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Tekumel is beautifully made, but I think that it's one of those things that's deliberately not for everyone, although it has compulsive D&Disms like dungeons and magic spells. But I suspect its biggest problem, in terms of acceptance and popularity, is that its publication history is a clusterfuck and is now in the hands of a boutique company charging high prices.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:28
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Nuns with Guns posted:there's no way painting a white dude solid black would go over well. What about an Asian dude?  I still think that a D&D movie should focus on the drama of the D&D player, rather than the drama of the D&D characters. That episode of Community was probably one of the best depictions on how important D&D can be in a person's life. Not so much a whole life-or-death thing, but I imagine most D&D players feel like outcasts and outliers, and the game can provide a creative and social outlet for a really rough patch of life. I think there's more potential in the movie being an intimate drama rather than being an epic fantasy, but the former wouldn't make Lord of the Rings money. The latter probably won't either. GrandpaPants fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 16:29
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Misandu posted:This is exactly the problem and I'm sure a lot of people in this thread have made this exact mistake at some point. When your first experience with RPGs is 3 hours of character building and then you fail to stab an orc, getting you to come back is going to be a pretty hard sell.You can give people pregen characters and fudge the numbers a bit to help with that, but at that point why are you playing a system that takes that much massaging in the first place? That said, *World games pretty much prevent this problem from happening. One of my favorite demos was a group of six Pathfinder players; we made all the characters and explained the system in like half an hour, did the adventure in another hour and a half, and they couldn't get over how easy it all was.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:40
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Making a D&D movie that plays everything straight seems doomed to fail. Comedy is such a big part of why we play. Making something along the lines of an adaptation of Cugel the Clever would be awesome if they removed the skeevy bits.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:41
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That would inevitably result in a Cugel movie that doesn't realize that Cugel is awful and makes him the unironic hero.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:46
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Just making the setup like Jumanji (or the old cartoon) is probably the best bet if the movie ever gets made. Embrace that D&D is a complete mish-mash of every mythical or fantasy world ever created, and have a bunch of players who get sucked into the game world by a magic d20 or whatever undergo the Last Action Hero/Galaxy Quest arc, turning from mocking unbelievers through panicking that the dangers are real and everyone they meet takes it deadly seriously to ultimately become genuine heroes. I'll take cash, not bitcoin, please. if they make it a Warcraft knockoff, they'll be inspired by the movie of the game that was inspired by, er, themselves, and it will be poo poo.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:Hell, I made the same mistake with a Fate Accelerated demo. I figured that since it's FAE, character creation would be really simple and quick. And it is...if you've got the types of players who can wrap their heads around the idea of Aspects or can come up with character descriptors on the fly. But when you have people who aren't used to having to come up with a bunch of stuff on the spur of the moment, well... I think going forward *World is going to be remembered as the game that taught us to hand the players everything they needed for their character in one neat little bundle. Playbooks are such an incredible distillation of the splat book idea.
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Jan 29, 2016 16:54
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GrandpaPants posted:What about an Asian dude? that is an excellent example of how weird and creepy drow makeup would look irl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tsmjkKzT3w Payndz posted:Just making the setup like Jumanji (or the old cartoon) is probably the best bet if the movie ever gets made. Embrace that D&D is a complete mish-mash of every mythical or fantasy world ever created, and have a bunch of players who get sucked into the game world by a magic d20 or whatever undergo the Last Action Hero/Galaxy Quest arc, turning from mocking unbelievers through panicking that the dangers are real and everyone they meet takes it deadly seriously to ultimately become genuine heroes. I'll take cash, not bitcoin, please. They did that already and it sucked. that one was about larpers instead of explicit D&D players, but the execution would be about the same Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 17:15
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Payndz posted:Just making the setup like Jumanji (or the old cartoon) is probably the best bet if the movie ever gets made. Embrace that D&D is a complete mish-mash of every mythical or fantasy world ever created, and have a bunch of players who get sucked into the game world by a magic d20 or whatever undergo the Last Action Hero/Galaxy Quest arc, turning from mocking unbelievers through panicking that the dangers are real and everyone they meet takes it deadly seriously to ultimately become genuine heroes. I'll take cash, not bitcoin, please. the problem with doing this is that D&D needs a harder market push towards a younger demographic, this makes an interesting movie but not one that's going to sell toys. I still think a D&D cartoon in the last airbender style would work better, along with some actual marketing when's the last time anyone ever saw a tv ad for D&D? but if they wanted to go with a movie i think playing it off as a sort of fantasy avengers/guardians of the galaxy might work well.
