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4e, it's important to remember, went through an initial "alpha" edition that they eventually scrapped completely. Tome of Battle was sort of a beta for that. Not a lot of that alpha survived to the actual 4e that was printed.
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Dec 21, 2014 10:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:4e, it's important to remember, went through an initial "alpha" edition that they eventually scrapped completely. Tome of Battle was sort of a beta for that. Not a lot of that alpha survived to the actual 4e that was printed.
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Dec 21, 2014 15:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, now compare that to the indie scene before. Do we count d20 shovelware? Because a lot was small publisher. Or do we look at the gap after 3.5 came out? And ToB wasn't so much a beta as scavenging all the usable parts when they went back to the drawing board.
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Dec 21, 2014 16:19
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KittyEmpress posted: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!" I'd say that's a product of making a class that pulls double duty as a magic+melee/monk rebuild. All the fancy names sound like things wizards or monks would scream out as they attack. PresidentBeard posted:Well also most people with that complaint flat out never read it. Similar to people who hated psionics for being "overpowered". There were a ton of weak excuses for why people hated ToB. "It feels wrong in my tummy!", "All the classes are the same/are wizards!", "This is too much like something other, younger nerds like and I resent that!", "I never read it but I heard they were OP baby mode!" The Crusader also played fast and loose with alignment and a code of honor, so you could be any alignment besides true neutral, and you could devote yourself to a cause, or ideology, or whatever if you didn't feel like being some god's murderhobo. That pissed off the type of neckbeards that see the Paladin's code of honor as a fun "gently caress YOU" button to press when the Paladin doesn't stab that orc baby on sight or introduces herself to a secretly-evil NPC because "Heh you have detect evil at will for a reason." 
Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 16:31
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PresidentBeard posted:Well also most people with that complaint flat out never read it. Similar to people who hated psionics for being "overpowered". In 2e particularly psionics had that reputation because when nobody has read the book, it's easy for cheating players to lie about what their characters are capable of. At least in the circles I gamed with, this was the case. In 3.X psionics were also a dip magnet, where charop types would take a level here and there and maybe a couple psionic feats and synergy would do the rest.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:00
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Nuns with Guns posted: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. Thanks for all the answers. "Martial classes but with Vancian casted anime moves" sounds cool as hell.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks for all the answers. "Martial classes but with Vancian casted anime moves" sounds cool as hell. They are quite possibly the most fun you can have playing 3.x D&D.... if you're not playing a Factotum.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:33
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Nuns with Guns posted:if you're not playing a Binder.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:38
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3.x and Pathfinder have good games buried in them. Unfortunately if any of your classes or mechanics share names with something from AD&D you haven't found the good parts yet.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:02
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One of the more interesting misconceptions re: d20 is the idea that it was good for the industry as a whole. I think the issue was that the d20 bubble managed to actually cannibalize itself. The overwhelming majority of all OGL product was garbage, and if there was a good product or two out there, I don't really think anyone ever even heard of them.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:06
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Kemper Boyd posted:One of the more interesting misconceptions re: d20 is the idea that it was good for the industry as a whole. I think the issue was that the d20 bubble managed to actually cannibalize itself. The overwhelming majority of all OGL product was garbage, and if there was a good product or two out there, I don't really think anyone ever even heard of them. I think you're a little too biased, in that you're looking at the thing as irredeemable that no good has come out. But a lot of those bad products got relatively forgotten, and the OGL helped a lot of small companies who made good product gain a foothold in the RPG industry. For example, Green Ronin started off with D20, but over the years it expanded into other RPGs and got a respectable following. Arcana Unearthed (Monte Cook's Diamond Throne setting) was novel at the time for getting rid of some 3.X sacred cows such as noncasters which were versatile to play. The OGL gave us True20, which led to the creation of Tales of the Caliphate Nights (a very good treatment of mythic Arabia) and Blue Rose (the first RPG setting to feature homosexuality as a setting element out front and as a normal thing not to be condemned). Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition was a very good treatment of a superhero RPG. And for settings, we got cool things like Midnight and Freeport. All of the companies and products I listed are very well known and managed to rise to prominence in spite of the deluge of mediocrity. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 19:23
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Don't forget it also got us Spycraft, which I still maintain was fun times.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:25
