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AlphaDog posted:"Someone wants to do it, it sounds like it'll be fun, and it isn't much work to implement since it mostly fits in with the existing rules... Hey, that worked well I should share that" seems to have been the deep and well considered design philosophy, yes. I somehow doubt that as well. I am sharing my perspective on D&D as I experienced it in the 1980s, which is that most of the content in Dragon was medieval simulationism or "make this other fictional thing within the rules", and that the "anything goes, with D&D! just wing it!" aspect of the game may have continued at Gygax's table, but was disappearing early on in published content.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:17
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I hope the future of ttrpgs isn't all pdfs. I really hate reading them and digitally flipping back and forth is super annoying to me. I backed the DCC kickstarter and have really like the little bits of it I have read, but I am not going to even try to drum up interest without a book to hand my friends.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:20
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Serf posted:I thought the gnome "thing" was machines and tinkering. Or illusions. Halflings stole crap and gnomes built crazy inventions. At least that's how I remember it when I played a gnome (yes, I played a gnome). Gnomes were added to AD&D 1e for the sole reason that there had to be a race that could multiclass as an illusionist. The illusionist was a completely separate class from the magic-user in 1e, and for reasons known only to Gygax, only humans and gnomes could be illusionists. That's why gnomes didn't have any particular hook or flavor of their own until 4e and Pathfinder both tweaked their origins - they were created solely to fit a game-mechanical niche. Before 3e, their whole schtick was "like dwarves, but not dour, and they can do some magic"; when 3e made the halflings less explicitly hobbity and removed race/class restrictions across the board, gnomes became even more redundant and pointless than ever. It's funny that people complained specifically about the gnome's absence from 4e's PHB1, considering how common it was in 2e to drop gnomes from settings - nobody complained about the lack of gnomes in, say, Dark Sun or Birthright.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:22
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AlphaDog posted:So, what would the future of TTRPGs look like? Given how much I used the Character Builder for 4e, and how much I use the various squad builders for X-Wing, for me the future of TTRPGs is in providing high quality digital tools to aid character generation and gameplay. Give me a good character generator connected to a well-maintained and curated database of content, and to a digital tabletop I can sync up to a projector, and an at-table live character sheet I can run from my phone, and you have a game that I and my friends are much, much more likely to play than one that comes in a PDF or a dead-tree book.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, but they weren't intended for use as a PC race. This is in the initial Chronicles, due to the fact that they were a mostly-unknown and new race outside the Dragon Empire. But during the 5th Age and post-Chaos War a military contingent of Draconians were able to forge their own nation after one of their generals finds and saves the female draconian eggs. In the Dragonlance Campaign Setting for 3rd Edition, Baaz and Kapak Draconians are PC options, but are effectively 3rd and 4th level respectively due to "Level Adjustment" rules.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:Um...yes? I would say it's every bit as devoid of imagination as "you can play as whatever you want". The difference is that a fully open classless system can at least work if you are able to put in the tools, whereas quoting pop culture is guaranteed to be loving lazy.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:34
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thespaceinvader posted:Given how much I used the Character Builder for 4e, and how much I use the various squad builders for X-Wing, for me the future of TTRPGs is in providing high quality digital tools to aid character generation and gameplay. Give me a good character generator connected to a well-maintained and curated database of content, and to a digital tabletop I can sync up to a projector, and an at-table live character sheet I can run from my phone, and you have a game that I and my friends are much, much more likely to play than one that comes in a PDF or a dead-tree book. All of that sounds just awful and I would rather just play video games and chat via Skype or whatever. I totally admit that the nostalgia thing is huge with me but the traditional trapping of "playing d&d" are a big part of the charm for me. Hell, I am slowly trying to track down old copies of the 1st Ed books rather then buy the reprints because I want them to have that "old book" smell that will forever remind me of gaming. All of your stuff is objectively better but I want some touchy feely crap.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:41
