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It was a while ago, maybe as much as a year. I think some major update on the books had just come out, which made it a topic of discussion. OG was revving up his "no guys, I'm totally cool, RPGnet is the poops and you should buy my similar, shoddier book" after another RPGnet ban. I don't care to dig it up. I posted it in grogs.txt, along with highlights of his forum making fun of him conspiracizing about a book he hadn't read.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:50
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inklesspen posted:This looks really good, but I don't know any of the names listed. James Stuart, Mark Diaz Truman, Jessica Hammer, Lillian Cohen-Moore, and Lizzie Stark. What should I know about them? I don't know about the others but Lizzie Stark has some great stuff out there about Nordic LARP. Her one book chapter called "we hold these rules to be self evident" is pretty great. http://nordiclarp.org/wiki/States_of_Play:_Nordic_Larp_Around_the_World
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Dec 20, 2014 05:03
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Plague of Hats posted:Watch out for fascist mind control revisionism in the books, according to our good friend who never read them, the Pundit. The only revisionism in the book, unfortunately, is the continued statements that 4e D&D was a commercial and creative failure.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:19
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fez_machine posted:The only revisionism in the book, unfortunately, is the continued statements that 4e D&D was a commercial and creative failure. I don't get why people think it's a commercial failure. You can infer a lot from its D&D Insider subscriber count in regards to how much income just peripheral of it generated.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:22
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I've lost count of the number of times I've had this argument, but "a bunch of people liked it" has never, ever been a successful barometer for a given product's quality. Ever. In the history of anything. I've not entirely sure why sales figures are relevant to anything other than talking about what has the broadest appeal.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:27
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How does the book deliver this information? As interviews with people who would know? Store reported sales?
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Dec 20, 2014 05:32
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Covok posted:While it isn't out yet, I remember seeing a kickstarter that was all about playing a Russian night witch, a female only division of pilots from world war 2. It isn't out yet, but you could look into it. Night Witches is a really solid game. I need to decide how I want to run it; PBP, roll20, irc… It's odd enough that the format is - to me - important. It's not D&D by any stretch of the imagination, but $48k worth of Kickstarter dollars and 1300+ backers is a lot to argue with.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:34
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Plague of Hats posted:How does the book deliver this information? As interviews with people who would know? Store reported sales?
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Dec 20, 2014 05:55
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mllaneza posted:Night Witches is a really solid game. I'm really looking forward to trying this out. 
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Dec 20, 2014 06:02
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dwarf74 posted:It doesn't. Not that I saw, anyway. It does mention the very real and acknowledged problems with the launch, though. Oh, that's good to hear. Fixes it in my eye.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:05
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Covok posted:I don't get why people think it's a commercial failure. You can infer a lot from its D&D Insider subscriber count in regards to how much income just peripheral of it generated. Right, but that was another shooting-themselves-in-the-foot situation. A lot of people realized that the contents from the $30+ books was being included in your $10 a month subscription that you could share with everyone. So from a customer standpoint it wasn't cost-effective to buy the books after a while.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:06
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Hm, drat, $140 for the hardback collection. Guess that'll have to wait.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:07
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Froghammer posted:I've lost count of the number of times I've had this argument, but "a bunch of people liked it" has never, ever been a successful barometer for a given product's quality. Ever. In the history of anything. I've not entirely sure why sales figures are relevant to anything other than talking about what has the broadest appeal. It's not that people are using 4E sales figures as proof that it was a good game, it's just a counterargument to the idea that 4E was a bad game because it didn't sell well.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:13
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Reminder that 4e outsold Pathfinder easily for two years, and only started to fall behind after Mearls took over and muddied the waters with Essentials. "4e was the WORST EDITION EVER AND SOLD TERRIBLY" isn't even something Mearls fights against, which isn't surprising given his attitude towards 4e once he took the reins. Go check out the 4e Portable Hole sometime. Then check out the version Mearls made later, which he literally named "True Portable Hole." Dude has never liked 4e. Honestly we've reached a point where 4e needs to have sold poorly (even if it didn't) because the most outspoken consumers of the industry - and it's biggest gatekeeper - have all but staked their lives on it. The actual numbers don't matter. If 4e didn't sell poorly then the market isn't what they want it to be, and they don't know where to go from there.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:27
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Covok posted:I don't get why people think it's a commercial failure. You can infer a lot from its D&D Insider subscriber count in regards to how much income just peripheral of it generated. Companies are weird. There are a lots of ways you can try to judge the success of a product, and in the end I think a lot of it just comes down to office politics. Like, if my understanding of things is correct (it's almost certainly at least a little flawed--whole lot of misinformation flying around here) 4e reached a slightly bigger audience than 3e, but that's a general trend for RPGs in general so maybe you could argue that it didn't grow as much as hoped. It also probably made a ton of money from Insider, but maybe that's just an innovation in monetization strategies more than anything to do with 4e itself. Also, nerd poo poo in general and games especially have just been hugely blowing up in popularity, so even if 4e did do super well it'd be easy to paint it as a failure if it didn't fully mirror that growth (although that might be more to do with how hard RPGs are to get into without mentoring under an existing GM). The feeling I get from WotC's reaction to 4e is that it actually did pretty well financially, but that due to feelings of brand turmoil, personal play preferences among certain high level designers, and possibly unrealistically high hopes for it there's a desire to kind of play its success down somewhat.
