Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting

thespaceinvader posted:

And this is double-dumb
I kind of suspect that kind of stilted thinking is bleedover from the CCG rules-lawyering that has penetrating a lot of games. Strict interpretation and panels of judges arguing over what "is" is after "or" and issuing regular errata for re-interpretations is part of WotC.

The ambivalent desire to have DMs interpret things to allow more options while having the desire to pen DMs in and not let them make decisions is another problem. (At least on the forums, Ive never seen it in real life.)

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Generic Octopus
Mar 27, 2010
Couldn't you have wild magic do different things based on odd or even roll? Like on an even your ranged single-target spell suddenly becomes a burst, odd the target is teleported in some random direction. The more levels you get the greater quantity/variety of things happen. Perhaps have some class features that give you some control over what effects proc (like, treat an even roll as odd) a couple times a day at high levels.

That sounds more appealing to me than a chart or something that only happens on 1s and 20s.

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!
Yep, that's where i was going with exploding-dice burst size increases with damage, but I really liked Choas Bolt from 4e as well, which bounced on even rolled hits and kept doing so until it had targeted everything on the board at least once or missed or rolled odd. It was cool.

Generic Octopus
Mar 27, 2010

thespaceinvader posted:

Yep, that's where i was going with exploding-dice burst size increases with damage, but I really liked Choas Bolt from 4e as well, which bounced on even rolled hits and kept doing so until it had targeted everything on the board at least once or missed or rolled odd. It was cool.

Sorry, haven't slept tonight so I kinda glazed over your post. Yeah, the stuff you mention is totes what I'm talking about. Mostly where I'm coming from though is, if someone writes "Wild Magic" on their sheet, I'd like to see those effects in play all the time, rather than occasionally cropping up when someone rolls 20 or in the case of Chaos Bolt only doing something neat on an even roll.

MartianAgitator
Apr 30, 2003

Damn Earth! Damn her!

FRINGE posted:

I kind of suspect that kind of stilted thinking is bleedover from the CCG rules-lawyering that has penetrating a lot of games. Strict interpretation and panels of judges arguing over what "is" is after "or" and issuing regular errata for re-interpretations is part of WotC.

The ambivalent desire to have DMs interpret things to allow more options while having the desire to pen DMs in and not let them make decisions is another problem. (At least on the forums, Ive never seen it in real life.)

I don't think the pedantic ideology comes from CCGs. I think that everyone at Wizards just subscribes to the literal interpretation of D&D, as put down by their forebears. In 2e and previous, each spell would have giant lists of specific (-ish) rulings for what would happen when you threw your fireball at a tree instead of an orc. Then it would be debated, with anecdotes and philosophy, in the Talmud Dragon magazine, forever and ever. Eventually, Moses Skip Williams would hand down a non-sequitur ruling in Sage Advice. Thus it was and ever shall be.

4e powers have no rulings or examples of what would happen using them out of combat, or at least none that could be taken seriously. But the wizard had specifically got the ability to influence the world outside of combat with his spells in earlier D&Ds. So they had to invent rituals. Letting PCs interact with the noncombat world using abilities designed for combat would obviate rituals and blur the scope of combat-centric 4e. Besides, how could you balance abilities if they could be used in an open setting? Players already had skills to interact with the world (Fighters getting half as many as Wizards, natch).

Rituals of course can do anything because they are magic and magic has no bounds. Constraining magic would be constraining the joy of creativity at the heart of D&D.


tl;dr: gently caress this gay hobby.

A Catastrophe
Jun 26, 2014

FRINGE posted:

I kind of suspect that kind of stilted thinking is bleedover from the CCG rules-lawyering that has penetrating a lot of games. Strict interpretation and panels of judges arguing over what "is" is after "or" and issuing regular errata for re-interpretations is part of WotC.
And yet Mike 'greatest of grog-friends, take this grog cloak as our grog-gift unto you' Mearls is even worse and more fiddly.

The Magic team runs a top grade development house and the poo poo that happens in the dnd offices is their own drat fault.

quote:

The ambivalent desire to have DMs interpret things to allow more options while having the desire to pen DMs in and not let them make decisions is another problem. (At least on the forums, Ive never seen it in real life.)
So you say. I've seen plenty of people claim to live in these perfect fiat-heavy wonderlands but I've never ever seen one for real.