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bongwizzard posted:All of that sounds just awful and I would rather just play video games and chat via Skype or whatever. Agree to differ I guess. The part of TTRPGs that I value is getting together with friends and being creative and/or playing fightmans. I don't care to sit at home with 8 different reference books and make a character when I could have a computer to do that for me. The digital tabletop and digital at-table character are much less important, but I'm hosed if I'm going to spend time doing stuff manually when I have a computer.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:51
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Leperflesh posted:I mean, what I see is stuff like this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modiphius/robert-e-howards-conan-roleplaying-game There's no way that a Conan RPG doing well is an indication that the TTRPG industry is in a good way. If this was some campaign for an up and coming YA series or something then sure that would be a great example of how the industry wasn't catering to an ageing audience, but Conan? I would love for WotC to pick up on how people perceive the name "Dungeons and Dragons" to mean "TTRPG" and run with it. Just make a ton of RPGs and call them all "Dungeons and Dragons:_______." First up Dungeons and Dragons: Cybertron. Don't even have character creation rules, just give everyone premade characters from the movies or the comics that are running right now.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:54
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thespaceinvader posted:Agree to differ I guess. The part of TTRPGs that I value is getting together with friends and being creative and/or playing fightmans. I don't care to sit at home with 8 different reference books and make a character when I could have a computer to do that for me. Chargen and the gm having a tablet or whatever is fine, gaming in a nasa control center would put me off. I mean unless it was a space game or some deal where we are all playing overworked engineers having torrid affairs around the office.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:57
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Mecha Gojira posted:I wonder where that notion of "low fantasy" "versimilitude" actually infected the hobby. Gary Gygax was a big source of it too - I always think of AD&D as his effort to add a bunch of additional realism/verisimilitude rules (weapon speeds! 22 different pole arms! 2% chance of catching a disease of the lymphatic system every month you spent in the tropics! precise costs in gp for each 10' length of crenelated battlement you build! hex-grid turn radius ratings for flying creatures! etc etc etc) to the simple, game-y D&D.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:01
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thespaceinvader posted:Given how much I used the Character Builder for 4e, and how much I use the various squad builders for X-Wing, for me the future of TTRPGs is in providing high quality digital tools to aid character generation and gameplay. Give me a good character generator connected to a well-maintained and curated database of content, and to a digital tabletop I can sync up to a projector, and an at-table live character sheet I can run from my phone, and you have a game that I and my friends are much, much more likely to play than one that comes in a PDF or a dead-tree book. The money involved in the TT RPG business is so poor that if you have the skills to build any significant piece of this, let alone a complete suite for a particular game, you could make AT LEAST triple the income applying those same skills to anything else. I desperately want tabletop roleplaying to catch up to all the improvements to how technical & narrative information are displayed since the mid-90s. Right now the industry is sustained by a combination of people accepting below market wages for their skills (not dissimilar to a lot of jobs in video games, with the difference that below market for video games is a lot more livable) and unskilled amateurs working for the sheer passion of it. But I don't see how it happens unless an extremely wealthy benefactor basically sets giant stacks of cash on fire just to demonstrate to people that it's possible. If that describes you, please look me up as I have a few ideas I'd like to share.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:04
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FMguru posted:I honestly think a lot of it came from one of the big groups of early adopters of D&D - the medieval recreators of the Society for Creative Anachronism. SCA has been around since the mid-60s, and the Venn diagram of SCA to early D&D proselytizers is close to a circle, outside of the toy store shelves with the Red Box. Its one of the few hobby cultures where spending three to four hours around a table with four to six friends is actually less intensive logistically.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:11
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bongwizzard posted:All of that sounds just awful and I would rather just play video games and chat via Skype or whatever. So you like bookkeeping but you're completely repelled by the the ttrpg equivalent of an Excel document that does hours of repetitive page flipping and bookmarking and note-taking for you?
