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Evil Mastermind posted:That's the other reason I like Strange Stars; it's 30 pages all told. There's no fine detail, just broad enough strokes for people to get the tone of what's going on. Yeah, this is sort of the problem with the "just make a bunch of 8 page pamphlets" idea. Nobody like WotC is going to do that because it just isn't cost-effective frankly. They could do it via digital I suppose except that doesn't get them any shelf exposure, which big hardback books do, and WotC is completely awful at digital anything anyway. Paizo does adventure module subscription deals, which you can get via pdf as well, but even those are a lot more extensive than gazetteer style things and tend to be less ala carte choose-what-you-want. Small gazetteers like that are right in the wheelhouse of indie OSR-style writers who can easily write up that sort of stuff and put it up on Drivethru rather than bankrupting themselves with print costs, but the problem there is they have to contend with a million other cheap self-published supplemental .pdfs for old-school D&D which makes it really hard for anything to stand out amidst the sea of 1,000 Random Treasure Types and Bob's Guide to rear end in a top hat Traps vol. 20.
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Feb 21, 2016 04:46
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Kai Tave posted:Actually yes, it is. Elminster has a secret portal to Ed Greenwood's house where they get together and drink beer and talk about the chicks they've banged. Not even kidding, this is literally a thing. Well I guess this help contextualize Elminster getting turned magically into a woman.
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Feb 21, 2016 05:10
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Kai Tave posted:Nobody like WotC is going to do that because it just isn't cost-effective frankly. Hm. Well, I'm thinking if you had to pay for lots of good art and full-color covers and stuff, you're right... unless... ...what if it was a magazine? OK, maybe not 8 pages, but you could have a monthly publication, and each month is another area of your campaign world in a soft-cover format, supported by both the cover price, and advertising. Or! What if you published, like, a monthly magazine, and it had these 8-page segments in them, one per issue, but then you also had other short supplements and stuff, maybe for lots of different games, so it'd appeal to a broader audience of TTRPGers. You could get FLGSes to run ads in them, and people would get subscriptions... or you could even just do it as a digital magazine... oh. Oh, dang.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:46
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Leperflesh posted:Hm. Well, I'm thinking if you had to pay for lots of good art and full-color covers and stuff, you're right... unless... In that case nobody at WotC is going to do that because they no longer have the talent, sorry.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:49
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Kai Tave posted:In that case nobody at WotC is going to do that because they no longer have the talent, sorry. I'd ask if this was number or quality of D&D employees, but the answer is probably yes.
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Feb 21, 2016 07:33
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Yeah, it's both. Like I said earlier, this is the inevitable consequence of having your parent company hold layoffs as a nigh-annual tradition until you're working with a skeleton crew and probably a skeleton budget to boot. The D&D Next pipeline hit a snag because a dude got jury duty and so all his projects had to go on hold, that's how bad it is. Who's even working on D&D right now that stands out as a beacon of talent at this point (and I'll even spot you Mike Mearls, the one name everyone knows, despite the fact that I personally disagree)? I mean Dragon Magazine still exists as far as I know, and it's absolute garbage in its current incarnation, a few anemic articles interspersed with tepid self-promotion. They don't even care enough to host a forum anymore.
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Feb 21, 2016 07:39
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Leperflesh posted:That map implies that pretty much none of the realms are still forgotten. Like, they're all remembered realms, basically. I always thought it had to do with the history of the setting. Everything is built on layers of previous, half-remembered civilizations and kingdoms- literal forgotten realms. You've got the Creator Races, you've got the Elven Kingdoms, whatever came between them and Netheril, Netheril itself, and the ~1500 years between then and the present, and then the Spellplague happens and adds a new layer by blowing up half the setting. Greenwood wanking about Elminster is sadly the probable correct explanation. Kai Tave posted:Yeah, it's both. Like I said earlier, this is the inevitable consequence of having your parent company hold layoffs as a nigh-annual tradition until you're working with a skeleton crew and probably a skeleton budget to boot. The D&D Next pipeline hit a snag because a dude got jury duty and so all his projects had to go on hold, that's how bad it is. Who's even working on D&D right now that stands out as a beacon of talent at this point (and I'll even spot you Mike Mearls, the one name everyone knows, despite the fact that I personally disagree)? I mean Dragon Magazine still exists as far as I know, and it's absolute garbage in its current incarnation, a few anemic articles interspersed with tepid self-promotion. They don't even care enough to host a forum anymore. Man, this is loving depressing. I know there's more to the tabletop industry than D&D and Hasbro/Wizards won't let the game out and out die to keep the brand image intact, but is there any way up from here?