As for penning GMs in, there's nothing more 'penned in' in a ttrpg, than somebody who's class features are dictated by the GM.

Ratoslov posted:

Anyone have a good idea for a mechanic for a Wild Mage that isn't complete poo poo?
Once per day when the wild made does a wild surge, everyone else at the table grabs a dice and rolls it.

Each dice roll is applied to a table. The first to roll get a relatively tame but reliably good buff table, and last to roll gets a good/bad tradeoffy but interesting complication table, and everyone in between rolls on the basic table. You can roll whatever dice comes to hand, but the better ones are higher on the 20 point scale. Then the wild surge is made out of all the rolls, with sub-rolls being rolled by whoever rolled that initial dice.

A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Aug 2, 2014

cbirdsong
Sep 8, 2004

Commodore of the Apocalypso
Lipstick Apathy
Apparently my current 4e GM is "really happy they're returning power to the GM" and it "doesn't matter that the 5e designers aren't focused on the numbers." I suppose it's a testament to 4e that his encounters are reasonably fun and challenging. The other players I've talked to aren't crazy about it but assume, "well, whatever, we'll still have fun." It really bums me out that 5e is going so far backwards, since the current version of D&D is apparently the default choice for a lot of people. I can say we should play FATE or 13th Age or whatever else all I want, but they are inexorably drawn to the name, even if they might not be fully on board with the way it works. For them, D&D is tabletop RPGs.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

FRINGE posted:

I kind of suspect that kind of stilted thinking is bleedover from the CCG rules-lawyering that has penetrating a lot of games. Strict interpretation and panels of judges arguing over what "is" is after "or" and issuing regular errata for re-interpretations is part of WotC.

The ambivalent desire to have DMs interpret things to allow more options while having the desire to pen DMs in and not let them make decisions is another problem. (At least on the forums, Ive never seen it in real life.)

I like how you cast games that don't require a constant stream of GM adjudication to function as "a desire to pen GMs in and not let them make decisions."

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

cbirdsong posted:

"really happy they're returning power to the GM"

Anyone who thinks this has an actual issue.

"I can't be a GM unless the game EXPLICITLY STATES that I'm more important then the players!"

"I can't make GM decisions unless the game FORCES me to!"

Like it's one of those two, and neither one is good.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

ProfessorCirno posted:

Anyone who thinks this has an actual issue.

"I can't be a GM unless the game EXPLICITLY STATES that I'm more important then the players!"

"I can't make GM decisions unless the game FORCES me to!"

Like it's one of those two, and neither one is good.
What the game needs, you see is some sort of MASTER who runs the DUNGEONS.

LFK
Jan 5, 2013

MartianAgitator posted:

I wonder if this isn't the same problem that comics may have. The fans are in charge; the inmates are running the asylum. In D&D's case it seems like the shitheels are the ones holding on to their Wizards employment, gatekeeping new blood from entering the brand like Doritobeards loudly making GBS threads on the Avengers movie at the front of the game store. I live in Seattle; any goons wanna come with me, storm the D&D office, and kick out anyone who doesn't get Dungeon World?
It is exactly the same problem DC is having.

Marvel wizened up and told their "fans" (i.e. the ones that don't actually care, just enjoy gatekeeping the hobby) to go gently caress themselves. "Yeah, here you go, here's a throwback easter egg in Winter Soldier, now go gently caress yourselves while we make all the money on the planet."

Daetrin
Mar 21, 2013

LFK posted:

It is exactly the same problem DC is having.

Marvel wizened up and told their "fans" (i.e. the ones that don't actually care, just enjoy gatekeeping the hobby) to go gently caress themselves. "Yeah, here you go, here's a throwback easter egg in Winter Soldier, now go gently caress yourselves while we make all the money on the planet."

From what I've seen, the marvel people are all very excited about what they're doing - but from the perspective of writers first, or as actors first. Not from the perspective of "One true comic interpretation!" but "Wow we can do SO MUCH with this material!"

Which I guess illustrates the difference. When you have people who are worried about the "integrity" of the material rather than where they can take it and what they can do with it, you get...weird incestuous stagnation of an IP.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Yeah, Marvel isn't exactly saying "gently caress you, fanboys!" The Marvel movies are chock full of Easter eggs and references that clearly establish that the people making them are as much fans of the source material as the audience they're being pitched to and the movies themselves are also top-quality, not shovelware shlock.