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It also gave us an updated version of Grimtooth series in the form of The Wurst of Grimtooth's Traps. If we include Pathfinder and OSR games under the OGL, the we also got Scarlet Heroes, the first working D&Desque system meant to handle 1-on-1 games I've seen of its kind. Ravenloft got a nice update and treatment by White Wolf. Not only did it reproduce a lot of setting material, the Gazetteer series really brought life to the world in the form of an in-character traveler's journal. Also, Path of War and anything by Dreamscarred Press. Ptolus is a very user friendly city-centric campaign setting. I remember writing up a FATAL & Friends for it last year, but sadly had to abandon the project. Some day I hope to return to it and show off its glory. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 19:30
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I am sort of biased, but a brief clarification here: it's obvious in hindsight that some things were actually good, I'm sort of a fan of Blue Rose myself. It was more of a problem dealing with the deluge of d20 product from third parties back in the 2000's when you had shelves full of shovelware with an occasional good game here and there. That had to affect the sales of those designers and companies who didn't do shovelware.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:38
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While there were some good things to come from the OGL, the best of them did so by either skirting the rules as hard as they possible could and divorced themselves from D&D entirely, or came out like 6 years after the fact. The initial point of the OGL was to kill the market by creating a monopoly for d20 products that all lead back to D&D. This was couched in terms of ending the bubble cycle in the hobby. What it did instead was create probably the biggest bubble the hobby's seen - which then popped, and destroyed a lot of the market. So sorta what they wanted to do, but in all the worst ways. There's a reason the Forge talked about the "fantasy heartbreaker" during this time - this was the era of a plethora of products that boiled down to "one good idea, everything else is d20." While 3e reigned supreme, it did so by cannibalizing and hollowing out the rest of the hobby.
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Dec 21, 2014 22:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:There's a reason the Forge talked about the "fantasy heartbreaker" during this time - this was the era of a plethora of products that boiled down to "one good idea, everything else is d20." While 3e reigned supreme, it did so by cannibalizing and hollowing out the rest of the hobby. That's slight revisionism - the Fantasy Heartbreaker was a term built around 2E heartbreakers.
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Dec 22, 2014 00:53
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neonchameleon posted:That's slight revisionism - the Fantasy Heartbreaker was a term built around 2E heartbreakers.
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Dec 22, 2014 00:57
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I stand corrected!
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Dec 22, 2014 01:33
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The d20 bubble burst is probably the worst disaster in the gaming industry - I can't think of anything, historically, that even comes close. The fall of TSR is barely even a bump in comparison, though it was bad. In that, you can probably blame 3.5 for instigating it, though if D&D had been revised later, the damage may have been even worse. We did get some great products and great companies out of it, it's not all bad, but far more companies didn't survive, old or new, or were deeply diminished. It basically was a death knell to most game lines running beforehand, and then managed to kill off the majority of the game lines it spawned. Of course, having the economic downturn exacerbated the effect. After it slew much of the gaming lines in the industry, the economic force to build new ones took at least a few years to recover. About the best thing you can say is that it shook up the industry to the point that it gave real impetus for the indie scene to grow and provide innovation that would have been glacial under older publishers, but it's really hard to say for certain.
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Dec 22, 2014 02:08
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neonchameleon posted:Do we count d20 shovelware? Because a lot was small publisher. Or do we look at the gap after 3.5 came out? In addition to what others have said, the key difference between the d20 bubble and the present indie RPG scene is, as you yourself point out, the bulk of the d20 glut was shovelware. Quick and dirty sourcebooks hastily written to cash in on the d20 craze, many of which were, not to put too fine a point on it, utter dogshit. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the vast majority of d20 content published during that period was done so with the intent of snagging a quick buck or, more charitably, jumping on the bandwagon while it was hot...it wasn't just small publishers crapping out d20 content remember. There was d20 Traveller, d20 Deadlands, d20 BESM, a slew of d20 conversions that nobody asked for and nobody really wanted but everyone else was doing it so why not. Obviously every game publisher wants to make some money, that'd be great, but there's a distinct and immediately apparent difference between something like Apocalypse World or Fate and the deluge of lovely d20 sourcebooks that came out back then. I can't imagine that whoever it was that was churning out all those lovely Avalanche Press pseudo-historical d20 sourcebooks with stripperiffic cover art went into that going "yes, this is the culmination of all my game design aspirations, my heart and soul is being poured into this." That's not to say you can't and don't get shovelware today. Tremulus, that one Fate Cthulhu thing that Ettin likes to make fun of, any given Kickstarter project involving zombies, etc. But back then shovelware was the name of the game and even the aphorism about how 90% of everything is crap would be rather generous in describing the overall levels of quality and care that went into most such projects.
