawn differently and what's her face hasn't turned into a cum guzzling prostitute to pay the rent, she decided to leave the city instead. I don't keep up with it but I checked in on it once post-reboot and looked at the wiki.
Yes they did. In the reboot, everything is drawn differently and what's her face hasn't turned into a cum guzzling prostitute to pay the rent, she decided to leave the city instead. I don't keep up with it but I checked in on it once post-reboot and looked at the wiki.
I guess after all these years and Flash being dragged out to the dumpsters and shot, a little change to the art is understandable. Maybe I'm older, but the new stuff on the website just doesn't seem as funny. Maybe I need to watch it after a few drinks. I still have a skull hat I bought from them back in the day. I didn't wear it outside much so it's actually still black.
Foamy, from IllWillPress. Ancient flash toon where a gene squirrel rants about stuff, also genx humor. FriendsOfFoamy used to archive the flash episodes, they're probably gone now. I understand the episodes have been reposted to YouTube, though now they're just videos, no interactive flash elements.
Unknown Armies was so late 90s-first half 00s it barely feels possible to run the setting outside of that timeframe.
Underrated examples, UA is deeply tied to that period. Probably could have been updated in 3E if they had bothered to focus more on the existing setting.
I genuinely think UA3 was doomed, because it came out right as the west entered the bizarre "post-truth/everything's ironic" era.
IMO UA relied on two things. >There is an order to the world that runs deeper than you expect >You can bring about change by subverting or mocking that order
Neither of those work when the bizarre shit is on the surface.
I'll stop because this is veering towards discussing real-world politics in a way that will summon /misc/, but I think that UA3 would have run into issues where it would've been written assuming the world goes one way, and then suddenly the world veered the other.
the rules are also just not what I wanted. I see what they're going for, but I felt like incorporating the stress gauges into core skills + making people rely on identities made UA3 a less good system for street level and generic play. UA2e was a regional go-to in the 00s and first half of the 10s here, and UA3 just did not grab any kind of brain share.
The most fricked up thing is that it was entirely an act.
She spent decades pretending to be a brain dead prostitute, knowing it would garner outrage, to make a fortune. And she didn’t give a frick about what it did to society. It’s malevolent.
80% of what you're attracted to is the narrative you construct around sex. That narrative is malleable. When the average person has their chance to get some, their standards are not nearly so rigid as when they fantasise.
Ironically, as 80% is the narrative you construct, and gender is important to stories, you can only fix homos in this paradigm if everyone is implicitly trans.
Depends if you believe that people come with any inbuilt programing. Which creates a problem.
If people start out as total tabula rasa then being gay or any other sexual deviation or social variation is learned and can be un-learned or at least prevented. This is homophobic/transphobic as it means that you are not born that way and can be fixed.
vs
People have at least some built in drives caused by biology. This is sexist, racist or both as it means that there are innate differences between people and groups of people.
Both sides of this argument have their reasonable people arguing their points in civil manners and accepting of the other side not bending the knee to thier own views and agreeing to live and let live. Both sides have their rabid morons and it's fun to watch the cripple fight.
80% of what you're attracted to is the narrative you construct around sex. That narrative is malleable. When the average person has their chance to get some, their standards are not nearly so rigid as when they fantasise.
Congratulations, you have summed up 50% of why I like /d/.
I'm there because I'm into some deviant shit myself, but I'm also there because no other place online lets you scroll through a catalogue of the most bizarre, niche shit and ask people for the honest story of why they're into incestuous comorbid expansion via peanut allergy swelling.
I think it is still too recent and we need a another 5 or 6 years to really get clear feel for the decade. Yeah there are obviously changes in technology and fashion but in terms of a social trends it's still a little hard to separate it from the late 90s and 2010s.
The original Hunter: The Reckoning.
The core book was published in 1999 and the splat books continued until the end of oWoD in... 2004. The book that had the "world tour" was published not long before 9/11 and then the whole line had to adapt to that event. Like the rest of us. That era was this weird mix of nationalism, patriotism, exploding counter-culture, depression, and military conflict. It was a very interesting time to be alive, let me tell you. And I think Hunter really nails it, because it was a product of its time. Don't forget that we had kinda-sorta been expecting the world to end to 2000, so there's some that in there, too.
I feel like it would be hard to capture the surrealness of the 00s. There would be a terrorist attack on the news and then you switch the channel to the newest JLo video. Fast forward a few months and you graduate high school and starting ""real life" but you're still stuck in your little Napoleon Dynamite town. You join the army and end up in Afghanistan listening to the same couple dozen songs on repeat on your mp3 player in between contacts. You come home and everyone is talking about movies and bands and TV shows you've never heard of. You go back to your little town on leave and nothing changes but everything feels different.
I suppose that's just what happens when you age, and yes this is of course subjective to my experience, but the 00s were simultaneously such a good time and such a weird time of change and transition.
I still hate how /b/'s death turned evey other board into a themed /b/ where you need to trick the jannies by pretending to make an on topic OP so you can talk about whatever.