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Feb 21, 2016 09:55
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Kavak posted:Man, this is loving depressing. I know there's more to the tabletop industry than D&D and Hasbro/Wizards won't let the game out and out die to keep the brand image intact, but is there any way up from here? Up for D&D or for the hobby in general? For D&D, probably not really. 3E was a genuine TRPG bubble and it brought both the highs and, unfortunately, the lows. Despite that 4E had a fairly substantial media rollout for a TRPG, outreach and attempt to get new people engaged with stuff like the Penny Arcade podcasts and Acquisition Inc. liveplays at PAX, digital Dragon Magazine, DDI, Encounters, etc. From there it looks like a combination of factors were in play, including a less than stellar American economy, Borders going bankrupt and shutting down as the D&D team was attempting to push the Essentials stuff as evergreen shelf material, Mike Mearls getting in charge, years and years of people poisoning the well of discourse surrounding 4E and branding it a traitorous disgrace to Gygax's name, Paizo hammering the Pathfinder-as-D&D's-true-heir drum as hard as they could, Atari squatting on the video game rights all through 4E's run, and the frequently proposed notion that Hasbro had $50 million per year expectations for D&D which it almost certainly didn't meet. The digital tabletop initiative falling through because of the lead developer being involved in a murder/suicide probably didn't help matters either. At this point about the only thing I can see incentivizing Hasbro to give the D&D team at WotC a big booster shot is if this upcoming Forgotten Realms movie makes Bayformers/Marvel movie level money and prompts a sudden worldwide explosion of renewed interest in D&D. Otherwise Magic: the Gathering continues to bring in nine figures annually which means WotC as a subsidiary is more than earning their keep without D&D even entering the equation. Hasbro is never going to sell the D&D IP because they have no need to and nobody who would want to buy it has a hope in hell of making them an offer they'd entertain outside of winning the Powerball or stealing the Mincraft guy's identity. The hobby in general has achieved what I consider a comfortable level of enabling indie game writers and modestly sized outfits like Onyx Path to do their own thing thanks to crowdfunding, digital distribution/PoD, and social media. It's a great time to be alive and have an idea for a sweet TRPG when you can, with a good enough pitch and something even halfway substantial to show for it (or even nothing at all substantial and a very slick pitch), raise $50-100 thousand. You're still probably never going to quit your day job unless you crank out something like that every year, but it beats the hell out of the days when publishing your fantasy heartbreaker meant paying for a 10,000 copy print run most of which would end up moldering in your garage until you were forced to haul it to the dump. The one snag to all of this is that for the majority of gamers RPGs still equal D&D/Pathfinder so while there are an abundance of cool and good games it can be an uphill battle trying to cultivate a group willing and enthusiastic to play them instead of "can't we just play D&D instead?"
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Feb 21, 2016 10:19
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I think the recession kind of ties together with Pathfinder. Why switch to a whole new system when there's this new game that's compatible with all your old stuff? Now what's this about Atari stopping 4E video games and a murder/suicide killing digital tabletop?
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Feb 21, 2016 10:27
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Kavak posted:Now what's this about Atari stopping 4E video games and a murder/suicide killing digital tabletop? Pretty simple: Atari had the D&D license for 4E's tenure but never made any games with it, and the designer of the 4E digital tabletop killed their partner/was killed by their partner (can't remember which way round) in a murder/suicide. As they were they only person working on the project it effectively killed it.
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Feb 21, 2016 10:30
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Kavak posted:I think the recession kind of ties together with Pathfinder. Why switch to a whole new system when there's this new game that's compatible with all your old stuff? The Atari bit is just what it sounds like. In 2007 Atari signed an exclusive 10 year contract with WotC to produce D&D video games. D&D4E came out in 2008. In 2009 WotC/Hasbro sued Atari for breach of contract because they claimed that Atari had sublicensed D&D digital game rights out to Namco Bandai which Hasbro viewed as a competitor. Things got tied up in court until 2011 when the two settled out of court, with Hasbro reacquiring the rights. So basically from the beginning of 4E's tenure to the point when it began to run out of steam, there wasn't anyone making D&D video games because everything was tied up in court. Neverwinter got pushed back to 2012, too little too late to make any sort of impact. As for the other part, WotC had hired a guy named Joseph Batten to work on their Virtual Tabletop initiative that was supposed to be part and parcel of the whole digital push they were advertising, the first bit of which was the digital character builder/compendium. Unfortunately for everyone involved Joseph and his wife were, to put it charitably, estranged. The kind of estranged that involves her taking out several restraining orders. This culminated, sometime in 2008, with him confronting her in a parking lot, shooting and killing her, then putting the gun to his head. This was of course an awful tragedy and generally terrible situation all around, but apparently Joseph Batten was essentially the entire VTT team and WotC had no one else to pick up his work. Ryan Dancey, scumfuck of the earth that he is, claims that this plus "market backlash" is what caused 4E to miss its supposed $50 million goal to keep Hasbro happy. However right he is, and remember this is Ryan "the Steve Jobs of disappearing two weeks before 90% of Goblinworks is laid off" Dancey we're talking about, it's true that 4E's proposed VTT failed to manifest despite initially being a touted feature.