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Dec 22, 2014 06:09
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No d20 no Witchfire Trilogy no Iron Kingdoms no Warmachine  The d20 glut created an ecosystem where products from people who weren't well established seemed like something that could sell, which means they could stock a shelf. Maybe they edged what would have been other small-time publishers out, but I think it spread out the base, resulting in a multitude of quick cycling companies. I posit that it changed the ratio of developer:player by an order of magnitude. This order of magnitude change would have eventually been eclipsed by increasingly affordable distribution methods emerging (the internet, print-to-order), but it I think it contributed to the market being willing to accept alternative products and developers having worked through a generation of products. This new 'indie generation' (whatever the hell that actually means) might have taken a couple for years to take off if the market wasn't primed by that event. Assuming my opinion is true (and I don't exactly provide a lot of evidence), it doesn't really address whether or not it was good for the industry. This is because 'good for the industry' isn't really being defined in a meaningful context.
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Dec 22, 2014 12:58
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Kai Tave posted:In addition to what others have said, the key difference between the d20 bubble and the present indie RPG scene is, as you yourself point out, the bulk of the d20 glut was shovelware. Quick and dirty sourcebooks hastily written to cash in on the d20 craze, many of which were, not to put too fine a point on it, utter dogshit. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the vast majority of d20 content published during that period was done so with the intent of snagging a quick buck or, more charitably, jumping on the bandwagon while it was hot...it wasn't just small publishers crapping out d20 content remember. There was d20 Traveller, d20 Deadlands, d20 BESM, a slew of d20 conversions that nobody asked for and nobody really wanted but everyone else was doing it so why not. Oh, not disagreeing. And the biggest problem with the shovelware is not just that it was shovelware - but that it strangled the desktop published Indy games of the time. I know it wasn't what actually killed Eden Studios but it feels like a lot of the interesting work being done at the turn of the millennium imploded.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:06
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You could also blame Iron Kingdoms on the collapse of FASA for that matter - what if Matt Wilson's original minis line, VOR, had survived to this day? Would we have an RPG filled with neo-soviets and growlers at this point? There's a lot of things that probably led Matt Wilson to where he was for that, including d20. As for Tremulus , I wouldn't call it shovelware; it was just made early on for a World game and didn't have the best grasp of how to adapt it in retrospect, but I don't get the impression Sean Preston went into the project cynically by any stretch.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:20
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I guess it's kind of hard to sort 'shovelware' as quick cash-in low effort product from 'heartbreakerish' stuff that somebody really thought was a good idea and did badly. Though it's hard to really call anything *World truly shovelware, given the size of the audience. FATE has attracted a bit more actual shoveling, since it has a higher profile and stuffing 'FATE Conversion' in as a stretch goal at least seems easy. EM has found a prime example below. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 20:13
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Mongoose was the king of the "shovelware" attitude in their early history; they deliberately shipped out books at times to beat out competing products, irregardless of their quality. Products like Creature Collection from White Wolf, shipped before the Monster Manual was even out, probably is also a good example. That's not to say that kind of rushed product is necessarily without merit - Creature Collection does have some cool monsters, but it also had numerous errors, balance issues, and low-quality art.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:40
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There's one company that's put out a whole line of Fate shovelware. They basically take the OGL, staple 10 to 15 pages of half-assed setting onto it, then charges $15 for the drat thing. This is the beginning of every one of their games. This is page 3, after page 1 being the cover and page 2 being the TOC/credits. This is from "Steampunk Powered By Fate" but every opening is pretty much this with the genre tags swapped out: quote:CHARACTER CREATION I don't think I've ever seen a phrase that gets you into the designers' mindset better than "Combining two names with a meaning can provide an interesting name, such as Darkraven, from dark and raven." They've got a dozen or so of these products, which isn't surprising since they probably took about half an hour each to write.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:54
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PresidentBeard posted:3.x and Pathfinder have good games buried in them. Unfortunately if any of your classes or mechanics share names with something from AD&D you haven't found the good parts yet. I was actually going through the D20 SRD and I found this little thing: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm posted:Extraordinary Abilities (Ex) They've had a working justification for martial classes being capable of doing all sorts of caster-level stuff sitting there on the shelf for years! They just didn't want to use it.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You could also blame Iron Kingdoms on the collapse of FASA for that matter - what if Matt Wilson's original minis line, VOR, had survived to this day? Would we have an RPG filled with neo-soviets and growlers at this point? *Eyes Khador, eyes trolls* I'm not sure we -don't-, really.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's one company that's put out a whole line of Fate shovelware. They basically take the OGL, staple 10 to 15 pages of half-assed setting onto it, then charges $15 for the drat thing. If Fate has an OGL, and Fate Accelerated is free, then how are they still in business? That all sounds very...generic.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was actually going through the D20 SRD and I found this little thing: quote:The term saving throw is common enough, coming to us from miniature