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Feb 19, 2016 01:21
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Asimo posted:Because D&D is in decline and it's 95% of the "RPG industry". D&D isn't 95% of the "RPG Industry" and hasn't been since the 90s. As weird as it seems given SA's wheel house Star Wars RPGs do comparable business to D&D post mid era 3rd edition. Both the WotC Star Wars RPG and the Fantasy Flight one have done very well and account for a fairly large portion of the hobby by themselves, because hey Star Wars.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:31
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Everything else is basically a rounding error in comparison, at least now that White Wolf has kinda fallen from its 90's heights.
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As a relative newcomer to the hobby, and especially one that lives in Asia where it's expensive to get dead-tree books, I know DriveThruRPG is my Steam spirit animal. It's too easy to just be wandering around, find a supplement or even a corebook for five dollars or whatever the hell, and just have a digital copy immediately. Meanwhile I also put up character sheets as form-fillable PDFs in Google Drive, use Google Sheets to automate rolling on look-up tables, run games through VoIP, use roll20 to make sure our modifier calculations are correct and never have to deal with the physical tedium of rolling a bucket of dice, and use the forums to post lots of campaign notes. I'm pretty sure that if I ever ran a live game I'd be using a laptop as my "DM Screen". I'm with kaynorr in that I think it's going to be a long time before we see better digital integration beyond easy access to PDFs, because yeah anyone who's skilled enough to be doing this might as well be doing it for other industries for more cash, but I do super-appreciate the level of digital integration we already have now. One issue I do have with the state of things as they are is that working off of PDFs introduces a wrinkle to "book-sharing" that I've never been able to comfortably address. So far I've always just assumed anyone who joins my game has a copy of the books that they need, but if they didn't, am I entitled to just email them the PDF of the rules, knowing that they might never buy a legit copy for themselves if I did that?
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Feb 19, 2016 01:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:One issue I do have with the state of things as they are is that working off of PDFs introduces a wrinkle to "book-sharing" that I've never been able to comfortably address. So far I've always just assumed anyone who joins my game has a copy of the books that they need, but if they didn't, am I entitled to just email them the PDF of the rules, knowing that they might never buy a legit copy for themselves if I did that? I can't see why it's an actual problem for me to buy an RPG PDF and let my friend read it too (like we would constantly do with rulebooks through the 80s and 90s), but I can see why it looks like a problem, especially if you've somehow got the idea that everyone at a given gaming table will own all the rulebooks they're using. If I were to sell a game as a PDF I'd probably put something like "It's very helpful for each player to have a copy of the rules, so please feel free share this PDF with your gaming group to make things work better for you. If you're enjoying the game while using a PDF someone's shared with you, please consider buying a copy!" I mean, people are going to share it anyway, so... Leperflesh posted:I've actually literally argued that I'm amazed we don't have more RPGs with rulesets laid out as online references rather than as books in the traditional sense. When the D20 SRD went online, I almost immediately started using it to the total exclusion of the printed references, except when I needed content that simply wasn't there. It sort of seemed like Wizards had figured this out when they turned on D&D Insider, but I guess they eventually decided they couldn't afford to keep their cash cow alive or some loving thing. So, how hard is it to create a wiki? If I had hosting and some basic web design skills, what else would I need to pull something like that off, if I wanted to make it freely available? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 01:52
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Isn't there a similar problem with traditional books? I doubt that in most D&D groups everyone had their own copy of the PHB.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:58
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As far as I can tell the best strategy for that is just watermarking the pdfs with customer info, nad if they show up on sharing sites ban that customer and their payment method.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:59
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Nuns with Guns posted:So you like bookkeeping but you're completely repelled by the the ttrpg equivalent of an Excel document that does hours of repetitive page flipping and bookmarking and note-taking for you? I would enjoy flipping through real books more then using an app, but I would prefer an app to dealing with a half dozen pdfs open on my screen. Looking at you, Shadowrun 5th ed.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:01
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That's all assuming your friends only ever plays with your group and never want access to the book anywhere but the table, is the thing. Like it's easy to give someone a PDF and say "well I'd just hand them my book anyway" for when I need my friends to make characters for a game I'm running, but then they have that PDF forever unless they think it's an SNES rom and delete it in 24 hours each time I share it. If they then go on to play with another group and then another it's entirely possible they're playing with people who never purchased an initial copy at all. This is only magnified for online play like play-by-post games where the same people are often playing in multiple simultaneously, and certainly will play multiple games over time. Like I said I'm still gonna give my friends a $10 pdf at the end of the day because I know none of them are going to pony up for it and my purchase is basically wasted if I don't have friends to play with, but it's not really the same situation as passing a book around the table or lending it out for a week between sessions.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:03