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Feb 21, 2016 10:41
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I've mostly given up on engaging in the rhetoric surrouding 4th edition - you might as well be debating truthers. I'm just trying to do my part by continuing to run 4e itself, which a significant amount of players still seem to be interested in.
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Feb 21, 2016 12:26
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Kai Tave posted:For D&D, probably not really. 3E was a genuine TRPG bubble and it brought both the highs and, unfortunately, the lows. Despite that 4E had a fairly substantial media rollout for a TRPG, outreach and attempt to get new people engaged with stuff like the Penny Arcade podcasts and Acquisition Inc. liveplays at PAX, digital Dragon Magazine, DDI, Encounters, etc. Honestly this is kind of my favoite thing to come out of the whole ordeal because of what happened and how. Scott Kurtz was generally uninterested in Roleplaying Games but 4e got his attention because of the role separation and the fact that healers could do a healy thing and still do something else with their turn. He went whole hog on it and even started up a webcomic based around a roleplaying group. During the 5e podcasts one of the first things Kurtz asked was "Can clerics still heal and do something else" and Mearls was like "Oh yeah sure of course" but once play actually started Kurtz got less and less interested and eventually just started doodling instead of contributing, even the PA guys seemed kind of annoyed and bored. They still do their D&D stuff out of obligation (they are getting paid an absurd amount of money) but it doesn't seem like their heart is in it anymore. Hell Kurtz's webcomic now involves a weirdly controlling DM playtesting a new ruleset with a group of people, not telling them how everything works until it comes up, and handing them pieces of paper with their own character backstories and grinning like a puppetmaster while they read them back to him.
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Feb 21, 2016 17:21
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Kurieg posted:Honestly this is kind of my favoite thing to come out of the whole ordeal because of what happened and how. Scott Kurtz was generally uninterested in Roleplaying Games but 4e got his attention because of the role separation and the fact that healers could do a healy thing and still do something else with their turn. He went whole hog on it and even started up a webcomic based around a roleplaying group. The Penny Arcade podcasts taking place during 5E's "open playtest" are a pretty pro listen if you want to hear just how disconnected Mike Mearls was from everything that had those guys excited to get into D&D in the first place. There's a whole meandering bit where they have to haltingly kitbash a pseudo-Avenger character together because Wil Wheaton's character was a 4E Avenger and there wasn't anything at the time that even slightly replicated that. It's not just a matter of "well these are two different games and you can't expect them to be 100% compatible okay" (ignoring that 5E was widely billed as The D&D For Everyone), it's a matter of Mearls not bothering to do the slightest bit of homework in preparing for a podcast that was meant to go out to everyone as a big advertising/word-of-mouth signal boost. Instead he shows up and it's just awkward, there's none of the enthusiasm of the first ones. Then later there are the podcasts of Mike Mearls and the rest of the 5E team playing where it becomes apparent that Mike Mearls is just kind of a boring GM in general.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:30
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Kai Tave posted:Then later there are the podcasts of Mike Mearls and the rest of the 5E team playing where it becomes apparent that Mike Mearls is just kind of a boring GM in general.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:33
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Zereth posted:Wasn't there a part where the PCs had to make a skill or something roll to progress, so they just sat there rolling until somebody succeeded? Yes, it was a Perception check. It was literally "roll Perception to see if you can advance the plot, oh nobody passed, well uh..." This is the guy they put in charge of the TRPG hobby's most widely known game.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:38
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Kai Tave posted:It's a matter of Mearls not bothering to do the slightest bit of homework in preparing for a podcast that was meant to go out to everyone as a big advertising/word-of-mouth signal boost. Instead he shows up and it's just awkward, there's none of the enthusiasm of the first ones.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:59
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Kai Tave posted:Yes, it was a Perception check. It was literally "roll Perception to see if you can advance the plot, oh nobody passed, well uh..." This is the guy they put in charge of the TRPG hobby's most widely known game. Seeing how Mearls DMs removed any questions as to why 5e was so dull and lackluster. The creation mimics its creator. The other fun thing was them afterwards going "Ha ha, well, maybe ghouls ARE too powerful," because it became increasingly clear they had barely actually tested their own game.