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Dec 22, 2014 21:20
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Libertad! posted:For example, Green Ronin started off with D20, but over the years it expanded into other RPGs and got a respectable following. To be pedantic (the best kind of correct!), I'm pretty sure Green Ronin's first product was a supplement for Feng Shui, that Chris Pramas published himself because Daedalus was such a shitshow. I haven't read my copies of Designers & Dragons yet, but I did flip through the indices for Daedalus, because gossip about just what the gently caress happened with that company is exactly the kind of stuff I'd expect to see in there. Sadly, it just gets a sidebar in the Atlas Games section, which is frankly all it really deserves in the scheme of things, but I have been curious about it for ages.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:40
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Davin Valkri posted:If Fate has an OGL, and Fate Accelerated is free, then how are they still in business? That all sounds very...generic. They were released about the same time the Fate Core KS ended, and people were grabbing everything with Fate on it. They're the very definition of cash-in-cash-grab products.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:41
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unseenlibrarian posted:*Eyes Khador, eyes trolls* I'm not sure we -don't-, really. Fair enough, really. Evil Mastermind posted:Characters can speak an additional 1D3 languages if they desire. Ah, yes, random determination of character traits, that's clearly what FATE is all about.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:42
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Parkreiner posted:To be pedantic (the best kind of correct!), I'm pretty sure Green Ronin's first product was a supplement for Feng Shui, that Chris Pramas published himself because Daedalus was such a shitshow. It was that and a supplement for Whispering Vault. But d20 put them over the top because they had the first d20 adventure available at the GenCon where 3e was released. So people were buying the first new D&D in however long it was, then GR was there going "hey, you want to start playing right away? Here's a module with pregens!"
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Dec 22, 2014 21:43
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Green Ronin was one of the better d20 supplement publishers. That's not to say their stuff is really good in a modern context, but was pretty solid when you compared it to most of the d20 output at the time - it was probably the closest you'd get to a low-budget version of WotC's releases outside of Malhavoc. There's a reason Freeport is one of the few settings that originated in d20 that's still being published to this day in various forms.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:It was that and a supplement for Whispering Vault. Oh, right. I'm pretty sure I have that, too! Man, Whispering Vault. Great premise, but (like a lot of ambitious high-cosmic mid-late '90s games) I have a hard time going back to it without just wanting to play it in Nobilis instead.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Green Ronin was one of the better d20 supplement publishers. That's not to say their stuff is really good in a modern context, but was pretty solid when you compared it to most of the d20 output at the time - it was probably the closest you'd get to a low-budget version of WotC's releases outside of Malhavoc. There's a reason Freeport is one of the few settings that originated in d20 that's still being published to this day in various forms. They were also smart enough to expand Freeport to other systems. They have a generic citybook that has all the needed fluff, then they have system-specific books for 4E, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, and Fate that have detailed stats and new rules and such. I still say Pirate's Guide to Freeport is one of the best citybooks out there. They understand that if you're going to list major locations or people, they need to be interesting and/or have cool hooks.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:57
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Greenronin also got a fairly big boost from having the SoIaF license when the Game of Thrones show became a big cultural phenomena.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was actually going through the D20 SRD and I found this little thing: Reminder that when 4e was released, the wizard was slightly unfinished because, during development, some people in the dev team kept buffing them to be intentionally more powerful then every other class, so they had to revise the wizard constantly to fight against it.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:52
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Parkreiner posted:Sadly, it just gets a sidebar in the Atlas Games section, which is frankly all it really deserves in the scheme of things, but I have been curious about it for ages. "Nerds with no business sense, sometimes shading towards scam artistry" is a sadly recurring theme in RPG history.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:03
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