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paradoxGentleman posted:Isn't there a similar problem with traditional books? I doubt that in most D&D groups everyone had their own copy of the PHB.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:04
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paradoxGentleman posted:Isn't there a similar problem with traditional books? I doubt that in most D&D groups everyone had their own copy of the PHB. Yes, absolutely. As I've said before, my experience is that at a table of 6, one person will own and bring the books, and if the game is split into player's and GM's stuff, then maybe one other person will own and bring a player's book. Then those books get passed around and shared and loaned out and whatever as the game goes on. Maybe someone's having enough fun that they buy their own book/books and start gaming with a new group of 4-5 other people who also don't own any books. I guess the thing is that when you "share" a PDF, you both end up with a a copy that you can read at the same time. Like I said, I'm not sure it's an actual problem given that in my experience most gamers never buy game books anyway, but I can see why it looks like a problem. e: When I talk about "in my experience", this is what I mean: Since the 80s I have problably played regularly scheduled games of D&D at different times with around 30 different people. I'm still in contact with 20 of those people. Out of those 20 people, myself and one other guy have collections of RPG books, including lots and lots of D&D stuff. One other guy has a 2nd ed PHB and at one point was a 4e subscriber. One other guy once bought Vampire: Dark Ages or whatever it was called, and never ran it. Nobody else bought any RPG books at all, although many bought dice, miniatures, pads of BECMI character sheets, etc. In the 90s, I did a fair bit of in-public gaming, and it didn't give me any reason to think that other people's experiences would be different. That said, I have no idea how things work now and am happy to be corrected if it turns out that nearly every player at a given D&D table owns the full core set of books. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 02:06
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Terrible Opinions posted:As far as I can tell the best strategy for that is just watermarking the pdfs with customer info, nad if they show up on sharing sites ban that customer and their payment method. This doesn't really solve the problem though - now if someone buys your game and runs it with their group and shares it with their players, then it leaks out from one of those players, you've just punished the GM, one of your actual loyal customers who is interested in your game enough to run it and show other people it. Success! They can't give you any more money! Oh wait.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:12
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The problem too is that it can be argued that giving other people a copy of a PDF to use could be considered  .If I have a book and I loan it to someone to use, I paid for one copy and there;s still only one copy. If I have a PDF and let other people access it, then there can be multiple copies of the file floating around but it was only purchased once.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:12
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This is an area I wrestle with since I am generally the person buying the PDF and convincing people to sit around and play it. Eclipse Phase was great since I could just share the PDF and not care. This is actually one of the reason I think light games and *world stuff does well compared to heavier weight indie games - moving all the relevant content you need to play the game onto sharable stuff means there's no issue. I don't need to read the Apocalypse World book to play it successfully - I just need the playbook. Whereas something like Chuubo's I feel like there's no way I can just explain the game directly, so I gotta either * give prospective players the PDF * tell them to buy it (yeah right) * find other players who already own it (yeah right) * turn a blind eye to them -ing it. (what I did in the D20 era) Net result: I'm not running Chuubo's. This sucks.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:17
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Would an online rules site that you pay to access and have to be logged in to use not solve all these problems? It works just like a physical book - you can lend your login to someone, but you can't both be logged in at the same time.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:18
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So was I the only one who did some Mission Impossible poo poo to get a moment alone with the school library's color photocopier to slowly make copies of the old D&D modules? I don't think any of my middle school/highschool friends ever bought a game book in their lives. My father was super into used books so I was always able to pick up a ton of old stuff for cheap, which is how we got all of our stuff.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:21
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AlphaDog posted:Would an online rules site that you pay to access and have to be logged in to use not solve all these problems? The rules could get easily copied down onto a word doc or equivalent format and shared. Though, it would solve the problem of sharing with players, but still having only copy. But, you're looking at issues in a void: a lot of customers won't like the loss of control/ownership over the product. Hell, there are still people (even techies) who view buying digital media as a scam because you aren't purchasing anything real. It could eventually work out, but you need someone strong -- a lot of strong groups together -- leading the charge for this to work. And it's still a big "if."