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Jan 29, 2016 17:28
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Elfgames posted:the problem with doing this is that D&D needs a harder market push towards a younger demographic, this makes an interesting movie but not one that's going to sell toys.
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Jan 29, 2016 17:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:The problem with this is that, for most of its history, D&D hasn't really wanted to get a younger demographic. I think the 4e era was really the only time they made a push to bring in new players (via Encounters and Penny Arcade/PAX).
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Jan 29, 2016 18:03
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ProfessorCirno posted:Dragon Age isn't popular because people are really super deeply invested in the story of the Not-Orcs who are invading, it's popular because people want to bang the Iron Bull. This is true, but food for thought: they burned the setting down in Mass Effect 3 and most people hated it.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:03
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D&D was after the young demographic for quite a while, pretty much up until 2nd ed came out (coincidence it sort of ceased when Gygax was ousted?). They use to work a lot with school and public librarians and send materials and staff to things like D&D camp for kids. Have some nostalgia: http://2warpstoneptune.com/2013/06/18/dungeons-dragons-camp-1981-1985/
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Jan 29, 2016 18:05
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FMguru posted:Early-mid 80s Red Box era pushed hard for kids, too. Available in toy stores, advertised heavily in comic books, etc. Designers & Dragons does talk about how Gary didn't like Basic, because he wanted D&D to stay focused on the "college" crowd and didn't seem to like the idea of just anyone playing.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:10
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I have heard of some RPGs aimed at kids (Mermaid Adventure or something similar) but it's mostly very minor stuff, isn't it? Which is understandable, because without the D&D brand name, how can they advertise to kids?
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Jan 29, 2016 18:10
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Evil Mastermind posted:Designers & Dragons does talk about how Gary didn't like Basic, because he wanted D&D to stay focused on the "college" crowd and didn't seem to like the idea of just anyone playing. I don't buy that. He use to play with local kids all the time, and played the game a lot with his own kids when they 12 or under. Hell, the game is named Dungeons & Dragons because a pre-pubescent Heidi Gygax proposed it and he liked how it sounded. He did want a different version for a more experienced crowd, hence the split between AD&D and Basic when Holmes talked to Gygax about doing a more streamlined version that became basic.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:18
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I don't know about "Gygax didn't want kids playing D&D", but we know for a fact that TSR eventually killed off Basic D&D forcibly.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't know about "Gygax didn't want kids playing D&D", but we know for a fact that TSR eventually killed off Basic D&D forcibly. The lack of compatibility between two similarly-named products is a big reason to do something like that. I know I only ended up with AD&D by accident, since I also started with the Erol Otus Basic set and that DMG looked like it was for the same game...
