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gradenko_2000 posted:Am I just reading that analogy wrong or are you really saying that the creation of the OGL was a bad thing? I had the impression that it was one of the better things to happen to the hobby The OGL was awful. It was literally invented in an attempt to kill all other RPG systems so that only d20 reigned, and for a while, it succeeded! No real innovation was allowed, and loads of lovely 3rd party d20 books littered gaming shelves everywhere. It was a dark and awful time to be a tradgamer.
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Sep 8, 2014 09:31
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efb It also caused the glut of lovely d20 products, loving up the market as well as the ability to design or appreciate other kinds of games in a large majority of the hobby. Ryan Dancey causes brain damage 
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Sep 8, 2014 09:31
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Tollymain posted:Ryan Dancey causes brain damage I think you'll find he's the Steve Jobs of brain damage.
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Sep 8, 2014 09:48
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ProfessorCirno posted:Ryan Dancey is a loving all star champ at getting people who absolutely know better to give him another chance to gently caress everything up all over again, and then burning all his bridges on the way out, only to somehow find a new person who absolutely knows better to give him yet another chance. If instead of loving around with this nerd poo poo he went into finance, he'd be the next Donald Trump with this kind of skill.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:15
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MartianAgitator posted:Well, WotC released a bunch of pdfs for a short while, then pulled them because of piracy concerns. So then the only way to get those pdfs was piracy.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:Am I just reading that analogy wrong or are you really saying that the creation of the OGL was a bad thing? I had the impression that it was one of the better things to happen to the hobby The OGL was the best thing to happen to 3.x. If all you want is 3.x forever (or the occasional OSR clone) then the OGL is super rad! If you want to play a game that isn't 3.x sometimes, the OGL was absolutely terrible and destroyed most experimentation and creativity in the hobby for awhile. Like, look at the biggest OGL fans and then ask yourself what games they play and count how many are not a variation of 3.x or terrible OSR game.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:40
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Well. Honestly d20 and the OGL resulted a lot of growth in the game industry. The amount of companies that exist today that probably would not have existed without it is, frankly, staggering. It did a lot of damage to anything that wasn't a d20 derivative, and Dancey's motivation in pushing the OGL is pretty suspect just going by his own admissions - that's all true. But we probably wouldn't have a Crafty Games, Fire Opal, Frog God, Goodman, Green Ronin, Kobold, Mongoose, Monte Cook, Privateer Press, Troll Lord, and yes, Paizo are all companies or studios that owe their existence to d20 products that are still in existence today in one form or another. A lot of companies rose and crashed in that time, but a lot have thrived or at at least survived through the d20 crash about a decade ago. I think the darkest legacy of the d20 phenom and the resulting rise of other D&D-alikes is just the use of nerd tribalism as a means to build a fanbase. It's always existed, of course, but Paizo and the duller parts of the OSR have made spitting on innovation a core part of their marketing strategy, and as a result fan the flames of dumb stuff like edition warring. Granted, I don't think this is necessarily intentional, but it works to split the hobby and increase its toxicity, in addition to just being frustrating to watch.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:41
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Error 404 posted:Dude, it is super pbp friendly. And we have a lot of games that recruit. Keep an eye out! I'm reading the Suicide Squad one shot that you're playing and it pushed me over the edge. I also have a pretty solid idea for my own variant (just needed a rule set).
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Sep 8, 2014 13:07
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Just for clarity's sake, what are the big differences between the d20 OGL and, say, the FATE or GUMSHOE license? They seem pretty open.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:45
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A Catastrophe posted:S But that kind of modest success isn't going to inflate anyone's ego.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:36
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Davin Valkri posted:Just for clarity's sake, what are the big differences between the d20 OGL and, say, the FATE or GUMSHOE license? They seem pretty open.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:39
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ascendance posted:Many other open licenses came into being because of d20 OGL, including FATE. I think GUMSHOE is a direct license from the company you pay for, like Savage Worlds. FATE and Gumshoe both use the OGL (Gumshoe also uses Creative Commons 3.0). It's really the SRD that makes the difference, IMO. D20 had practically everything in the SRD, so you could just reprint the entire game. At least with the others, you still need to come up with a game beyond the base mechanics.
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Sep 8, 2014 14:42
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jadarx posted:FATE and Gumshoe both use the OGL (Gumshoe also uses Creative Commons 3.0).