It is true, though, that they both aren't getting hung up on fannish minutiae to a pathological degree and that the vast, vast majority of their business isn't coming from comics grognards but from a much broader moviegoing audience. Yeah, the comics still exist and get printed, but the comics aren't making billions of dollars a year and Marvel has to know this.

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

Kai Tave posted:

It is true, though, that they both aren't getting hung up on fannish minutiae to a pathological degree and that the vast, vast majority of their business isn't coming from comics grognards but from a much broader moviegoing audience. Yeah, the comics still exist and get printed, but the comics aren't making billions of dollars a year and Marvel has to know this.

In a certain way, Marvel is treating their properties as a business would and using them to a degree that would generate the most profit. That is, attracting mainstream audiences and the general public with products that appeal to them. Hasbro does the same thing with their licenses like Transformers and MLP. Even the MTG part of Wizards has tried to expand their base by appealing to more casual players through comics and Duels of the Planeswalkers.

D&D still needs to catch up and stop focusing on the grog crowd. That's not to say they can't appeal to them, but the amount of money from new blood will almost always outweigh the money coming from the die-hards that would get alienated by the casual fans. Unfortunately, the decision makers at D&D are too afraid of the risks in alienation to see the gains in appealing to mainstream and casual players. There's also the curious notion that they must focus on only one edition. I've never understood that.

A Catastrophe
Jun 26, 2014
4e was in part an effort to expand appeal, but they attempted it while failing to deal with the greatest of the 3e-era sacred cows: complexity.

4e could have been 90% of the game it was in 50% of the pagespace, but that would mean getting rid of feats! And pages and pages of magical items!

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
The problem is that presupposes that there's a "mainstream market" for D&D in the first place. I'm kind of doubtful that there is, at least as a tabletop RPG that you spend 4-8 hours at a go sitting around a table and pretending to be an elf over. I don't think it's a coincidence that D&D's peak was back in the day before video games were the multi-billion dollar juggernaut of mainstream entertainment they are today. D&D's competitors for mainstream attention are literally everything else that young and casual gamers have at their disposal (which includes Magic: the Gathering).

Countblanc
Apr 20, 2005

Help a hero out!
I'm not going to defend 5e, but quite frankly I don't think "they should do [thing], it earns more money!" is necessarily the best advice if we're trying to create the best game possible. I absolutely don't think they should cater to the incredibly toxic hyper-grog fanbase, of course, I just also think they should prioritize making a great game with interesting combat and world building advice, not embrace the horrors of capitalism.

A Catastrophe
Jun 26, 2014

Kai Tave posted:

The problem is that presupposes that there's a "mainstream market" for D&D in the first place. I'm kind of doubtful that there is, at least as a tabletop RPG that you spend 4-8 hours at a go sitting around a table and pretending to be an elf over. I don't think it's a coincidence that D&D's peak was back in the day before video games were the multi-billion dollar juggernaut of mainstream entertainment they are today. D&D's competitors for mainstream attention are literally everything else that young and casual gamers have at their disposal (which includes Magic: the Gathering).
You could say the same thing about other kinds of tabletop games but they're going pretty well.

Whatever potential audience TTRPGs have, it's a lot larger than the one it's got.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

A Catastrophe posted:

You could say the same thing about other kinds of tabletop games but they're going pretty well.

Not really, though? I mean, you could say the same thing about other kinds of tabletop games but that ignores the pretty crucial distinctions between those tabletop games. Board games have a lot more mainstream cachet to lean on out of the gate, and even thoroughly nerdy games like Magic don't ask you to rope five of your friends in to spend 8 hours every Saturday playing a game that requires you to internalize a set of 300 page textbooks written in "naturalistic language" in order to pretend to be an elf and kill goblins. You can play three of four games of Magic in an hour barring occasional outliers.

D&D is the opposite of a casual game. It's a game that expects you and your group to devote a lot of time, effort, and headspace to what should, in theory, be a pretty simple sort of thing. But D&D isn't the only game around and time and again RPGs with popular name-recognizable licenses (Star Wars and such) and games with simpler, easier opportunity costs for casual gamers (Fiasco, let's say) have failed to set the hobby on fire and usher in a new age of elfgaming.