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Dec 20, 2014 08:55
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It probably suffered by comparison to the 3e launch. 3e was, to the best of my recollection, adopted very quickly and by a large majority of the D&D audience. It really took off in popularity and I got the impression it kept going strong for quite a while. 4e on the other hand really was a love/hate thing for a lot of people. There were plenty of groups that refused to cross over to the new edition and/or went to Pathfinder instead. Even if, financially, it sold well I don't think it was adopted with nearly as much enthusiasm.
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Dec 20, 2014 09:13
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From my understanding many/most of the internal champions of 4e left WotC for greener pastures not long after it was released. There was also apparently a huge suite of digital tools that were developed (at a great cost) but never released to the public because WotC couldn't figure out a viable way to monetize them.
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Dec 20, 2014 09:21
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About the only thing I'm sure of is that between Paizo's marketing and ~the internet~ and grognards, we probably will never get a clear picture of just how successful 4E really was because the discourse has been really poisoned.
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Dec 20, 2014 09:31
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oriongates posted:It probably suffered by comparison to the 3e launch. 3e was, to the best of my recollection, adopted very quickly and by a large majority of the D&D audience. It really took off in popularity and I got the impression it kept going strong for quite a while. 3E was extremely successful at launch because there was a period between 2E and 3E where it looked rather strongly as though D&D was going to die out along with TSR. WotC buying the D&D rights and publishing a brand new 3rd edition was essentially a triumphant comeback story, and at least within the confines of the hobby (and even outside of it as mainstream news occasionally likes to remind people that D&D still exists) it was kind of a big loving deal. Plus you had the allure of the OGL/d20 license where suddenly you, yes you, could write your own D&D books and publish them and so it absolutely took off big, there was a lot of hype surrounding it and of course because it was a D&D at a time where there was no Pathfinder and no Old-School Revolution it was the still the biggest, most uncontested, number one choice for anyone who wanted to play some D&D-style fantasy roleplaying. It came out at the right time under the perfect circumstances to take off strong and maintain its lead for years. 4E was in a much different position. There was no comeback narrative, the OSR and Pathfinder were both in full swing, the d20 bubble had burst and a lot of designers, publishers, and even players had gotten tired of D&D and were looking for something new. I doubt it was the failure that a lot of people desperately want it to be, but I don't have any trouble believing that it wasn't the huge splash that 3E was. That's more due to the circumstances surrounding it than anything to do with its quality as a game though, and I'm highly skeptical that Next is going to fare any better in that regard.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:06
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Kai Tave posted:4E was in a much different position. There was no comeback narrative, the OSR and Pathfinder were both in full swing, the d20 bubble had burst and a lot of designers, publishers, and even players had gotten tired of D&D and were looking for something new. I doubt it was the failure that a lot of people desperately want it to be, but I don't have any trouble believing that it wasn't the huge splash that 3E was. That's more due to the circumstances surrounding it than anything to do with its quality as a game though, and I'm highly skeptical that Next is going to fare any better in that regard. See, my experience (which I realize is anecdotal ) was that when 4E came out DnD and specifically 3E was no longer relevant. People weren't playing fantasy tabletop RPGs much at all. I knew zero people playing DnD at the time, and when 4E hit the shelves suddenly everyone was playing, tons of new players who had never played before were getting in on the game. I participated in multiple 4E games that had 9+ players because so many people wanted to play. I feel like 4E made DnD relevant again, and then Pathfinder rode in and stole a lot of that enthusiasm when WotC failed to keep the momentum going.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:16