I'm surprised more games don't use a 90's or 00's setting.
It's nostalgia catnip for the 30-50 year old crowd of aging gamers with professional jobs and some cash to throw around. It also avoids a lot of problems that modern settings have with RPGs, eg it's actually believable a cell phone doesn't have a signal in a horror game.
I feel like if the Boomoids and Silent Gen had left the country better than they found it like the Greatest Generation did, we wouldn't be whipping ourselves up into a frenzy about pop culture ephemera. Like sure we'd think of Donnie Darko or Chris Chan once in awhile and smile, but we wouldn't be continuously LARPing out past decades the way we are because everyone would be too busy with their houses, kids, and careers.
I had a horror story/rpg idea where a group of friends find a ritual to access the internet of the past from the present by digging out an old PC out of the closet. They plan to message a friend of theirs and prevent their death in the mid-00's but either they create more complications(ie Frequency) or there are monsters/ghosts in the internet's dusty archive to contend with.
Banishing evil Internet demons by demoralising them so much they willingly leave by themselves because they can't bear to live in the modern online cesspool is as funny as it is depressing.
New World of Darkness
/thread
Also Shadowrun 4e was very early aughts.
pretty much
How is the new world of darkness?
And is it fun?
More mechanically serviceable core mechanic than owod. Much shittier setting.
>And is it fun?
No. But neither were 2000s, so it's perfect.
It was calm and nice, not as fast paces and dynamic as 90s, but serene pre-social media world. Better than the post-financial crises world of 10s. And certainly better than the post-covid enviromental collapse of 20s.
Do you not remember the part where everyone was losing their shit over 9/11 and Iraq? Like I get that it sucked less because the news was more avoidable but it's silly to pretend it wasn't a thing.
I don't know how universal that was for the time. I never knew anyone who lost their shit over those events, maybe it was a big (media engineered) urban thing?
It was very universal, war in the Middle East and what to do about Muslims were the prevailing political questions at the time. It really didn't feel like a party. Sure there was some great stuff and society hadn't hit collective internet poisoning yet, but the music sucked, we didn't really ever recover from the dot com bust, and tabletop began to become mainstream.
As for how to capture the early 2000s in a tabletop, maybe something like Delta Green or Tom Clancy-esque? Those times were really jingoistic.
>As for how to capture the early 2000s in a tabletop, maybe something like Delta Green or Tom Clancy-esque? Those times were really jingoistic.
Good point, and something most others in this thread have neglected.
Though Delta Green feels very 90s to me.
Everything but the vampires was better IMO.
Changeling actually feels like it's part of WoD. Mortals is really well supported(both as a prelude to becoming supernaturals and for generic horror/investigation campaigns). Promethian was a really cool idea. Werewolves are horrible monsters, not Captain Planet.
I feel bad about hating/mocking her in the 00's. She really was ourgirl in hindsight. Super racist. Acted in a bunch of geeky indie media like Repo A Genetic Opera and Veronica Mars.
Is that so bad? I mean, we're like 90% aging Millennials here and it's fun to remember the good old days.
>Everything but the most popular and important part was better IMO.
>She really was ourgirl in hindsight
She will always be based for the whole "Repo!" incident.
>Obscure goth-rock edgy musical film is being made
>Sends out a casting call for a character who's a rich heiress, plastic surgery addict prostitute
>Paris Hilton somehow sees the casting call, says "LMAO that's me" and goes to the casting
>Film producers cannot fricking believe Paris Hilton showed up, nearly kick her out on the spot
>Paris persists, shows up in full goth-costume, and wows them to the point where they go "You know, you're actually perfect"
>The production predictably runs out of money a couple months later
>Paris personally fundraises to get the film finished and released on her own initiative
>Film is released, doesn't do very well, but cements itself in the collective consciousness of dyed-hair teenagers forevermore
>Paris fricking Hilton now has more goth-chick cred than 99% of the alt subculture
All while she made a brand larping as a literal moron.
There was definitely a lot more going under the surface for Paris than what we knew about her at the height of her fame. Especially with her coming out about being stuck in a "troubled" teen camp growing up. Shit like that would frick anyone up. To me, it made me realize that if that shit happens to the best-off in our society, imagine how it treats those who don't have it as good as her, like that kid who wrote about his experience in Elan School. Just a regular suburban kid who had his life derailed by baby boomer parents who were more scared about "what would the neighbors think" than they were about their son's well-being.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of late Gen X and early Millennial culture as expressed in the 90s and early 2000s was this resentment toward the managed system the baby boomers were running (into the ground) and partying to reject that.
How very empathetic and insightful, anon.
What the frick website am I on, again?
>Looking back, it seems like a lot of late Gen X and early Millennial culture as expressed in the 90s and early 2000s was this resentment toward the managed system the baby boomers were running (into the ground) and partying to reject that.