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Feb 21, 2016 23:16
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Aside from the ones where the elevator pitch makes them obviously stand out like Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape, the D&D settings look alike, but when you get to know them better they have differences. In my opinion, the basic differences are, Forgotten Realms has a focus on the epic sweep of epic history, with epic dudes fighting each other, kingdoms rising and falling and the gods fist fighting each other all the time. There's a reason the setting is known for Realms Shaking Events™. Greyhawk is more sword & sorcery focused. Not to say there isn't history because there's plenty of it, but there's much less focus on the big picture. The one time there was a big world changing event (The Greyhawk Wars) it felt kind of jarring and odd. Dragonlance is 80s style romantic fantasy, although not as much as Blue Rose. Early on it also had a bit of a post-apocalyptic tone, since it explicitly takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. It's also basically Mormon fantasy. It's pretty obvious Tracy Hickman drew on a lot of that when creating Dragonlance - tablets that bring back lost divine knowledge, white people who cosplay as John Ford movie Native Americans and are a "lost tribe", etc. Mystara (the Gazetteer setting) is a science fantasy kitchen sink that has elements like an invisible moon where samurai tigermen ride flying sabertooths, or the fact that the source of all magic is the warp core of a crashed spaceship that was altered by the gods, who are called Immortals, which sounds Jack Kirby-esque no matter the real world reasoning for it. Also, the planet's hollow and a bunch of those Immortals (including a sapient t-rex) have turned it into a museum for cultures that have vanished from the surface, including elves with phasers. These all exist alongside your average dungeons because the world was designed to scale from Basic to Immortal. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 23:27
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Kai Tave posted:I will say that back when regular official D&D web articles were a thing that they had Keith Baker do a lot of short, quick "here's a campaign seed/collection of plot hooks for an Eberron game" deals and they were, to my foggy recollection, pretty decent. But of course they deleted all that poo poo and now there aren't even any official D&D forums because that stuff takes too much effort, along with going to Gencon and making supplements. The Dragonshards articles still exist, actually. They're just buried deep in the WotC website and you can only find them with Google afaik e- Kai Tave posted:The digital tabletop initiative falling through because of the lead developer being involved in a murder/suicide probably didn't help matters either. Here's the article on the murder suicide for reference: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-murder-suicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online quote:Ryan Dancey, formerly the Dungeons & Dragons brand manager for Wizards of the Coast, recently explained how the brand failed to meet its $50 million sales goals by transitioning to an online format. Dancey shared a pivotal moment in that failure: a sad story of domestic abuse. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 23:43
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WotC's website is a labyrinthine mess, if you know how and where to look you can find anything from its entire history.
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Feb 21, 2016 23:45
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Well hey, that's a bright spot I guess. User friendliness and a sensible page layout would be nice but I guess you can't have everything.
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Feb 22, 2016 00:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:The other fun thing was them afterwards going "Ha ha, well, maybe ghouls ARE too powerful," because it became increasingly clear they had barely actually tested their own game. Well, none of the fans involved in the playtest seemed to want to point out problems, and the ones that did got shouted down. Remember Mikan and the rat swarm?
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Feb 22, 2016 01:01
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Nuns with Guns posted:The Dragonshards articles still exist, actually. They're just buried deep in the WotC website and you can only find them with Google afai Think I found the culprit. quote:with responsibilities for supporting Gleemax.com
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Feb 22, 2016 02:02
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I remember getting some of my posts deleted off the playtest forums after comparing the Next fighter to a one-button Atari joystick. They got the poo poo-rear end game they wanted to make, gently caress 'em.
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Feb 22, 2016 02:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:
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Feb 22, 2016 03:09
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MadScientistWorking posted:You know what the hilarious part to this is that I only found out recently. Pathfinder had the same goofy as problem early on. The truly ridiculous part of the 24d20 rats issue, besides all of it, was that they had to deliberately ignore the very simple and elegant solution they'd come up with to that very problem in the edition prior in order to screw it up all over again.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:17
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Evil Mastermind posted:Remember Mikan and the rat swarm? Insect Swarm is a creature in Basic Rules Cyclopedia that could easily be abstracted as a template. So, a solved problem for at least 25 years.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:23
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moths posted:I remember getting some of my posts deleted off the playtest forums after comparing the Next fighter to a one-button Atari joystick. Mearls blocked me on twitter when I asked him where the 2nd page of the fighter's character sheet was in the playtest.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:27
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Evil Mastermind posted:Remember Mikan and the rat swarm? I don't. What is this?