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Sure, I'm not saying that 4E did badly or had no sort of enthusiasm upon release. Remember when the biggest and most successful webcomic around (plus Scott Kurtz I guess), with millions of readers around the world, did a Let's Play of 4E? There was certainly hype for 4E and it certainly didn't fall flat on its face, the initial print run sold out, organized play events, digital tools, all that good stuff. But like you said, the momentum wasn't there anymore. Part of it was probably Pathfinder and assorted other retroclones, part of it was maybe that the roleplaying hobby was more saturated with all sorts of new games from indie publishers. Maybe the lack of an OGL had something to do with it even though the OGL, from a strictly business standpoint, is kind of a dumb and terrible idea. Part of it, as you point out, is that D&D just wasn't as relevant anymore (or maybe that more people were burned out on D&D after 8+ years of d20 overload). 4E gave it a shot in the arm sure, every new edition of D&D is going to do that, but 3E had momentum for miles. Barring a significant change in circumstances, I don't think another edition of D&D is going to recapture that lightning a second time.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:24
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I don't think Essentials helped much, kinda a 3.5,style reboot but also kinda not, and one that abandoned several of 4e's design conceits. It just muddied the waters. And to be honest there are some people who feel 4e didn't go far enough in slaughtering sacred cows.
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Dec 20, 2014 11:09
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D&D suffers heavily - both now and by 4e - by the fact that a) it was no longer the only game in town, and b) video games have increasingly devoured D&D's traditional spaces. There's a reason you saw a sudden growth in the indie scene, and it's because they figured out how to aim for the places other entertainments couldn't hit. D&D meanwhile, in it's big push to NOT BE VIDEOGAMEY in 5e, gives you close to nothing that you can't get from any other game - or, to be blunt, most other cRPGs. It doesn't help that the big industry leaders would rather the hobby burn to the ground (or, more likely, quietly rot away) then allow anything they don't approve of in. Tabletop gaming in general suffers from the fact that most games are made for other ttg veterans and nobody else. Like, remember that loving Dragon Age game that came out that has gently caress all to do with Dragon Age? The one that was painfully obviously a retroclone that someone crowbar'd a bunch of Dragon Age names onto after the fact? The one that has been completely forgotten despite the fact that DA: I is selling gangbusters? None of the big industry leaders are interested in improving the hobby or growing it in any way. They want to make Their Game, drat anyone and anything that could get in the way. WordMercenary posted:I don't think Essentials helped much, kinda a 3.5,style reboot but also kinda not, and one that abandoned several of 4e's design conceits. It just muddied the waters. Essentials lined up perfectly with a huge loss in market share for 4e if you go by those ICVwhatever numbers. Mearls absolutely sunk 4e, and then coincidentally was also the guy in line to be the lead designer for 5e. And wouldn't you know the only other co-lead was Cook, who very explicitly is not listed in the credits.
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Dec 20, 2014 11:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:And wouldn't you know the only other co-lead was Cook, who very explicitly is not listed in the credits. Didn't he leave (or get sacked?) fairly early on?
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Dec 20, 2014 14:51
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Reminder: 4e PHBII got on the NYT best seller list, which up until that point (and even now) has never happened for a roleplaying game.ChrisAsmadi posted:Didn't he leave (or get sacked?) fairly early on? He left of his own volition, apparently. More likely it was a butting of heads between him and Mearls (or possibly other designers) and just deciding it was best to go make his own game than deal with their nonsense. Probably made the right move in the long run.