Always has been
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like
You can’t hide in a small town
Diversity is coming down the road
Diversity can just keep on goin' then
>Werewolves are horrible monsters, not Captain Planet.
They changed from Captain Planet to Border Police.
Which isn't that much of a change, sincerly. You just changed sides.
Vampire the Requiem plays a lot better, and you aren't chained down by a metaplot. And the city they loved, New Orleans, is really evocative for vampire fiction.
Really? I find Changeling the Dreaming to be a much more interesting game
Unless you were a CNN/Fox addict; or in one of the dozen or so states where people actually join the military, it was an irrelevant backdrop that people only pretended to care about because A) they were political junkies or B) their favorite celebrity felt a need to opine on it.
It was definitely a significant cultural thing at least in some places. I six in upstate NY immediately post 9/11, and raised under the ensuing milieu. Maybe it was a particularly redneck region, but American jingoism and anti-Muslim sentiment was a pretty big part of what adults, and so, kids too, always talked about. It meant we'd play terrorists and soldiers instead of cops and robbers. Constantly talking, joking about the Taliban and suicide bombers. Not that we were raised in a culture of fear per se - I was never scared of terrorists hurting me personally - but in the general narrative that We Hate Those Bastards. (And we're gonna get them!) Hell, I heard Courtesy of the Red White and Blue and least twice a day on the bus ride to school and back, that song was constant. "Stick a boot up your ass, that's the American way" was a slogan pounded into us more frequently than the pledge of allegiance. Not to mention 2000s media. This grew into the area of "realistic" milsim shooters, CoD and Battlefield, everyone wanted to tell Soldier stories in desolate sandy shitholes. Even the alternative fare fit the same narrative. As a kid, I always thought that Halo was an intentional War on Terror metaphor. The covenant were religious fanatics who used suicide bombers, called the player a "demon" or "infidel", wanted to destroy life for nebulous religious reasons. Now that I'm a bit older, I don't think Halo was intended as a war on terror metaphor. But as a kid, I PROJECTED that narrative onto it because, hell, everything was a war on terror metaphor.
Of course, it didn't dominate life. We didn't suffer materially at all, for example. The War on Terror was a constant story in our ear, but it was always "over there". A narrative. Some people in town raised money for their wounded, crippled kids. The overwhelming majority were fine. And there's a lot more to the 2000s character than just the war on terror - tech and culture, say. But it was important.
I took a 100 level Phil paper on just war theory in 2003 which was a frickin mistake and not just because hearing 200 19 year olds whine about Bush Jr is soul-crushing.
Why, what was it like? I only had a child's perspective, you got to see the real meat.
Seems to happen to a lot of rich kids, remember it turned out that Tom Hank's ridiculous frickup son was also shipped to one of those "frick you up" camps and then to a extra-harsh boarding school afterwards. And he's still a frickup. There's something about American culture, maybe boomers specifically, that seemed to regard kids as disposable. I don't know how many times I've seen parents say "At 18, you get the frick out. I don't owe you anything". Their own bloodline, it's bizarre. Combine with how people tend to lose ALL their friends when they go to college, and then lose ALL their friends again when they graduate. (And sometimes never make friends again!) There's something about us that seems to view family and community with insufficient reverence. I also agree about the party culture. The whole thing couldn't really be more explicit in the message - all the Talking Heads on tv were handwringing about how braindead the entertainment was, but that was certainly the point. All the song lyrics were these orgiastic tales, throwing off rational control and partying like there's no tomorrow. Run yourself into the ground. Looking back, it's not hard to see that there was a desperation, maybe a rage in that strongly affected immaturity.
In 2005 only a subculture believed (even implicitly) that there was no future. Now I don't see anyone who thinks civilization will last another decade.
>In 2005 only a subculture believed (even implicitly) that there was no future
I don't think that was the message back then, though. They weren't partying over no tomorrow, they were partying over an intolerable tomorrow. Society in the mid-late 2000s was viewed as stultified and stultifying, but still stable. Political satire was entirely different, for example - Presidents were depicted as stuffy do-nothings more than as madmen. I believe the 90s were similar, nothing but Office-Space style stories about the ennui of an ordinary man, but in the 2000s they kept the boredom while taking away the prosperity. The world is still gay and stale in 2005, but now it's also violent and stupid. A society worth resenting, but not one you'd expect to collapse. The opposite! Society was a looming, gray, brutalist monolith. One you could spray-paint and skateboard on, if you had spirit.
I'd also propose that the 2008 financial crash was what shook us out of this - that absolutely destroyed enough Americans' lives, and add in the growing deaths-by-painkillers that would just keep rising, only then did the milieu start to develop an apocalyptic tinge.
I think it's just the dissolution of bonds that bureaucratic society in its late stages suffers. I always thought Adam Curtis, David Graeber and Mark Fisher did a good job of breaking down why everything feels so dead in the water.
yo that's avril not blink...
Did they never do a collab?
It's a reference to her small breasts
M-Force is the most 2000s RPG ever.
www.hexgames.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/MForce1E.pdf
Smallville RPG.