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Jan 29, 2016 18:27
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I would think the *World games would be hard to get brand new players into, given how freeform they are. I kinda feel like a more structured and GM driven, but still simple game would be a better intro. I used to work in theatre and had a bunch of friends who would do into to acting/improv stuff in schools and they had a really hard time getting kids/teens to engage unless they provided a lot of guidance and pre-set scenes.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:28
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nesbit37 posted:I don't buy that. He use to play with local kids all the time, and played the game a lot with his own kids when they 12 or under. Hell, the game is named Dungeons & Dragons because a pre-pubescent Heidi Gygax proposed it and he liked how it sounded. He did want a different version for a more experienced crowd, hence the split between AD&D and Basic when Holmes talked to Gygax about doing a more streamlined version that became basic. I get the sense that Gygax changed his mind about a lot of things over the course of his life, often flipping back and forth relatively quickly between seemingly opposite stances. Which is fair--that's something that tends to happen when you're dealing with a new Thing and trying to figure out how to make it work best on the fly.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:58
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Gary lived big for 15 years and I'm not surprised he came out the other side feeling completely different about certain topics.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:02
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Also, contrary to popular belief, there's nothing wrong with changing your opinions on things over time.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:03
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bongwizzard posted:I would think the *World games would be hard to get brand new players into, given how freeform they are. I kinda feel like a more structured and GM driven, but still simple game would be a better intro. I used to work in theatre and had a bunch of friends who would do into to acting/improv stuff in schools and they had a really hard time getting kids/teens to engage unless they provided a lot of guidance and pre-set scenes. The mechanics, maybe, but there's a lot to be said about the idea of a handout that contains everything you need to know to make all of the core interactions within a game, including the barebones framework of a fully-fleshed out character. And then having the players choose between different multiple character concepts.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:06
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bongwizzard posted:I would think the *World games would be hard to get brand new players into, given how freeform they are. I kinda feel like a more structured and GM driven, but still simple game would be a better intro. I used to work in theatre and had a bunch of friends who would do into to acting/improv stuff in schools and they had a really hard time getting kids/teens to engage unless they provided a lot of guidance and pre-set scenes. It's the old saw about how RPGs are "let's pretend, with rules", only the focus is on the pretending, which most people don't need a lot of coaching to do.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:09
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bongwizzard posted:I would think the *World games would be hard to get brand new players into, given how freeform they are. I kinda feel like a more structured and GM driven, but still simple game would be a better intro. I used to work in theatre and had a bunch of friends who would do into to acting/improv stuff in schools and they had a really hard time getting kids/teens to engage unless they provided a lot of guidance and pre-set scenes. They're not actually that freeform and "your character can do anything that's plausible, all you need to do is tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you which stat to add to your roll" is approximately 800% more intuitive to non-RPGers than "no, you can't shoot an explosive barrel to create an AoE attack, that's not in the rules."
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Jan 29, 2016 19:27
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I guess technically this should go in the KS thread, but I think this is an interesting example of how Evil Hat handles being customer- and fanbase-focused. The Fate More KS has hit the usual "stagnation" phase projects tend to get around the middle of the backing period. So in order to help keep things moving, Fred just released a bunch of mini-stretch goals that will focus on a) making a lot of their PDF content available in epub/mobi format, and probably more importantly b) making a lot of the mechanics from Atomic Robo, the various Patreon-funded books, and other assorted Fate products open content. I'm interested to see if this ends up kicking off another "boom" in third-party Fate content.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:35
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Evil Mastermind posted:I guess technically this should go in the KS thread, but I think this is an interesting example of how Evil Hat handles being customer- and fanbase-focused. 
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Jan 29, 2016 19:37
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's the old saw about how RPGs are "let's pretend, with rules", only the focus is on the pretending, which most people don't need a lot of coaching to do. That was my exact point, that in my experience getting people to "play pretend" is actually pretty hard if they don't have any context for doing so, beyond it being "something little kids do". Getting over that hurdle alone is tough as hell with teens especially.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:52
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bongwizzard posted:That was my exact point, that in my experience getting people to "play pretend" is actually pretty hard if they don't have any context for doing so, beyond it being "something little kids do". Getting over that hurdle alone is tough as hell with teens especially. All RPGs have this problem though, it's just that D&D is almost exclusively about murder so the kind of situations you should put new players in is more obvious. In something like FATE or *World you still need to set up situations where new players can lean on hard mechanics to get comfortable, it's it just doesn't always need to be a fight.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:57
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Misandu posted:I think going forward *World is going to be remembered as the game that taught us to hand the players everything they needed for their character in one neat little bundle. Playbooks are such an incredible distillation of the splat book idea. OTOH, every lousy PBTA hack is written by someone whose understanding of it starts and stops at playbooks.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:02