There could be other intangible factors at play here, I freely admit I'm no expert, but on the one hand you've got D&D and on the other hand, competing for the same nerd-dollars and "go kill monsters in fantasyland" experience, you have World of Warcraft and it seems pretty obvious to me which one of those is going to win 99 times out of 100. D&D is a niche hobby, period.

A Catastrophe
Jun 26, 2014
The vast majority of people see DnD as the only ttRPG- that's a majority even within the hobby. It really isn't fair to expect Fiasco to trump that. Board games and Card games are each doing respectable business these days, and showing plenty of innovation along the way. Not to mention the potential for hybrid digital products. I'm not saying that ttrpgs would ever be a huge industry, but i'm quite confident they could be a far larger, and healthier one than they are now.

After all, before the d20 glut the last big rise in RPG sales was from the WOD games, and that scene doesn't have poo poo to do with MMOs (despite comically inept efforts by CCP to change that).

eth0.n
Jun 1, 2012
Games are popular. Video games, card games, board games, they're all doing well. What's instrumental is that they're all focused on providing good gameplay first.

RPGs are, frankly, bad at gameplay. Feel and tradition get in the way, and flaws are excused with "GM can fix it". Problem is, GM-fiat and arbitrary GM-fixes (like fudging dice, or "going easy" during combat) kill gameplay. Even a good RPG like Dungeon World has relatively little gameplay, being so GM-fiat-heavy. And Fiasco's barely a game at all, being more an inspiration-engine for mostly freeform roleplaying. 4E and WHFRP3E tried, but they've still got dumb bullshit weighing them down, and RPGs have such a lousy reputation, they were probably doomed to fail to breakthrough to the mainstream no matter what.

I'm not sure what the answer is. As long as there's an expectation that you can do anything, not just what's spelled out in the rules, there will be GM-fiat that bypasses and interferes with gameplay. And that expectation is the heart of tabletop RPGs.

I wonder if the 80s heyday of RPGs was mostly about the gameplay they offered (that video games now provide in a mostly superior form), instead of the collaborative storytelling that now differentiates the tabletop niche.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

eth0.n posted:

I wonder if the 80s heyday of RPGs was mostly about the gameplay they offered (that video games now provide in a mostly superior form), instead of the collaborative storytelling that now differentiates the tabletop niche.

This is my working theory, that the peak of RPGs was a combination of good timing and lightning in a bottle (which is the same thing that gave White Wolf the degree of success they enjoyed back in their early World of Darkness days) and that while it's theoretically possible for someone to catch another bolt of lightning it's not going to be accomplished by trying to reinvent D&D, or possibly ever at all because the gaming scene in 2014 is a lot different than the scene in 1996 and people aren't really starved for choice when it comes to how they spend their free time.

FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting
Yeah theres no way people will want to sit in the same room with friends and tell stories.

Anyone wanna cyber? Imma 156th level orc!

Sir Kodiak
May 14, 2007


Are there any 5e tools announced? The character builder for 4e was a nice step forward, and put themselves in a position to do a lot more to make the game quicker to play which seems like it was lost due to the fool's errand that was a virtual tabletop. A middle-ground that simply handed condition tracking and power usage would have been much simpler and more sensible as an assistant to in-person play rather than a replacement. Everyone in the group I played with had at least a smartphone, if not a tablet.

eth0.n
Jun 1, 2012

FRINGE posted:

Yeah theres no way people will want to sit in the same room with friends and tell stories.

Thing is, there are loads of people doing essentially this, but online.

They just don't use game rules.

Obviously there are people who are into collaborative storytelling, but with game rules, but I'm not sure that that's ever been more than a relatively small niche, 80s heyday included, or that it's reasonable to expect it to become more than a niche.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

FRINGE posted:

Yeah theres no way people will want to sit in the same room with friends and tell stories.

Anyone wanna cyber? Imma 156th level orc!

You know what would make this experience even better? Paying $150 dollars for a set of lovely textbooks to tell you and your friends how to properly tell stories using the ~theater of the mind.~

"Oh baby...tell me more about walls."

M. Night Skymall
Mar 22, 2012

Sir Kodiak posted:

Are there any 5e tools announced? The character builder for 4e was a nice step forward, and put themselves in a position to do a lot more to make the game quicker to play which seems like it was lost due to the fool's errand that was a virtual tabletop. A middle-ground that simply handed condition tracking and power usage would have been much simpler and more sensible as an assistant to in-person play rather than a replacement. Everyone in the group I played with had at least a smartphone, if not a tablet.

