Monday, July 24, 2006

RPG motivational posters

There is a thread on RPG.Net — a roleplaying game forum — dealing with photoshopped motivational posters. The idea is for readers to create images similar to the corporate motivational posters popular in many companies (or the parody of same, as seen at www.despair.com). This thread started off simply enough, but it's become hideously long. At last count the thread has had 1.3 million hits!

Early on, I created a number of motivational posters of my own. I've since added a couple of others (two of which Jimmy and Jason haven't seen, and one Alana hasn't seen). Since most of my blog readers are unlikely to go traipsing over to RPG.Net, I thought I'd post them here.

Note that one of them is in... uh... questionable taste and may not be exactly "workplace friendly". Technically it could appear on prime time television (i.e. no breasts, genitals, or bums showing), but... well, you've been warned.

Here are the posters I created. If I do any more, I'll add them as I create them.

(Click on the image to see a larger, better looking version of it.)

This is the first one, based on a quote from the brilliant The Colbert Report:




This is, so far, the only Call of Cthulhu based poster. Non-gamers won't understand it. A "SAN Check" is a roll to see if a character has lost a little — or a lot — of his sanity:




This is probably the weakest poster I've done. It's based on a line from The Princess Bride:




This poster is based on a standard gamer theme, that gamers — many of whom are overweight guys with poor social skills — can be... smelly, at least in conventions (where folks tend to game non-stop for the better part of a weekend):




This is the "workplace dangerous" poster. When I originally created it back in May during a gaming weekend, Jimmy, Jason, Alana and I were rolling on the floor laughing after I posted it. I got a number of positive comments about it... and about as many very negative comments. One reader gave me a "laugh point". Another said he was unsubscribing from the thread over it. Hmmm... if I was CNN, that would be termed "balanced":




After posting this picture under the "Pimping Do-Ming's ride" entry on this blog, I was inspired (apparently only a little bit) to turn it into a poster. For the non-roleplayers, "LARP" stands for Live Action Role Playing; this is when people play the game by moving around as though they were playing make believe (as opposed to sitting around in a living room talking about what their characters do):




My most recent poster. This is based, only slightly tongue in cheek, on an actual incident. I don't think the guy was a stats major, but he was a university student. A "D20" is a twenty-sided die, like the one in the picture:

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