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Feb 19, 2016 02:22
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It would I believe, but then you get into other issues like web hosting (and with it a potential monthly/yearly fee to cover) and people not wanting to risk losing access to a game they like because servers go down, either temporarily or permanently. Also people would need to have constant internet access to read their books at all. Not that those can't be fixed or anything, but they'd need to be considered. It's one thing to ask WotC to do it like they did with 4e - They had a reasonable amount of capital (for a ttrpg company), the books could still be purchased so you couldn't be without them or lose access, they had a Name which could be used to attract the talent needed for projects like that even if they paid them less than other fields. It's a very different thing to have [random person with a kickstarter that just squeaked by] do it.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:25
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AlphaDog posted:Would an online rules site that you pay to access and have to be logged in to use not solve all these problems? It works just like a physical book - you can lend your login to someone, but you can't both be logged in at the same time. Something like a character builder that gives free and subscriber-only content could be another option, possibly even for crunchier games. Give free users the ability to reference all the base rules with a live character sheet that does the math for them, and offer the ability to swap out powers or feats or prestige classes or whatever the equivalents are with premium options. You could make other advanced rules premium only too, like maybe custom vehicles/mounts, mass combat, and sailing rules. You could make all the premium content subscriber only or offer small toolkit packages as one-off purchases. It'd interesting to see at least, but no one really has the resources to set something like that up
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Feb 19, 2016 02:32
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Covok posted:The rules could get easily copied down onto a word doc or equivalent format and shared. People scan and share physical books all the time, and I know of at least one person who, in the 80s, razored apart their Mentzer Basic books and would sell you a bound, photocopied set for 10 bucks. You're not going to prevent people from pirating stuff if they really want to, is what I'm getting at, and it's a bit silly to write off digital stuff because it's slightly easier to pirate. I think charging a smallish amount like $10 for access, and charging just once, would alleviate a lot of people's other concerns with a purely online product, but it's pretty hard to say since to my knowledge it's never been attempted.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:35
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It took me a while but I found the post I made last year on exactly this subject. Bigtime companies are wrestling with the same issues. Essentially, the game industry needs DRM. A Steam-like model might work. The requirement to be online in order to access your content is still obnoxious, but less than it used to be. A trusted third party that can guarantee that your digitally-purchased, DRMed content doesn't go poof when the publisher disappears helps too. You may also need to find revenue streams to support your publishing that don't come directly from publishing. Maybe you need to sell t-shirts, book tickets for live gaming events, sell art prints. I dunno. I think there's room for creative approaches and new ideas to be tried out here. AlphaDog posted:So, how hard is it to create a wiki? If I had hosting and some basic web design skills, what else would I need to pull something like that off, if I wanted to make it freely available? It's very easy to create a wiki. An hour or two of googling and the basic information needed to configure an application to run on your webhost is sufficient. However, running and maintaining a wiki is not free, and wikis have their own drawbacks. You tend to get stale content, broken links, you need to manage user accounts and access control, etc. etc. But it's probably easy enough and cheap enough now, that if you wanted to publish your RPG entirely on a wiki, you absolutely could do that even with very little prior training or experience.