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Sep 8, 2014 14:54
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The Open Gaming License was to gaming as the IPod was to .MP3 players--there were plenty of alternative products, many of which were potentially better for any particular person's uses, but the ubiquity of the main product drowned out most such arguments for years until entirely different sorts of products began to gain steam. If you liked 3rd Edition/the IPod, though, drat--you had the time of your life, with countless add-ons coming out from third party vendors galore. Yes that is the post I shall make and I also feel this way because I miss my Rio Karma like I miss TORG
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Sep 8, 2014 15:28
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Quarex posted:The Open Gaming License was to gaming as the IPod was to .MP3 players--there were plenty of alternative products, many of which were potentially better for any particular person's uses, but the ubiquity of the main product drowned out most such arguments for years until entirely different sorts of products began to gain steam. If you liked 3rd Edition/the IPod, though, drat--you had the time of your life, with countless add-ons coming out from third party vendors galore. This is a bad analogy because by all accounts iPods were pretty good.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:40
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jadarx posted:FATE and Gumshoe both use the OGL (Gumshoe also uses Creative Commons 3.0). Fate has an SRD as well. I think the reason the Fate SRD works is that Evil Hat makes the PDF of Fate Core/FAE available as pay-what-you-want anyway (so technically you could get it free regardless), and that it's not as huge as D&D. When 3e came out, everyone saw it as their chance to finally live the dream and publish a supplement for D&D, the most well-known and beloved game in the hobby. Of course, few of them realized that game design or writing is hard, hence the mountains of bad product. That's not to say there isn't Fate shovelware, it's just that with the smaller market share people aren't stampeding to make stuff. I'd imagine it's because it's easier to spot shoddy 3rd party Fate stuff, too.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:34
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Evil Mastermind posted:Fate has an SRD as well. In D20 shovelware, you got some really terrible, unplayable classes, unusable monsters, and unreadable text. There were publishers that depended heavily on churning out a mountain of garbage to keep their cash flow going. Some of them are even still around.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:53
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Yeah, the OGL was hardly good for D&D as a product or a rules set. I'm sure there were plenty of people at WotC who were more than a little embarrassed to see their official D&D products sitting on the same shelf as a glut of garbage d20 spinoffs.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:57
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S.J. posted:Yeah, the OGL was hardly good for D&D as a product or a rules set. I'm sure there were plenty of people at WotC who were more than a little embarrassed to see their official D&D products sitting on the same shelf as a glut of garbage d20 spinoffs.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:00
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Froghammer posted:Worth noting is that I mentioned in passing Goblinworks raising 300 grand for a tech demo they only showed to investors to a bunch of indie game developers and mouths hit the floor. gradenko_2000 posted:Am I just reading that analogy wrong or are you really saying that the creation of the OGL was a bad thing? I had the impression that it was one of the better things to happen to the hobby
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Sep 8, 2014 17:00
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I'm actually interested to see what kind of rules set Paizo comes up with for Pathfinder 2.0 whenever they get away from the d20 license and OGL. They don't like being beholden to it.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:01
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ascendance posted:Thing is, everything in FATE works the same way. Even in shovelware, you're just going to get a big pile of Aspects, that modify your Approaches. All that stuff will still be basically playable. Also, FATE is still so small that everything is a labor of love product. Fate shovelware isn't so much "the mechanics don't work" as "we just took the SRD and stapled our setting onto it, without trying to really talk about anything like genre emulation or tone or even adding something new to the system". e: To expand on this, since that's kinda glib: Jadepunk is a wuxia style game, and spends a good amount of time talking about how to make aspects and stunts fit the feel of the world they presented. Even something as simple as changing the names of your aspects (in this case, Portrayal, Background, Inciting Incident, Belief, and Trouble) can affect how you look at the game mechanically and fictionally. There's other stuff, too: they redid approaches, have some device rules, things like that. Cyber-Fate, on the other hand, doesn't have any of that. It's just Fate Core with a little smattering of generic cyberpunk on top of it. The rules for cybernetics boil down to "make it a stunt or aspect, I guess", which is fine, but you could expand on that so easily that it's obvious they didn't care. There's also no rules for cyberpunk-style hacking. And some of their other stuff is even worse. These guys put out 30 or so "genre" Fate games, but they're all pretty much the same in terms of rules text, and a good number of them are GENRE + GENRE. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 17:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Fate shovelware isn't so much "the mechanics don't work" as "we just took the SRD and stapled our setting onto it, without trying to really talk about anything like genre emulation or tone or even adding something new to the system".
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Sep 8, 2014 17:13
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Evil Mastermind posted:Fate shovelware isn't so much "the mechanics don't work" as "we just took the SRD and stapled our setting onto it, without trying to really talk about anything like genre emulation or tone or even adding something new to the system". Well, a lot of that, bad stunts, and just bad organization. Even first-party FATE stuff I think struggled; Dresden Files, which I've been in a game of for over a year, has organization I've found to be a constant frustration, and the balance for the stunts and supernatural powers is all over the place (wizards win, BTW).
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Sep 8, 2014 17:20
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ascendance posted:So basically, FATE shovelware just doesn't give you the things you really need to play the game. Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, a lot of that, bad stunts, and just bad organization. Even first-party FATE stuff I think struggled; Dresden Files, which I've been in a game of for over a year, has organization I've found to be a constant frustration, and the balance for the stunts and supernatural powers is all over the place (wizards win, BTW).