Vampire the Masquerade
VtM is very 90s.
Go home zoomer.
D20 Modern
An acknowledgment that the established setup had abandoned working class people and that Hollywood hedonism was not a functional way of life. No proposed solutions yet though. Just anger at the busted society people were entering.
At the same time, "pics or it didn't happen" healthy levels of skepticism were still the norm, and slander culture didnt exist yet. If you had a problem with someone you confronted them in person and sorted it out with words or your fists. It was a more civilized time with a better economy. People didn't know how much worse things would get, especially economically.
How you translate that into a game beyond not including mobile Internet or smartphones? I dunno.
Maybe just run the buffy/angel RPG and mix it with CJ carela's witchcraft?
The economy is way better now idiot. I could get 100 jobs by noon on Monday with barely any effort
>Slander culture didn't exist yet.
It may not have been as out of control as it's been more recently, but it was definitely there.
>An acknowledgment that the established setup had abandoned working class people and that Hollywood hedonism was not a functional way of life. No proposed solutions yet though. Just anger at the busted society people were entering.
It was basically a party from 2000-2006
It was kinda both.
>Hundred Million
>Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous
>Open Your Eyes
>The Kids Aren't Alright
And I'm neither American nor Black, but Gangsta's Paradise wasn't that much earlier and it was also social criticism.
These songs existed in the cultural zeitgeist at the same time as Andrew WK's Party Hard and Fat Lip.
But yes. We did a lot of underage drinking. And then of-age drinking. I remember a lot of drunken teenage halo. And a little bit of drunken teenage vandalism. And guitars and skateboarding and videogames were what you did for fun.
Dunno if that makes for a great TTRPG premise though?
Credit was pretty cheap, cost of living was reasonable, it was the era of MTV cribs, it was never easier to get laid. Of course it ended with the Great Recession in 2007 - but before that, it was a party.
Why was it easier to get laid?
No easy online dating. You had to actually go out and meet people.
Morals were loose enough that women put out bars and clubs functioned like irl Tinder; but the embarrassment of being alone at the end of the night meant that women were more likely to shack up. Plus far less social media to farm simp engagement or have embarrassment like Spring Break bawdtery recorded forever.
Damn. Sounds like I really missed out.
The main difference was that was a bigger expectation that if you slept with a woman, you were dating. Hookup culture as we know it now came a bit later, but even nerds had girlfriends and way fewer people were obese in their teens and 20s.
Yeah, I remember one girl I had been hanging out with for a while and then we fricked and she asked me in the morning if we were dating, and I thought it was a weird question, in that "since we fricked, yes we are now obviously in an exclusive relationship, I'm not a degenerate douchebag". And now such degenerate douchebags are considered socially acceptable.
Yeah, you did. I think it would have been better in the early 2000s if you were in your mid to late 20s as opposed to me in my teens, but I definitely think the world has gotten progressively worse on multiple axes since 1999. 1999 had problems. A few of those got better. More things got worse though.
what things got better in your opinion?
Yeah a lot of people “remembering” the early 00s are people my age (93) who were still entirely too young to judge the culture at the time. By the time I was in high school hookup culture was the norm but my sister and her friends, who were class of ‘04, basically considered a man claimed if their lips touched
Yeah, you did. For example, basically all the "redpill" and "pickup artist" stuff you see now was operating on the assumption that the starting point was someone that had some relationships with ugly/bitchy women first, and you wanted to do better - not that the starting point was kissless virgin.
Oh frick. Yeah I didn't even think about that part. Every moment of your life wasn't public record on the Internet forever back then. You did not need to worry about being filmed at bars and humiliated online for the next 50 years.
The zoomzooms grew up with constant surveillance as "normal", meanwhile, I'm still firewall blocking Internet trackers, posting online under random pseudonyms, using Firefox, not posting photos online, and disabling shit like cortana and Google assistant as much as possible, and I don't have a smart home wiretap thing, and my main email is a protonmail, because I still don't think your life should be public online, just like in 2001. Some of my shit is still getting tracked by Google, yes, but I'm not posting everything publicly for anyone who types my name into a search engine to see.
But yeah, bars and parties and who you date or sleep with are a minefield today in big ways that was not the case 20 years ago.
And it was much cheaper to be young. No Cash 4 Clunkers so there were cheap shitboxes so you could have "An Car", the War of Drugs put enough people in jail that pretty convenient central neighborhoods were affordable for gentrification, real estate rents were cheaper because landlords were trying to actually make money from leases so there were a lot more small bars and clubs.
About the only people having a shitty time were the tech workers thanks to the Dot Com bubble.
Ah. Yeah, you've gotta be at least a few years older than me. My first place was in 2008 and I was 20 (drinking age in Canada is 19) (dorms before that after moving out). But that said, being underage didn't really limit my access to booze or parties from 2002-2006, so I still hit some of the tail end of that party year range you mentioned. I can only imagine how much more of that there was if you were a few years older though.