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Dec 20, 2014 14:58
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Most videogame devs haven't actually heard of any modern games at all. I once got to ask Chris Avellone what he played, and the answer was basically just 2e and Ars Magicka. The only storygamey game he seemed familiar with was Mouseguard. I do think that's changing a little mind, the big board game boom has got a few people playing more unusual TRPGs too.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:47
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ProfessorCirno posted:D&D suffers heavily - both now and by 4e - by the fact that a) it was no longer the only game in town, and b) video games have increasingly devoured D&D's traditional spaces. There's a reason you saw a sudden growth in the indie scene, and it's because they figured out how to aim for the places other entertainments couldn't hit. D&D meanwhile, in it's big push to NOT BE VIDEOGAMEY in 5e, gives you close to nothing that you can't get from any other game - or, to be blunt, most other cRPGs. "Sudden growth in the indie scene"? The indie scene is tiny. Bully Pulpit have stopped publishing their sales numbers - but it took being featured on Tabletop to push Fiasco past 10,000. Fate Core and Dresden Files are both round the 20,000 mark. Lumpley had sold a grand total of 8000 games by the end of 2012 and a further 2000 in 2013. As for Monte Cook leaving, my belief is it had something to do with Pundit suggesting having his vocal cords cut in what he turned into an open letter. At that point the team was only big enough for one of them - and Mearls chose to stand by Pundit.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:53
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Covok posted:I was pursuing drivethrurpg when I saw Designers & Dragons: the history of tabletop roleplaying games. It sounds intriguing, but expense. Anyone know if it is any good? It's quite good, I've read through most of it, and it has a lot of informative chunks. Shannon Applecine really does his homework, and there's a lot of details on companies that would otherwise be forgotten despite their influence on the hobby, or modern companies that rarely get their due. Occasionally the histories devolve into "they released this which was important because of this, and they released this, and then they released this-", but I really feel like my $60 was well-spent. It's true the D&D 4th era comes off as overly harsh. I think part of it is that D&D 4e wasn't a failure by RPG publishing standards (quite the opposite), but was absolutely a failure by Hasbro's standards. And though Hasbro's standards are ridiculously unrealistic for the RPG industry, the ways in which they impact the D&D line are immensely real. Effectronica posted:It's the only attempt at a full history of the hobby, and the original version was four thick volumes. You can probably ditch the first volume for Jon Peterson's Playing At The World, which covers a lot of 70s designers as part of its history of D&D up to AD&D, but there really aren't any equivalents out there for the second through fourth volumes. Well, bear in mind the 1970s volume of Designers & Dragons covers the whole history of any company that started in that decade, so it covers the whole history of TSR, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Games Workshop, GDW, etc. It definitely overlaps with Playing At the World but doesn't just have the same material because it covers an entire company's history at once in a given volume.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:17
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WordMercenary posted:Most videogame devs haven't actually heard of any modern games at all. I once got to ask Chris Avellone what he played, and the answer was basically just 2e and Ars Magicka. The only storygamey game he seemed familiar with was Mouseguard. This is my experience as well. It's pretty common to hear video game devs say that a lot of their interest in games started with D&D, but they mostly either play the version of D&D they more or less started with (usually 1e or 2e) or try out indie stuff like Fiasco.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:03
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neonchameleon posted:"Sudden growth in the indie scene"? The indie scene is tiny. Bully Pulpit have stopped publishing their sales numbers - but it took being featured on Tabletop to push Fiasco past 10,000. Fate Core and Dresden Files are both round the 20,000 mark. Lumpley had sold a grand total of 8000 games by the end of 2012 and a further 2000 in 2013. Yeah, now compare that to the indie scene before.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:39
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Yeah, what you're seeing is the disappearance of the most of the RPG mid-list, the walls of books for non-D&D games like GURPS and World of Darkness and Rifts and L5R and lots of D20 publishers that have largely exited the marketplace, leaving D&D, Pathfinder, and a bunch of little one-book Indie games.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:42
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I've heard it said that 3.5s Tome of Battle Book of 9 Swords was a sort of testbed for ideas that would eventually become 4th edition. Anyone want to elaborate on that?
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Dec 21, 2014 02:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've heard it said that 3.5s Tome of Battle Book of 9 Swords was a sort of testbed for ideas that would eventually become 4th edition. Anyone want to elaborate on that? Yeah, that's a fan theory. Long story short, it gave martials nice things like wizards 'cept distinct and clearly martial powers. A lot of people think they were testing the waters for the AEUD system of 4e.