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Feb 22, 2016 05:33
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LordSaturn posted:I don't. What is this? There was a fight in the playtest that was something like a dozen rats, which would swarm around one PC as much as possible. But instead of using mook rules or representing the swarm as one large creature, every rat was a fully-stated monster. Also, if more than one monster is attacking a PC, then it has "advantage" which means it rolls 2d20 and takes the better die. Which meant that the monster's turn involved (as Kai Tave mentioned) rolling 2d20 take the best, a dozen times. When Mikan made this problem public, the response ranged from "well my group did <non-combat trick> to avoid that encounter", or shouted it down with IT'S A PLAYTEST IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE PERFECT. WotC ended up removing Mikan from the playtest because she did technically break the NDA. Either way it showed how little the main playtesters were actually playtesting. The whole point of testing is to find and identify the problems in a system. Saying "well, we just didn't test that bit" or saying "well it's not a final version" shows that you don't actually care about any problems in the system.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:41
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Evil Mastermind posted:There was a fight in the playtest that was something like a dozen rats, which would swarm around one PC as much as possible. that's not all WOTC also forbade all discussion of the playtest on any online forums outside of "i enjoyed/did not enjoy this playtest" i believe
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Feb 22, 2016 05:44
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Elfgames posted:that's not all WOTC also forbade all discussion of the playtest on any online forums outside of "i enjoyed/did not enjoy this playtest" i believe
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Feb 22, 2016 05:47
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"I am not enjoying this playtest" is such a magnificent understatement.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:50
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If there's one thing that both Paizo and WotC have taught me it's that the phrase "open playtest" is a sign that you're about to be fed bullshit by the shovelful.
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Feb 22, 2016 05:52
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Evil Mastermind posted:When Mikan made this problem public, the response ranged from "well my group did <non-combat trick> to avoid that encounter", or shouted it down with IT'S A PLAYTEST IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE PERFECT. WotC ended up removing Mikan from the playtest because she did technically break the NDA. It's something of an evil cycle; tabletop roleplaying games are poorly tested and full of design that ranges from annoying to toxic. By necessity, people have learned to avoid and houserule around poor design. Consequently, when presented with further poor design, the reaction is to give the poor design the benefit of a doubt and a gracious helping of good will. The result - I've gotten the impression of - is that playtesters and designers alike don't recognize glaring faults in a game as actual glaring faults, because, well, you're going to paper over the faults anyway and modify the game to suit you anyway, right? Whereas in every other industry, including the more cogent part of the board game industry, testing is destructive. Yet because RPG players, as a group, are collectively traumatized by bad games, they/we treat attempts to destructively test something as "being an rear end in a top hat". There's all these defensive attitudes around poor elements of design. If Thing X encourages players to do assholeish things to other players, it seems like players and game designers alike are more likely to meet this criticism with "don't play with people who'd use Gain XP When Betraying Party Members to betray party members because they want that sweet XP" rather than "oh yeah I guess that giving XP for betraying party members in a game where we don't want people to betray each other is kinda poor design".
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Feb 22, 2016 06:49
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LatwPIAT posted:is that playtesters and designers alike don't recognize glaring faults in a game as actual glaring faults, because, well, you're going to paper over the faults anyway and modify the game to suit you anyway, right? Rule Zero: You can change any rule in an RPG to suit your needs... Rule Zero Fallacy: ...therefore rules don't need to be well designed because the players can fix them at the table.
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Feb 22, 2016 06:58
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It's also a problem because some people view criticism of systems as criticism of the players.
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Feb 22, 2016 07:09
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, yeah. That's the Rule Zero Fallacy. "We don't need to balance the classes because people who want balanced classes will play with DMs that balance the classes for them." is by far the most irritating piece of moon logic to come out of 5e.
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Feb 22, 2016 07:11
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Lightning Lord posted:It's also a problem because some people view criticism of systems as criticism of the players. Kurieg posted:"We don't need to balance the classes because people who want balanced classes will play with DMs that balance the classes for them." is by far the most irritating piece of moon logic to come out of 5e. Fundamentally I'm willing to attribute this to the fact that acknowledging, accepting, and constructively examining criticism is a learned skill that probably isn't a mandatory requirement for being the Head of D&D. Obviously the whole concept of "open playtesting" is more about attempting to drum up publicity via word-of-mouth than it is actually hoping that a hundred thousand randos with an axe to grind are going to help you turn lead into gold, but even taking the most charitable possible stance and assuming that Mike Mearls was genuinely, deeply interested in crowdsourcing 5E's playtesting I have no idea if he'd actually know how to go about doing so in an effective fashion (and no evidence to suggest he did).
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Feb 22, 2016 07:22
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