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Feb 19, 2016 02:40
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Leperflesh posted:It took me a while but I found the post I made last year on exactly this subject. I think that attempts to do this are inevitable as more and more "indie" RPG publishers try all sorts of poo poo, but I think there's a strong likelihood that such attempts are going to run up against the same sort of thing that makes people freak out about gnomes being absent. You yourself have noted that there's a strong traditionalist streak in the RPG hobby, there are still people who complain about things like pdfs and digital character builders despite it being 2016, someone trying to pitch an online-required digital wikispace RPG is going to have a rough go of it imo, especially since as other people have pointed out someone skilled and passionate enough to do something like that and do it well could probably be making way more money in other fields.
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Feb 19, 2016 03:01
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Terrible Opinions posted:As far as I can tell the best strategy for that is just watermarking the pdfs with customer info, nad if they show up on sharing sites ban that customer and their payment method. This works, I assure you. I've had players ask for copies of my Drive-Thru PDFs, and the answer to "Will I wager my entire cloud of purchased gaming materials that this won't end up on a filez site?" is "no."
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Feb 19, 2016 03:10
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As a consumer, aside from finding people to play with I don't actually care how the TTG industry is doing. Its fun to discuss and think about, but I already did my time in those particular salt mines when I was a teenager. Plus Team Comics and movie box office nonsense. Now I just want to watch, play and read. This isn't me trying to derail the discussion, rather I think my position is a relatively common one. Also in regards to grog reactions to 4e, I find it funny how many of them think that tieflings originated there.
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Feb 19, 2016 03:11
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xiw posted:This is an area I wrestle with since I am generally the person buying the PDF and convincing people to sit around and play it. Eclipse Phase was great since I could just share the PDF and not care. I can empathize with this because the first time I tried to run AD&D I also said people could use OSRIC since it was a free clone, but then I found out that there's actually tons of little differences and inconsistencies that one would have to reconcile if people were using both. Which pushes me towards wanting to use the free clone to avoid potential sharing issues, but at the same time "Labyrinth Lord" isn't nearly as recognizable as "Basic D&D".
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Feb 19, 2016 03:12
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There's also, and this bears repeating, the problem that digital distribution completely cuts out the FLGS. That's cheaper (no middleman to pay) but arguably terrible for the sustainability of a social interaction hobby where the FLGS is the traditional locus of social interaction for that hobby. Perhaps online/digital-only RPGs only really work when online/digital-only play is both feasible and highly supported.
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Feb 19, 2016 03:20
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Lightning Lord posted:As a consumer, aside from finding people to play with I don't actually care how the TTG industry is doing. Its fun to discuss and think about, but I already did my time in those particular salt mines when I was a teenager. Plus Team Comics and movie box office nonsense. Now I just want to watch, play and read. This isn't me trying to derail the discussion, rather I think my position is a relatively common one. No, they just complain about the unified look of 4E tieflings. On the one hand there's something to be said for the weird wonder factor of demon people who can have all sorts of different demonic features as part of their heritage, on the other hand there's literally nothing stopping you from simply declaring "oh btw my tiefling doesn't have horns or a tail, instead he's got cloven feet and decorative bat-wings that don't actually let him fly" if it matters that much to you instead of endlessly raging against Wot$, now guess which one they actually did.
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Feb 19, 2016 03:22
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Even as a grog I don't get people complaining about dragonborn in 4e Darksun. Did they not play or at least read the more interesting Dark Sun adventures? There were straight up dragon men in 2nd edition, a whole city of them. The backstory of "btw these dragon dudes no broke free of the evil undead sorcerer king who created them," was great.
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Feb 19, 2016 03:26
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