Morningstar.

FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting

eth0.n posted:

Obviously there are people who are into collaborative storytelling, but with game rules, but I'm not sure that that's ever been more than a relatively small niche, 80s heyday included, or that it's reasonable to expect it to become more than a niche.
The thing with having a GM (of whatever name) is that more people will get into a character than they will crafting (or arbitrating) an entire setting/world. Thats where the systems help. The hardest thing with totally new players is getting over the "what am I" and "what can I do" type of issues. Telling them blithely "you can do anything!" is useless. The people that care most about "no DMs no masters" are not new players. They are burnt out players who want a new game that no one less-nerdy has ever heard of every few months and have stories about "this one time at band camp a DM was mean to me!"

Kai Tave posted:

You know what would make this experience even better? Paying $150 dollars for a set of lovely textbooks to tell you and your friends how to properly tell stories using the ~theater of the mind.~
Youve already said you dont like books in a variety of ways. Thats cool, but why post about it in a thread about book-based-games for years?

If people would rather spend 150 (or 1500) dollars buying props and statuettes then thats cool too. (They seem to come with piles of books as well.)

eth0.n
Jun 1, 2012

FRINGE posted:

The thing with having a GM (of whatever name) is that more people will get into a character than they will crafting (or arbitrating) an entire setting/world. Thats where the systems help. The hardest thing with totally new players is getting over the "what am I" and "what can I do" type of issues. Telling them blithely "you can do anything!" is useless. The people that care most about "no DMs no masters" are not new players. They are burnt out players who want a new game that no one less-nerdy has ever heard of every few months and have stories about "this one time at band camp a DM was mean to me!"

The vast majority of modern roleplaying is by people who have never played a tabletop RPG, and have absolutely no interest in doing so.

I'm not talking about burnt out tabletop RPG players. I'm talking about people roleplaying Twilight or Harry Potter or whatever on internet forums. It's a totally different kind of roleplaying from what us tabletoppers are used to.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

FRINGE posted:

Youve already said you dont like books in a variety of ways. Thats cool, but why post about it in a thread about book-based-games for years?

Sorry, you're right, I should have just said that your post was stupid and I strongly suspect that you're stupid as well. For example, nowhere did I say I don't like books in a variety of ways! That's a thing you came up with all on your own, possibly because you're stupid or maybe just bad at reading comprehension, it could be both, I don't know.

More relevant is the fact that "playing D&D" isn't "sitting around telling stories with your friends" or maybe having cybersex either, and trying to directly equate the two is inane and pointless because they aren't the same thing and there's a reason that several of those activities are more popular than D&D is.

My point is that people have been trying to find the secret blend of herbs and spices that will catapult tabletop roleplaying into a bigger, broader audience for decades now and they have gotten no closer. I strongly suspect that there is no ultimate RPG that will move tabletop roleplaying out of the hobby niche it exists in because, fundamentally, not that many people want to engage in traditional tabletop roleplaying ala D&D compared to pursuits like video games, board games, watching television, or getting together with friends to tell stories in a way that doesn't require a bunch of rules and dice and poo poo. D&D has to compete with all these things and it starts the competition with a high opportunity-cost buy in and terrible marketing.

A Catastrophe
Jun 26, 2014

Kai Tave posted:

This is my working theory, that the peak of RPGs was a combination of good timing and lightning in a bottle (which is the same thing that gave White Wolf the degree of success they enjoyed back in their early World of Darkness days)
It wasn't lightning in a bottle, or timing, it was Goths.

A whole shitload of Goths discovering RPGs and what makes them unique- that very combination of rules and collaborative storytelling that some other people ITT seem down on. Given a setting which suited their genre of choice, they went nuts for it and gave the industry a whole new lease on life.

Eventually that market got tapped out, for all the same old rpg reasons, but there's nothing about that which fundamentally could not happen again. A whole bunch of people who suddenly realize what this stuff is about, and go 'yeah!'. Sure, weird people, no doubt, but not half as weird as the target demo for 5e.

eth0.n posted:

The vast majority of modern roleplaying is by people who have never played a tabletop RPG, and have absolutely no interest in doing so.