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bongwizzard posted:That was my exact point, that in my experience getting people to "play pretend" is actually pretty hard if they don't have any context for doing so, beyond it being "something little kids do". Getting over that hurdle alone is tough as hell with teens especially. It's hard to get anyone that's old enough to have developed a sense of self-consciousness to express themselves in front of a group of strangers. this can occur in any kind of acting class/poetry reading/pickup game of D&D, especially if they're not used to it. encouraging people to show their creative side means exposing personal things about themselves they often aren't encouraged (or actively discouraged) to do
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Jan 29, 2016 20:05
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Misandu posted:All RPGs have this problem though, it's just that D&D is almost exclusively about murder so the kind of situations you should put new players in is more obvious. In something like FATE or *World you still need to set up situations where new players can lean on hard mechanics to get comfortable, it's it just doesn't always need to be a fight. Well yeah, for little kids going right into kobold murder is not a great idea, but I was talking more about getting people into the idea of roleplaying in general can be tough and to me seems really close to getting people into improv. The basic way they did it, and this was for for like late middle and early highschool kids, was to start them out with a simple "plot" and script. Bob is buying a loaf of bread from Betty. Then you get the kids to do the same scene but not using the script. Then have them do it again, but add little changes, like maybe bob forgot his wallet but still needs that bread. Starting with a heavily structured and scripted set piece then, as the "players" get more comfortable, remove bits of the structure until you get to full improv. I can see introducing rpgs the same way, getting people used to the idea of communal make-believe again, which is something most people stop doing at a pretty young age.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:10
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Evil Mastermind posted:The problem with this is that, for most of its history, D&D hasn't really wanted to get a younger demographic. I think the 4e era was really the only time they made a push to bring in new players (via Encounters and Penny Arcade/PAX). Evil Mastermind posted:I'm actually kind of surprised I forgot that, given that's how I actually started back in the 80's; a reb box I got from the Toys-R-Us. even if this was true who the gently caress loves kids cartoons more than college aged nerds?
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Jan 29, 2016 20:11
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bongwizzard posted:Well yeah, for little kids going right into kobold murder is not a great idea, but I was talking more about getting people into the idea of roleplaying in general can be tough and to me seems really close to getting people into improv. All RPGs are basically just improv, yes. For example you're describing the general structure of most campaigns right now. The party goes into the dungeon and kills some goblins. Next the party goes into the dungeon to kill some goblins but the door is locked, what do you do? Later you know that the Goblin Shaman is trying to wake the Red Dragon that sleeps in the caves in the Misty Hills and that's going to be a real pain for the town of Mistville, what do you do? The difference is the sort of scene you can set based on what the system can handle well. Think of different RPG systems as being similar to groups with different backgrounds. The kind of scene you script out for a group with a comedy background might be different from the scene you set for high school groups. Even if they're the same scene they're going to play out very differently based on the group. Your group of aspiring adult stand up comedians might do great with a prompt like "Unfortunate One Night Stand with the Boss" but your High School students are probably going to be more comfortable with something like "Football Player gets Bullied by Chess Club." Either group could do improv based on either prompt, but they're maybe more suited to particular things.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:48
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LatwPIAT posted:Some acquaintances of mine have been running D&D regularly for "beginners" at local LAN parties and cons, and the process by which they try to get people interested in D&D/roleplaying is to start with 2-4 hours of 3.5/Pathfinder character generation. I participated once on a whim (I had an open spot on my con schedule) and the way they were throwing D&D at people was to present them with 10 kg of printouts of the SRD. I think you hit the nail on the head here; the amount of time and effort you'd have to devote to the minutiae of selecting Feats and gear just to get your first taste of D&D seems to have a really poor pay-off when what happens afterwards is a 3-hour game of technically arduous but not really difficult or interesting combat scenarios. Going back a page but I've been watching this play out in real time with an acquaintance of mine. He's a regular at the Tuesday board game night at my FLGS and he's been trying to get started with Pathfinder Society stuff and the last two or three times I've been there he's been struggling to make a character, I think a Summoner, because, well, it's Pathfinder. I sat there and listened as he and the resident know-it-all went through the SRD section on feats one at a time down the list. He came up to me and was bemoaning how completely frustrated he was with the whole experience, how he had this idea in his head for a character and the system seemed to be fighting him every step of the way and I could tell he was very quickly souring on the whole experience and all I could think of was that this must be what happens with so many new players that decide they want to give that D&D thing a shot, a brief period of excitement followed by a frustrating exercise in wrangling a 16 year old mess of a system. And he's even got someone working with him, he's not just going it alone, but still. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:This is true, but food for thought: they burned the setting down in Mass Effect 3 and most people hated it. I don't think it was so much that they burned the setting down as they spent the first two games hyping up the whole YOUR CHOICES MATTER thing only to decide the best way to wrap up their hugely popular and anticipated trilogy was a Choose Your Own Color ending. Mass Effect, the first one anyway, had whole reams of setting lore and poo poo you could read if you wanted to, going into exhaustive detail about things like how future guns work and heat dissipation issues on spaceships and stuff, it's got this whole big important plot about ancient rear end in a top hat machines from outside the galaxy coming to destroy (or maybe assimilate, whatever) all life, but all that stuff pales in comparisons to people discussing "Which NPCs do you want to bone y/n?"