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Dec 21, 2014 02:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've heard it said that 3.5s Tome of Battle Book of 9 Swords was a sort of testbed for ideas that would eventually become 4th edition. Anyone want to elaborate on that? Melee people now get the ability to 'do things' per turn with some way to refresh these 'do things', rather than just being able to charge in or trip or hit with their sword. Melee people could suddenly 'teleport' behind people, ignore hardness and break down walls, achieve limited flight (by jumping super high), etc. It's basically the same people who hated that 4e let fighters do more think than hit with sword that also hated Tome of Battle
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Dec 21, 2014 02:08
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's quite good, I've read through most of it, and it has a lot of informative chunks. Shannon Applecine really does his homework, and there's a lot of details on companies that would otherwise be forgotten despite their influence on the hobby, or modern companies that rarely get their due. Occasionally the histories devolve into "they released this which was important because of this, and they released this, and then they released this-", but I really feel like my $60 was well-spent. What does Shannon say about his book, the Gloranthan supplement for how to play Elves in the Runequest glorantha variants? imho it was quite good and also great if you ever want to roleplay a sylvari in your Basic Roleplaying derived rpg
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Dec 21, 2014 03:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've heard it said that 3.5s Tome of Battle Book of 9 Swords was a sort of testbed for ideas that would eventually become 4th edition. Anyone want to elaborate on that? Like the others have said, Tome of Battle gives melee characters martial maneuvers besides the standard combat ones. On a wider level, the three classes introduced are "fixes" for three troubled core classes from 3e: Warblade -> Fighter, Crusader -> Paladin, and Swordsage is an interesting variant of the Gish (melee/magic) type melee-class, though they provide the option to make the class into an unarmed fighter that's considered superior to the Monk in every way. The maneuvers do the same sort of thing the attacks of 4e classes do: provide bonuses to things, let you move in unusual ways, deal extra damage, etc. The big difference is there are also stances that provide a constant benefit to something, which didn't migrate over. Maneuvers are also a bit more similar to Vancian spellcasting in that you prepare and lose each maneuver, though you can regain them with a short rest or get one or two back with an action in combat. This drew critics who saw it as "too anime" because I guess there weren't any Blizzard games out right then to draw a comparison to. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 03:24
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Nuns with Guns posted:This drew critics who saw it as "too anime" because I guess there weren't any Blizzard games out right then to draw a comparison to. To be fair, Swordsages do come across pretty anime, though the other ones are silly to compare to anything anime. I could totally see an anime yelling poo poo like "Ruby Nightmare Blade!" or "Dancing Mongoose!" But it's also awesome so who cares?
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Dec 21, 2014 04:05
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Mormon Star Wars posted:What does Shannon say about his book, the Gloranthan supplement for how to play Elves in the Runequest glorantha variants? Nothin'. The Runequest releases from Mongoose get an even-handed treatment, but an elfbook isn't a big enough deal to be mentioned Mongoose's history, which is where it'd go.
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Dec 21, 2014 04:48
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FMguru posted:Yeah, what you're seeing is the disappearance of the most of the RPG mid-list, the walls of books for non-D&D games like GURPS and World of Darkness and Rifts and L5R and lots of D20 publishers that have largely exited the marketplace, leaving D&D, Pathfinder, and a bunch of little one-book Indie games. Beyond that, one of the big differences between now and 2001 when 3E first came out is that it's much, much easier for a small-press or indie RPG publisher to cultivate an audience for their game and for communities to grow around smaller games. The increased prominence of social media, digital publishing and print-on-demand, and fulfillment and distribution services like DriveThruRPG and Indie Press Revolution have helped games that 10 years ago might have gone down as just another also-ran tossed onto the pile of forgotten games carve out niches and establish fanbases. Of course Fate isn't in D&D's league, but back in 2001 FUDGE wasn't even on anyone's radar whereas in 2014 Fate has two reasonably popular nerd media licensed products to its name, a bunch of ENnie wins, several successful Kickstarters, and a flourishing fanbase.
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Dec 21, 2014 04:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:This drew critics who saw it as "too anime" because I guess there weren't any Blizzard games out right then to draw a comparison to.
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Dec 21, 2014 05:38
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