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Sep 8, 2014 17:27
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Yeah, I meant to say "struggled early on" instead of just "struggled". The current releases are much better.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:35
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It is pretty interesting how you can see and follow the evolution of the system from SotC to Dresden to Fate Core. You can see each game addressing the problems of the previous one.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:37
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It makes you wonder what the next version will look like. I think the Skills subsystem is the most ripe for rebuilding right now.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:42
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Well, Fate Accelerated almost already does that for Fate Core's problems of bad stunt design and occasionally restrictive skills, even though it came out at the same time as Core.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:See my edit to my post, but yes. Fate shovelware is "hey, you guys like Fate, right? That's the new hotness? Here's a Fate game!" It comes from people failing to understand that Fate Core isn't a game but a system: it's designed for you to build subsystems on top of it to emulate a specific genre. All the good Fate games figure out what modes of interaction the game needs hard rules for based on genre (e.g. gunfights, kung-fu, hacking, heist planning, debate, whatever) and then build a dedicated subsystem to handle that; all of the bad ones just settle for renaming aspects and going "just use aspects and stunts."
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Sep 8, 2014 17:51
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I don't know about that. I'm pretty new to Fate and don't know about a lot of versions of the game, but Fate Core is really clean, and I can see how releasing a game with a ton of subsystems could really bloat the system down. Aspects and Stunts are really nice and versatile, and I don't see how avoiding using them would help anything. Like, subsytems can be cool and all, but I think the best design in Fate should stick to the Fractal and make use of already existing parts.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:57
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Loki_XLII posted:I can see how releasing a game with a ton of subsystems could really bloat the system down. You don't release it with "a ton of subsystems," you specifically release it with a subsystem for each of the poo poo that actually matters. For a cyberpunk game, you'd put together a subsystem for hacking and one for cybernetics, for example. They don't all have to have the same complexity, and the fewer subsystems you have the more complex you can afford to be (since too much faff bloats things, as you pointed out). The entire cyberware subsystem in the Toolkit fits on 2 pages of rules, for example - depending on how big a focus getting aug'd up is in your particular flavour of cyberpunk, that could be enough, or you might want to stretch that to 5-10 pages, but you don't want to go beyond that unless you're writing a game where the actual core theme is what you're doing to your body. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 18:11
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I feel like someone needs to release Fate/Stay Night for FATE.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:26
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Lemon Curdistan posted:For a cyberpunk game, you'd put together a subsystem for hacking and one for cybernetics, for example. They don't all have to have the same complexity, and the fewer subsystems you have the more complex you can afford to be (since too much faff bloats things, as you pointed out). The idea is that you still have to think about these things, and point your mechanics at your themes. Cyber-Fate up there fits into something (I think) Lemon talked about once in regards to a different game: it's not emulating cyberpunk fiction, it' emulating cyberpunk RPGs. There's no themes there, so there's no focus, so there's really nothing for them to talk about or build on. They're just cashing in on Fate's name.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:27
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Yeah, that was my criticism of The Sprawl. In general, there's a lot of people making AW/DW "hacks" that blindly reuse their respective mechanics with no account for how those mechanics inform and are informed by theme, and it's the same thing for Fate. It's easy to slap a coat of flavouring over existing mechanics, it's a lot harder to understand how theme and mechanics impact each other and therefore what to do with either of them. 
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Sep 8, 2014 18:39
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Lemon Curdistan posted:It's easy to slap a coat of flavouring over existing mechanics, it's a lot harder to understand how theme and mechanics impact each other and therefore what to do with either of them.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:45
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I think I've got you guys now. I was picturing subsystems as a much bigger thing than you meant.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:54
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Loki_XLII posted:I think I've got you guys now. I was picturing subsystems as a much bigger thing than you meant. It's not a matter of adding complexity, it's about saying "here's what my game's about. Now, here's how the rules will reinforce that."
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Sep 8, 2014 19:05
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Evil Mastermind posted:At least Dresden Files has the excuse of being like a late beta of what we think of now as Fate mechanics. ascendance posted:Thing is, everything in FATE works the same way. Even in shovelware, you're just going to get a big pile of Aspects, that modify your Approaches. All that stuff will still be basically playable. Also, FATE is still so small that everything is a labor of love product. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 19:31
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MadScientistWorking posted:I have a hard enough time with three to five aspects which is the sweet spot. Having to keep track of a dozen and more is just pointless. Admittedly, those games are the ones that also predate Fate Core. That was one of the biggest problems with SotC era Fate: too many aspects. (The other was that characters were drat near indestructible). Not only is coming up with ten character aspects really rough, in practice most of them will be forgotten or ignored. Believe it or not, Bulldogs is even worse: ten character aspects, two or three shared ones for the ship the characters work on, two for the space sector you're in at the moment...I'd have to check but I think there's a base of 15 or so aspects in play at any given time, and that's before things like consequences or creating them in play.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:43
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