I'm not talking about burnt out tabletop RPG players. I'm talking about people roleplaying Twilight or Harry Potter or whatever on internet forums. It's a totally different kind of roleplaying from what us tabletoppers are used to.
You think there aren't people in this forum, familiar with that scene?

Most of the time, Freeform collapses under it's own weight for want of system. There's no way to reach a collaborative resolution in a freeform space, and contrary to what those strange second cousins of railroading GMs will tell you, acting out a bunch of prescipted stuff isn't what makes roleplaying special.

A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Aug 3, 2014

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

A Catastrophe posted:

It wasn't lightning in a bottle, or timing, it was Goths.

A whole shitload of Goths discovering RPGs and what makes them unique- that very combination of rules and collaborative storytelling that some other people ITT seem down on. Given a setting which suited their genre of choice, they went nuts for it and gave the industry a whole new lease on life.

I don't know about anyone else but this sounds like the definition of good timing to me, that is to say that White Wolf released an RPG that happened to tap into a subculture right at the time that subculture was primed for a thing like Vampire. But there have been so many roleplaying games before and after Vampire that have aimed themselves at all manner of genres and subcultures...there's a glam rock RPG out there, Harry Potter knockoffs, Hong Kong kung-fu movies and Hollywood action movies and superhero comics, but somehow the Marvel movies exploding in the mainstream didn't turn the Marvel Heroic RPG into the new hotness.

It's not as easy as just saying "aim for a market and cater to it" because RPG designers have done that repeatedly and for every White Wolf you have dozens of endeavors with no bigger impact than any other also-ran. I agree that there's nothing about it that fundamentally couldn't happen again, but practically it seems pretty obvious that White Wolf benefited from no small amount of good fortune.

FRINGE
May 23, 2003
title stolen for lf posting

Kai Tave posted:

Sorry, you're right, I should have just said that I'm a lovely poster and basically stupid as well.

Two entire pages of this 45 page thread is you crying oily tears about how terrible things are.

Heres a hint angry kid: dont play it.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

eth0.n posted:

Games are popular. Video games, card games, board games, they're all doing well. What's instrumental is that they're all focused on providing good gameplay first.

RPGs are, frankly, bad at gameplay. Feel and tradition get in the way, and flaws are excused with "GM can fix it". Problem is, GM-fiat and arbitrary GM-fixes (like fudging dice, or "going easy" during combat) kill gameplay. Even a good RPG like Dungeon World has relatively little gameplay, being so GM-fiat-heavy. And Fiasco's barely a game at all, being more an inspiration-engine for mostly freeform roleplaying. 4E and WHFRP3E tried, but they've still got dumb bullshit weighing them down, and RPGs have such a lousy reputation, they were probably doomed to fail to breakthrough to the mainstream no matter what.

I'm not sure what the answer is. As long as there's an expectation that you can do anything, not just what's spelled out in the rules, there will be GM-fiat that bypasses and interferes with gameplay. And that expectation is the heart of tabletop RPGs.

I wonder if the 80s heyday of RPGs was mostly about the gameplay they offered (that video games now provide in a mostly superior form), instead of the collaborative storytelling that now differentiates the tabletop niche.

A lot of what's done in video games now has supplanted a lot of what TTRPGs, Board Games, Tactical Warfare Game and so on tried to do. Ostensibly, to try an innovate in the market, TTRPGs should take advantage of this new technology and use it to its advantage. 4e is probably the perfect game in a dungeon crawl to implement such ideas given how everything is so cleanly codified. It does make the game feel more like a video game, but in a sense, that's what video games were based on already: electronic implementations of things that existed in reality. The only difference now is the technology is better and more people can come to the table at the same time.

It's easy to say TTRPGs are a niche hobby, but there are ways to make it less so. Ultra simplified systems being more readily available or masked in the guise of being a board game or a party game is part of it. Necessitating prebuilt scenarios having around 4 hours worth of playtime per session is another (and it's probably a huge limiting factor). One important thing that is brought up is the "feel" and that largely keys into both "What is expected from an RPG?" and "What defines an RPG?" GM-fiat is implied to be essential to an RPG, but at the same time, it's not really in the definition and it may not be in the expectations of certain players, depending on their point of entry.