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Jan 29, 2016 20:51
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm actually kind of surprised I forgot that, given that's how I actually started back in the 80's; a reb box I got from the Toys-R-Us. Kai Tave posted:I don't think it was so much that they burned the setting down as they spent the first two games hyping up the whole YOUR CHOICES MATTER thing only to decide the best way to wrap up their hugely popular and anticipated trilogy was a Choose Your Own Color ending. Mass Effect, the first one anyway, had whole reams of setting lore and poo poo you could read if you wanted to, going into exhaustive detail about things like how future guns work and heat dissipation issues on spaceships and stuff, it's got this whole big important plot about ancient rear end in a top hat machines from outside the galaxy coming to destroy (or maybe assimilate, whatever) all life, but all that stuff pales in comparisons to people discussing "Which NPCs do you want to bone y/n?" Also, Liara. Always Liara. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 21:22
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Everblight posted:The only R.A. Salvatore D&D book to make the NYT Bestseller list afaik is Waterdeep Lightning Lord posted:I hope Warcraft flops too because look at it. People in the audience when I saw Star Wars were laughing themselves sick during the trailer. If it succeeds we're probably in for a generation of garbage.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:22
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Dr. Quarex posted:I am quite content with being ridiculed over this question, but why do people think Warcraft looks so bad? It looks...mundane, but I am kind of excited to see any Fantasy film where the idea of race as predestination is questioned. ... any film, really, generally. Not that I imagine the questioning will be the least bit subtle. Still beats "MURDER ALL ORCS AND GOBLINS" Tolkien/D&D, surely? I don't think you're going to get much commentary on race from the Warcraft movie. That said, I am pretty hyped for the movie. I have no idea whether it will be good or bad, but it sure looks like something that I want to see on the big screen. Plus Duncan Jones is a good director, so I am interested to see what he does with it.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:27
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Halloween Jack posted:I haven't read Designers & Dragons; did it go into how Rob Kuntz and some of his colleagues thought basic was for dumb casual babies because, get this, it explains what the game is about and how to play it in plain English? The thing is that Deus Ex: Human Revolution's endings were, I would say, on par with ME3's for sheer lack of effort and being a dumb way to cap off what had been up to that point a pretty solid game, but what pushed the response to ME3's endings over the critical threshold of the fanbase demanding something different really is the fact that Bioware had generated phenomenal amounts of hype over the course of two entire games and multiple years leading up to that point. DXHR was a one-and-done deal but Bioware cultivated a fanbase with Mass Effect that had years to get hype about the epic conclusion to the epic trilogy, and while you could maybe argue that there was no way that Bioware was ever going to meet the sort of expectations they'd generated by that point (which is probably true) what they actually delivered really was pretty loving stupid. That was my very important opinion on Mass Effect 3's ending, thanks for listening.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:35
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I saw the preview for Warcraft before the new Star War. I doubt I'd go see it in the theater (since I hardly see anything in the theater), but yeah . . . looked acceptable, if that makes sense. World of Warcraft art direction is generally pretty neat. Nothing was cringe-worthy in the trailer I saw. I didn't realize people thought it looked terrible, actually.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:43
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