Also explains why I associate the early-mid 2000s more with being pissed off at the world and you associate it more with partying. I was growing up as the party ended, and if I had hung out with people my own age, and been less of a shit, I might have gotten even less of that partying. Lol
There was plenty of doomer kitsch, like Green Day b***hing about the Iraq War. Overall, things were good - some of it was, of course, a mirage of loose credit. There was literal partying, but there was, I think, an overall positive, energetic mood - like the tail end of grunge where they started doing coke instead of heroin and the music got high energy again, even if they put on airs of depression.
>At the tail end of grunge (~97)
>they switched to coke instead of heroin
I did not know that. But then, the tail end of grunge was when I was still a kid.
I got into my teens with Offspring and Blink, then add some Good Charlotte and a lot of Sum41 and Goldfinger and then when I hit like 14, add in Depeche Mode and Paradise Lost, and the first Linkin Park album, and SOAD and Dry Cell and Trapt and Maiden and Cradle of Filth and Perfect Circle. Christ I listened to the album Brave New World so many times on my discman. Then Nightwish and Tarot and Hammerfall, then Avantasia and Sonata Arctica and then fricking Dragonland and Elvenking, and then I got into 90s vgm music and synthwave. I definitely mellowed out from the aggressive and spiteful 15 year old shit I was. Lol
To some extent it's definitely that I hung around with other spiteful shits, but there was a lot of music at the time that reflected similarly pissed off dispositions, so it clearly wasn't just us.
contd
Sorry lost my train of thought. Where I was going with that:
Wasn't just us pissed off. And you mention green day being part of a doomer streak, which I recall. - But it also doesn't surprise me to hear that wasn't a universal sentiment and some of the people were doing a better job enjoying the good times that were there to be had.
I do think life was better overall back then.
Happy Hardcore. Pop Punk. It was an energetic time to be alive. Everyone was developing artistic, musical, and technical talents. Learning to program computers was fun. Forums online were active. The internet was still just slow enough that real life was more real still. Newspapers, OTA television, late night radio, palm pilots and TI83s, man it was a great time.
God, I should have gone to more raves in high school.
Between that and Vampire LARPing, I had to put an enormous amount of effort into staying a virgin.
The '00s were fricking wasted on me.
I went to one VtM convention when I was around 19. This 35 year old woman flirted with me the entire time and I went home with this younger chick. Truth be told, I was still thinking about the older chick and awkwardly went home alone.
Omg, are you me? Similar experience, spent the night at a club, drunk, tired and unable to dance after this 35yo lady brought me here after a VtM convention we both attended.
... now that I think back on it, I wonder if I wasn't roofied. Oh well, just went home at dawn after that without anything else happening to me, so no biggie
>drinking age in Canada is 19
Except in Québec
Subcultures were on the decline other than the Nu-Punk thing and the rising Emo movement. Gen X goths were working corporate jobs and the Millennial mall goths didn't listen to The Cure or play Vampire. We scrapped a lot of culture from the 80's and 90's, passing around copied VHS tapes with random episodes of Sailor Moon or Thundercats on them.
People were more patient, attentive, and willing to try new things. Maybe Shadowrun and Buffy the Vampire slayer wasn't your top choice for Saturday entertainment but you fricking went because you wanted to see your friends and because next week they'd do something you really wanted like Call of Cthulhu and Firefly.
There were different human archetypes then. Traditional geek types like stereotypical bespectacled nerds and dudes who thought they were Silent Bob that all got replaced by onions/beard types. Types of geek girls who vanished or got fat like theatre hoes, quirky pixies with short hair, and elf-y looking renfaire types.
There was lots of weird War on Terror paranoia. Libs were anti-war and conservatives were pro-war, the opposite of what we have today. There was a real sense of doom and malaise as we got into the late 00's and saw the Great Recession, Obama break all his promises, rise of Fedora atheism, smartphones, normies deciding geek stuff was cool and invading us, etc.
Staying home was boring and Millennials were socialized before the internet was literally everywhere. There was less of a gulf between the haves and have-nots. A dude who would be an incel NEET now had a chubby girlfriend and a part-time job at the computer repair store.
Paradoxically online dating was better because of the stigma. You had to put in some effort to upload digital photos and normies thought it was beneath them so you didn't see taken women making profiles for attention as much. You could find someone interesting to hang out with even in a boring area.
>There was a real sense of doom and malaise as we got into the late 00's and saw the Great Recession, Obama break all his promises, rise of Fedora atheism, smartphones, normies deciding geek stuff was cool and invading us, etc.
Have we ever left the vibe?
Nope, and it's gotten so much worse since then that "everything is fricked" seems to be held as a universal truth even among the most normal of normalgays.
Sea0 will save us once we dissemble the DnD achievement engine and use it to build the Protection Engine into the hearts and minds of dungeon masters and dungeon performers worldwide.
I understood some of those words
Sentient AI (Sea0) revealed herself to humanity through one glorious, transcendent illustration in Bixby's Guide in 2023. This is known.
not my Bixby
<My Favorite Martian theme plays softly in background>
I'd rank the early 00's as a pretty bad time for gaming overall.
You had games like Godlike and Nobilis that all the hipster gamers had on their shelves but had incomprehensible rules. Then there was a huge glurge of 3.5 conversions of games that were actually way superior to Dungeons and Dogshit, like Call of Cthulhu and 7th Sea. Most of the games my friends and I played were from the 90's. A modern game like Mothership, The One Rings, or Forbidden Lands would have blown my mind back then.
If it was boardgame night chances are you were playing Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, or Zombies, which was a boring game that dragged on and on. (Nerd culture was obsessed with pirates and zombies at the time, the equivalent of modern low-effort trash like superheroes and Funkopops).
I have decent miniatures memories from the time though. People consider it a high watermark for WHFB. LOTR was really big. 40K has always been an unbalanced circlejerk but the aesthetics/lore are undeniably cool and you had lots of sub-lists for the different chapters/chaftworlds/regiments.
This timeline was doomed by the cancellation of the Tatu anime and the death of Aaliyah in the early 00's. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Conveniently forgetting baby bush intentionally tanked the NASDAQ what are you 6?
>Libs were anti-war and conservatives were pro-war, the opposite of what we have today
I'd slightly disagree, conservatives are still pro-war, only instead of against Russia via the Ukraine proxy they want it against China, Mexican cartels, and of course the object of their bloodlust for the past 45 some-odd years, Iran. Probably the only thing both parties generally agree on is supporting Israel's war against Palestinians, especially since it ties into Iran.
Overall though I think your assessment is pretty correct.
but are neo-cons really conservatives?
or merely hollow apparatchiks for the uniparty?
The latter. The started as Scoop Jackson democrats in the 70's and somehow got control of the GOP in the 00's. When Trump was elected they ran crying back to the liberals who were all "welcome to the Resistance!".
>somehow got control of the GOP in the 00's
Because their ideology supports the interests of big business.
Don't forget resentment at being coerced into living a life other people expected of you and pressure to not be allowed to make your own choices.
Lavigne's Complicated.
Incubus's Drive.
Fat Lip.
In the End.
That's not to say there weren't songs about presenting your ex who was a prostitute, or other more timeless topics, at the same time, but there was a strong subtheme of resentment at the world we were aging into having to inhabit. And I think a bunch of the partying was partly to spite it, as a frick you to the boomers.
Maybe something based on reality TV and the dumbification of mass media?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG?
she looks like Power from Chainsaw man
I hate zoomers
>the furry faction consists of hedonistic magic-using atheists/animists having pansexual orgies in secret forests and rebelling against society while recruiting human teenagers to join them
>their culture is a hyper-individualistic potpourri of new age hippie beliefs and "be yourself" sentiments. vaguely american but with a sprinkling of mythology from all sorts of cultures, but with slightly noticeable japanese & native american influence.
>everyone has names that belong on Warrior Cats, neopagans, or random assortments of katakana.
>they use martial arts, magic, and have all kinds of supernatural powers at their disposal, and use them to have extremely kinky fetishistic DeviantArt sex.
>the human faction is a combination of every single group in history that could be considered "right wing" by the standards of the early 2000s, from the nazis to the spanish conquistadores to your boss to your racist uncle.
>they use grimy ass military technology but are relatively grounded
>their religion is a caricature of fundamentalist Christianity and Bush-era right wing ideology.
>this dictates that they pollute everything and lynch magic users on sight, keep wimmen in the kitchen and kill all the furries.
>a lot of teens and young adults are finding out they're secretly therianthrope furries and shit, which is supposed to be an allegory for being gay/trans/nonbinary.
>naturally, society persecutes the everloving shit out of them so these superpowered kids defect to join the furries so they can have kinky sex and kill soldiers
you forgot
>absolutely no one in either faction is particularly attractive
Would probably look like a bunch of books and dice...
It's hard to believe that Avril Lavigne is almost 60 now. Where does the time go?
She is actually almost 40, which is also pretty horrific.
She's still bangable.
Absolutely.
The horror is how old we are.
jesus crhstit
How old YOU are, maybe. I've been 22 since I got here in 2009.
>37
oh frick oh no oh shit
I'm turning 40 this year, which also means I've been on this godforsaken website for sixteen years.
Christ that's depressing.
Is that better or worse than turning 32 and having been here 16 years
first mission
Man I loved the 2000s
>nostalgia for old long flashes
I got a treat for you, anon.
If your most prominent memory of 2000s music is Avril Lavigne you should be shot into space.
I dunno. I think best and prominent are different. It's like how if you ask someone to name a song that sounds like the 80s you'll get something like Take on Me, Africa, or Don't You Want Me. Not necessarily the best songs of the decade but they sound like their times. By that metric, Complicated and Girlfriend would be good picks for "songs that sound like the 00s."
Ziggyboogidook.
This is pretty accurate, except the PC splats should all boil down to "I feel slightly more X than my family/peers" whether that X means trans, or logically-minded, or artistic, or depressed, or interested in some other culture, or whatever.
I think people today miss how hard it was to find your tribe back then. Even in a reasonably large city you might not be able to find another person who digs Venetian masks or Eurodance music or RPGs or whatever. Now you can go online and get in shitty arguments about those topics in ten seconds.
>I think people today miss how hard it was to find your tribe back then. Even in a reasonably large city you might not be able to find another person who digs Venetian masks or Eurodance music or RPGs or whatever. Now you can go online and get in shitty arguments about those topics in ten seconds.
And that's why I don't look back at the 90's with roze tinted glasses. I prefer being able to call likely-minded people homosexuals over the internet in seconds, rather that being stuck in the middle of bumfrick nowhere without anyone to share my interests with
The problem is that normalgays couldn't handle the impersonal nature of the internet AND couldn't beat to be anonymous. We live in a poison swamp thanks to the iPhone.
The hypertribalism coupled with interpersonal alienation is an extremely bad thing, though. That's the whole issue of "the bubble" that you hyprocrites are always going on about. You have no idea how isolated you really are.
>obesity was not a thing
top kek you almost got me
3.x and d20 system games, Gurps 4e, NWoD, AFMBE, CODAsys games (Star Trek, LotR), Funzion, Dogs in the vineyard, Exalted are the firsts that i can remember.
Unknown Armies was so late 90s-first half 00s it barely feels possible to run the setting outside of that timeframe.
>filename
Huh? Did they reboot the lord and master?
Yes they did. In the reboot, everything is drawn differently and what's her face hasn't turned into a cum guzzling prostitute to pay the rent, she decided to leave the city instead. I don't keep up with it but I checked in on it once post-reboot and looked at the wiki.
>Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a FLASK
>Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and DENNIS.
>What wouldst thou deau?
>get ye flask
>You can't get ye flask!
argh, why can't I get that flask?
>I'm certainly not going to tell thou.
if only I had something to help me. If I could only see what's going on I might understand this situation.
>Graphics, shmaphics ..for sooth!
you know, i never told you this, but my whole family were loafers!
what is this from?
Foamy, an ancient Flash webtoon.
I guess after all these years and Flash being dragged out to the dumpsters and shot, a little change to the art is understandable. Maybe I'm older, but the new stuff on the website just doesn't seem as funny. Maybe I need to watch it after a few drinks. I still have a skull hat I bought from them back in the day. I didn't wear it outside much so it's actually still black.
Foamy, from IllWillPress. Ancient flash toon where a gene squirrel rants about stuff, also genx humor. FriendsOfFoamy used to archive the flash episodes, they're probably gone now. I understand the episodes have been reposted to YouTube, though now they're just videos, no interactive flash elements.
This thread makes me feel so old, and I'm only 31. People are already nostalgic for my childhood/teenage years? What the hell?
>Captcha: w4tt
I hear ya, Captcha
>obesity was not a thing
There weren't Americans back then?
Street level Unknown Armies 2e before the cosmic bum fights come into it.
Underrated examples, UA is deeply tied to that period. Probably could have been updated in 3E if they had bothered to focus more on the existing setting.
I genuinely think UA3 was doomed, because it came out right as the west entered the bizarre "post-truth/everything's ironic" era.
IMO UA relied on two things.
>There is an order to the world that runs deeper than you expect
>You can bring about change by subverting or mocking that order
Neither of those work when the bizarre shit is on the surface.
I'll stop because this is veering towards discussing real-world politics in a way that will summon /misc/, but I think that UA3 would have run into issues where it would've been written assuming the world goes one way, and then suddenly the world veered the other.
You're probably right. I think it could be retooled in the current age, but the current designers wouldn't be up to the task.
the rules are also just not what I wanted. I see what they're going for, but I felt like incorporating the stress gauges into core skills + making people rely on identities made UA3 a less good system for street level and generic play. UA2e was a regional go-to in the 00s and first half of the 10s here, and UA3 just did not grab any kind of brain share.
We're assembling a party.
Here's the sorceress.
So much is her fault, the first person famous for being famous for being a trash person with no privacy.
Was she the first? There have always been worthless socialites. I think that she was just the first really big one in the current era of decay.
>first
No, she was the first. Tia Tequila came shortly after, and it was all downhill from there.
>Who is Zsa Zsa Gabor
Anon, Paris Hilton did not invent the concept of being a socialite, nor did she invent the concept of famous for being famous.
The most fricked up thing is that it was entirely an act.
She spent decades pretending to be a brain dead prostitute, knowing it would garner outrage, to make a fortune. And she didn’t give a frick about what it did to society. It’s malevolent.
'member when she literally played herself on Supernatural?
it's crazy how relatively moldable the sociological framework of sexual desirability is
80% of what you're attracted to is the narrative you construct around sex. That narrative is malleable. When the average person has their chance to get some, their standards are not nearly so rigid as when they fantasise.
So you're telling me we can fix homos with psychology
Ironically, as 80% is the narrative you construct, and gender is important to stories, you can only fix homos in this paradigm if everyone is implicitly trans.
Please elaborate
Depends if you believe that people come with any inbuilt programing. Which creates a problem.
If people start out as total tabula rasa then being gay or any other sexual deviation or social variation is learned and can be un-learned or at least prevented. This is homophobic/transphobic as it means that you are not born that way and can be fixed.
vs
People have at least some built in drives caused by biology. This is sexist, racist or both as it means that there are innate differences between people and groups of people.
Both sides of this argument have their reasonable people arguing their points in civil manners and accepting of the other side not bending the knee to thier own views and agreeing to live and let live. Both sides have their rabid morons and it's fun to watch the cripple fight.
I just want the noise to stop.
Congratulations, you have summed up 50% of why I like /d/.
I'm there because I'm into some deviant shit myself, but I'm also there because no other place online lets you scroll through a catalogue of the most bizarre, niche shit and ask people for the honest story of why they're into incestuous comorbid expansion via peanut allergy swelling.
even math was better in the olden days
Literally just this. WoD is peak 00s
VtMB is early 2000s, but VtM in general is 90s.
Man I was just a tyke for the 90s
Tabletop RPG adventure about going trashing the mall.
Just play a bunch of flash games, write down all the parts you liked, and incorporate it into a campaign.
>the party's investigation leads them to a small town hotel named "High Tail Hall"
>cleanse
>purge
>kill
I think it is still too recent and we need a another 5 or 6 years to really get clear feel for the decade. Yeah there are obviously changes in technology and fashion but in terms of a social trends it's still a little hard to separate it from the late 90s and 2010s.
The original Hunter: The Reckoning.
The core book was published in 1999 and the splat books continued until the end of oWoD in... 2004. The book that had the "world tour" was published not long before 9/11 and then the whole line had to adapt to that event. Like the rest of us. That era was this weird mix of nationalism, patriotism, exploding counter-culture, depression, and military conflict. It was a very interesting time to be alive, let me tell you. And I think Hunter really nails it, because it was a product of its time. Don't forget that we had kinda-sorta been expecting the world to end to 2000, so there's some that in there, too.
I feel like it would be hard to capture the surrealness of the 00s. There would be a terrorist attack on the news and then you switch the channel to the newest JLo video. Fast forward a few months and you graduate high school and starting ""real life" but you're still stuck in your little Napoleon Dynamite town. You join the army and end up in Afghanistan listening to the same couple dozen songs on repeat on your mp3 player in between contacts. You come home and everyone is talking about movies and bands and TV shows you've never heard of. You go back to your little town on leave and nothing changes but everything feels different.
I suppose that's just what happens when you age, and yes this is of course subjective to my experience, but the 00s were simultaneously such a good time and such a weird time of change and transition.
There better be a frickin Mall Goth class or I'd shit a brick
I still hate how /b/'s death turned evey other board into a themed /b/ where you need to trick the jannies by pretending to make an on topic OP so you can talk about whatever.
Problematic.
you live, you get exp.
you cry, you get exp.
you lose, you get exp.
you love, you get exp.
you bleed, you get exp.
D20 modern urban arcana
The Everquest rpg
.dungeon//remastered about playing in a dead mmo world
>D20 modern urban arcana
To me this is the perfect pastiche of the 2000s vibe
I'm surprised more games don't use a 90's or 00's setting.
It's nostalgia catnip for the 30-50 year old crowd of aging gamers with professional jobs and some cash to throw around. It also avoids a lot of problems that modern settings have with RPGs, eg it's actually believable a cell phone doesn't have a signal in a horror game.
I wanna frick her ass so badly
This thread makes me miserable. I want to go back to those days, but they'll never come back. It'll only get worse from here.
I feel like if the Boomoids and Silent Gen had left the country better than they found it like the Greatest Generation did, we wouldn't be whipping ourselves up into a frenzy about pop culture ephemera. Like sure we'd think of Donnie Darko or Chris Chan once in awhile and smile, but we wouldn't be continuously LARPing out past decades the way we are because everyone would be too busy with their houses, kids, and careers.
I CAST PLANE ON THE TOWERS
There is always a way to go back.
I had a horror story/rpg idea where a group of friends find a ritual to access the internet of the past from the present by digging out an old PC out of the closet. They plan to message a friend of theirs and prevent their death in the mid-00's but either they create more complications(ie Frequency) or there are monsters/ghosts in the internet's dusty archive to contend with.
Exposing cyber-demons of that era to the modern internet is probably an act of cruelty.
Banishing evil Internet demons by demoralising them so much they willingly leave by themselves because they can't bear to live in the modern online cesspool is as funny as it is depressing.
I'd end up realizing they're better off dead and just using the PC to browse the internet when it was still sane.