The most obvious part of the equation is the need for monetary investment into the whole thing. As of right now, there is not enough money in TTRPGs to invest in things like market research or general marketing or licensed online play. D&D is probably the game in the best position to do some of these things (and they may have done some of it), but so long as the big players squander money in keeping the status quo, the hobby as a whole will probably never develop beyond the niche it carved.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

A Catastrophe posted:

It wasn't lightning in a bottle, or timing, it was Goths.

Most of the time, Freeform collapses under it's own weight for want of system. There's no way to reach a collaborative resolution in a freeform space, and contrary to what those strange second cousins of railroading GMs will tell you, acting out a bunch of prescipted stuff isn't what makes roleplaying special.

You're exactly right about White Wolf's success. What helped was their whole-hogged support of WoD LARPing. WW caught lightning in a bottle by providing rules for pretending to be a rebel outcast vampire right around the time suburban teens got on a kick about pretending to be rebel outcast vampires.

As for free-form, every successful long-running game I have seen has had some type of resolution system, even if it was just referee fiat. E: granted, I've only been introduced to a handfull.

PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Aug 3, 2014

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
WotC did some actual market research back in the leading up to 3E days. Summaries (compiled, I believe, by Mr. Ryan Dancey himself) can be found here and here. Note that this was done like 15 years ago and hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, been done again since then. It might have been, but if so they haven't disclosed anything about it.

Mormon Star Wars
Aug 13, 2005
It's a minotaur race...

Kai Tave posted:

I don't know about anyone else but this sounds like the definition of good timing to me, that is to say that White Wolf released an RPG that happened to tap into a subculture right at the time that subculture was primed for a thing like Vampire. But there have been so many roleplaying games before and after Vampire that have aimed themselves at all manner of genres and subcultures...there's a glam rock RPG out there, Harry Potter knockoffs, Hong Kong kung-fu movies and Hollywood action movies and superhero comics, but somehow the Marvel movies exploding in the mainstream didn't turn the Marvel Heroic RPG into the new hotness.

It's not as easy as just saying "aim for a market and cater to it" because RPG designers have done that repeatedly and for every White Wolf you have dozens of endeavors with no bigger impact than any other also-ran. I agree that there's nothing about it that fundamentally couldn't happen again, but practically it seems pretty obvious that White Wolf benefited from no small amount of good fortune.

There's also the factor that Vampire seemed a lot simpler than many of it's competitors. What seems more intimidating, creating 2e+ D&D characters, or making a vampire character? Even though there was still systems mastery, one consisted of filling in dots like a scantron sheet.

Fuschia tude
Dec 26, 2004

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

Nancy_Noxious posted:

Is there any professional RPG designer who currently doesn't hate 4e?


In Pillars of Eternity, rope kid is making the 4e CRPG that never was, basically. And it has better math systems and ability scores, even!

MalcolmSheppard
Jun 24, 2012
MATTHEW 7:20

A Catastrophe posted:

And yet Mike 'greatest of grog-friends, take this grog cloak as our grog-gift unto you' Mearls is even worse and more fiddly.

You shouldn't take Mearls' communications in his professional capacity as a reflection of what he's really, truly into. I would say that 4e is far more indicative of his interests as a designer. For example, healing surges in 4e can be traced back to his WotC interview where he said he wanted to emulate the concept of Halo's regenerating shields in D&D.

The thing is, most pros of any worth are interested in a bunch of different games, and can't afford to be dogmatic because it keeps them away from inspirations they can make their own. On the other hand, D&D is traditionally marketed by crapping on the prior edition. Part of the audience likes to view RPGs as a technology that gets progressively improved instead of a twisty, wobbly thing where one discovery would sacrifice something else you like if you follow it far enough. 5e feels much more like the version of D&D WotC told itself to make to sell D&D, instead of what its designers actually wanted to do.

To pick up on another post, lots and lots of people like 4e just fine. Ethan Skemp (Werewolf, now working on the electronic game Lichdom) runs it. I've played it for over 5 years (warforged ranger closing in on 18th level).

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

There's also the factor that Vampire seemed a lot simpler than many of it's competitors. What seems more intimidating, creating 2e+ D&D characters, or making a vampire character? Even though there was still systems mastery, one consisted of filling in dots like a scantron sheet.

Aren't you loading the question a lot by specifying S&P AD&D characters, or am I misunderstanding what you mean by the plus sign? I think rolling a regular AD&D character is less involved than creating a 1E WoD character. And in the former case, there's only one trap option: not picking wizard. :v:

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply