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Slimnoid posted:Warmahordes and Malifaux both seem to have done that with their second editions. Malifaux in particular saw a tightening of the rules and removing a lot of the newbie-unfriendly elements of the rules (wounding someone in 1st edition took no less than 11 steps to resolve), and only a very minor subset of the fanbase was upset about the changes. And those people were only upset that their rules mastery no longer made them easy trounce people. Warmahordes also went through some serious thematic rebranding. 1st edition was hyper masculinized with the motto "Play like you've go a pair" alongside the logo of two gigantic nuts. That's been quietly abandoned and they've been trying to make more female characters and less hyper sexualized ones, but they can't undo the characters created from 1st edition.
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Apr 29, 2016 21:07
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It's cool and weird for me me to think that there are people who have been playing Warhammer for 30 years and MTG for 20 years.
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Apr 29, 2016 21:13
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canyoneer posted:It's cool and weird for me me to think that there are people who have been playing Warhammer for 30 years and MTG for 20 years. Today someone was playing Robo Rally in the cafeteria, and I got to explain to my coworker that, "It's the game M:tG was created to fund."
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Apr 29, 2016 21:27
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(I started writing this post before I had to go to work and am only finishing it up now, so sorry if it seems a little weird. A few other people have brought up the upcoming WMH edition shift, for example.)Halloween Jack posted:Tell me about this 3e setting material that was invalidated by 4e. Why can't you use it? Why do you have to do a bunch of work to use it in the new cosmology? I am talking about rules, though: basically any monster, class concept, or whatever else has any sort of mechanical presence in the old rules but wasn't in a 4E book for months/years to come, if ever. It seems like a lot of people have gotten hung up on the Planescape thing specifically, and that may be largely my fault for using it as my first and most visible example. Sorry!  ---- Anyway. A lot of people have said or implied things along the lines of "well, shucks, how do you do any necessary edition update without disrupting things??" It's a fair question, because obviously you did need a 4E that would lack some stuff in common with 3E, namely the dumb/broken poo poo that you had to trim out to have a game that was playable at all levels. Let's go back to the miniature world, and this time, first, to a good example: the upcoming Warmahordes move to (I think) 3rd edition. I'm somewhat invested in Hordes, in the sense that I've sunk a couple hundred bucks into it. When the new edition hits, I have no reason to believe that this investment (which is miniatures for a miniatures game, as it is stacks and stacks of books for the D&D sort of adventure game) will be completely or even substantially pulled out from under me. I'll have to make a comparatively very minor investment in a new core rulebook and new cards to tell me how to interpret the stuff I already have, but even much of this is only for convenience's sake as some or all of the info will probably be available for free online. And what does Privateer Press get from this? They get the knowledge that I'm still relatively likely to keep buying new poo poo from them going forward whenever it appeals to me. Interestingly, at first Games Workshop appeared to be doing something very similar with AoS: they published updated free rules for (just about?) every unit in the old game so that you could play them in AoS! Super! Of course, it quickly became apparent to all the smart people that, on top of the AoS rules being lovely generally, this attempt to maintain compatibility was done in thoroughly bad faith: GW really didn't intend for you to be a "full member" of AoS if all you wanted to do with the new ruleset was keep playing your Bretonnian army in perpetuity, with only incremental additions if and when GW brought out good new stuff. They wanted you to buy Stormcast Eternals, Fyrslayers, Bloodnouns, whatever. For me as an (up to that point) avid consumer of D&D, it seems like the shift from 3E to 4E had a lot more in common with the WHFB->AoS shift than with the upcoming PP edition shift. I say "it seems" because never played WHFB, so I did not personally experience the end of WHFB from the inside, so to speak. But that's what I infer from seeing people post in the death thread and the WHFB thread. Leperflesh posted:We can get a broad sense of each edition's popularity by how well or poorly it performed in game stores, but we can't divorce that from the rest of the trad games marketplace during each era... sometimes D&D was more or less popular in part because of the attraction (or lack of it) to other RPGs, or to new forms of gamelike entertainment (computer games, online computer games) and social media and so forth. This was something I've been thinking about too. We talk a lot in the death thread about how it's much easier than it's ever been for people to get woke about the fact that they don't have to put up with the manufacturer, in this case GW, changing the game for the worse. ("Worse" is a matter of perspective; I would say that AoS is clearly worse in all regards whereas 4E is arguably mechanically superior in some ways, but I don't think it matters whether it's objectively or subjectively worse when the question is how you stop as many customers as possible from jumping ship.) I think something similar happened to D&D over the past decade and change. Back when they made the 2E to 3E shift, was there really any other prominent place for people to go? There were RIFTS and GURPS and WoD, but would those have really scratched the same itch? No matter what, you were going to get shaken up big time. Mise well at least stick with the D&D brand. But nowadays, I (the general I) have a choice: if I just want to keep my crunchy security blanket wrapped around me without needing to adapt hardly anything, I can go straight to Pathfinder; if I want a better ruleset while keeping the fluff, I can make it as easy as possible to carry over the essence of my beloved monsters, prestige classes, or whatever by going to Dungeon World. From that point of view, 4E is the worst of both worlds regardless of its virtues as a dungeon-crawling game unto itself.
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Apr 29, 2016 21:34
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Dr. Quarex posted:I do not know much about it between the late 1990s and today, but did Magic: The Gathering not successfully do this, like, a half-dozen times? Or do they mostly get new players every few years? Part of it was that TSR had a number of policies that were really good at alienating the community. They had a very draconian policy about D&D fan pages and fan materials. And the visable voice of TSR on usenet was SKR. Who never found a flame war he didn't love. If someone didn't pull him into one, he went out and started one. And while that community was small compared to the group of D&D players as a whole, they tended to be pretty vocal to their local groups and then that spread through the nerd grapevine usually getting more negative sounding along the way. When Wizards bought out TSR, they managed to get a ton of community good will. One of the first announcements to the web community was that TSR's policy about fan pages was done and their only restrictions were that you couldn't try to pass your stuff off as an official D&D product. They also did a big (for D&D) marketing push. Stuff like the Silver Anniversary Tour. And it felt like they were investing money into D&D so they built up a lot of really positive good will that they took into the 3rd edition transition. There were still people bitching about the change but there was a serious vibe that WoTC cared about D&D and was looking toward a bright, shiny future.
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Apr 29, 2016 22:01
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Warhammer Fantasy and 40K both featured edition changes which while they never outright squatted anyone's armies the way AoS did certainly upended things to a significant degree. Talk to any given Tyrannid player about how well 40K treated them over various editions, or Fantasy Daemons players. The latest 40K edition introduced an OP Elder codex full of broken bullshit. Older editions of 40K had all sorts of different ways to make a Guard or Chaos army that got phased out in subsequent editions making peoples' armies no longer valid or legal. That Privateer has your faith that they won't gently caress you over with a new edition is all to the good, yours and theirs, but I'd say that state of affairs in fantasy tabletop wargaming hasn't always been the rule but rather the exception.
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Apr 29, 2016 22:09
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Kai Tave posted:That Privateer has your faith that they won't gently caress you over with a new edition is all to the good, yours and theirs, but I'd say that state of affairs in fantasy tabletop wargaming hasn't always been the rule but rather the exception. Oh, no, you're definitely correct there, I'd say. We should try to hold more manufacturers to that standard, but I have no doubt that they'll continue to fall short. All I can do is continue trying to support companies that make their games as open and compatible as possible, especially to refugees from massive shakeups in other games (this is basically what Mantic's doing in the miniatures department and it's great). One other thing I do want to add is that the 3E->4E experience makes me sympathetic** to a lot of the folks who lost what they loved about 4E when WOTC sharply changed direction again for 5E. It's really the worst of both worlds again: the people who wanted something almost exactly like 3E already have Pathfinder, so there was no reason for WOTC to junk a different game incarnation that many people had come to love on its own merits. **I won't lie, there's also some reflexive schadenfreude, but that certainly shouldn't be directed at everyone who enjoyed 4E.
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Apr 29, 2016 22:37
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Kai Tave posted:Warhammer Fantasy and 40K both featured edition changes which while they never outright squatted anyone's armies the way AoS did certainly upended things to a significant degree. Talk to any given Tyrannid player about how well 40K treated them over various editions, or Fantasy Daemons players. The latest 40K edition introduced an OP Elder codex full of broken bullshit. Older editions of 40K had all sorts of different ways to make a Guard or Chaos army that got phased out in subsequent editions making peoples' armies no longer valid or legal. Mk 1 to Mk 2 Warmahordes was almost all good. Same thing for 1st to 2nd edition Malifaux. The rule has nothing to do with tabletop wargaming and everything to do with GW being poo poo. We haven't had a non-GW wargame really poo poo on its fans since Confrontation. Unless you count Monsterpocalypse being killed, possibly due to Tim Burton.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:34
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The other major difference between the 3E/4E transition and the WF/AoS transition is Pathfinder. There really has never been anything like that arrangement of circumstances before or since - they were in the exact correct position to lure a huge chunk of the disillusioned 3E fans over and I honestly think it was something of a black swan that is exclusive to that case. No one will ever make their ruleset so open that you can be Pathfindered, and without that element things are more likely to play out just like any other edition transition in the hobby. Most will be delighted, some will grouse but ultimately come around, and a small group will find (or more likely create) their way to another game that has the thing that was (usually wisely) thrown out of the old edition.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:01
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kaynorr posted:The other major difference between the 3E/4E transition and the WF/AoS transition is Pathfinder. There really has never been anything like that arrangement of circumstances before or since - they were in the exact correct position to lure a huge chunk of the disillusioned 3E fans over and I honestly think it was something of a black swan that is exclusive to that case. No one will ever make their ruleset so open that you can be Pathfindered, and without that element things are more likely to play out just like any other edition transition in the hobby. Most will be delighted, some will grouse but ultimately come around, and a small group will find (or more likely create) their way to another game that has the thing that was (usually wisely) thrown out of the old edition. Kings of War might want a word with you.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:03
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Leperflesh posted:The transition from 3e D&D to 4e D&D was the first D&D transition to take place during the age of online social media. (...) I mean you're not wrong about how internet social media circlejerks played a big part in the 4e backlash, but the environment was still a fair bit different and there was more to it than just "the internet is dumb". Even if it is dumb. kaynorr posted:The other major difference between the 3E/4E transition and the WF/AoS transition is Pathfinder. There really has never been anything like that arrangement of circumstances before or since - they were in the exact correct position to lure a huge chunk of the disillusioned 3E fans over and I honestly think it was something of a black swan that is exclusive to that case. No one will ever make their ruleset so open that you can be Pathfindered, and without that element things are more likely to play out just like any other edition transition in the hobby. Most will be delighted, some will grouse but ultimately come around, and a small group will find (or more likely create) their way to another game that has the thing that was (usually wisely) thrown out of the old edition.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:05
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Terrible Opinions posted:Unless you count Monsterpocalypse being killed, possibly due to Tim Burton. Didn't Monsterpocalypse die because of their distribution model, featuring random packs of miniatures including the huge centerpiece monsters?
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Apr 30, 2016 00:06
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JerryLee posted:For me as an (up to that point) avid consumer of D&D, it seems like the shift from 3E to 4E had a lot more in common with the WHFB->AoS shift than with the upcoming PP edition shift. I say "it seems" because never played WHFB, so I did not personally experience the end of WHFB from the inside, so to speak. But that's what I infer from seeing people post in the death thread and the WHFB thread. I'm going to disagree about 3e->4e being equivalent to Age of Sigmar, for one specific reason. Namely Wizards released two books during the lead-up to 4e, Wizards Presents: Classes and Races and Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters. (gradenko_2000 wrote about them for FATAL & Friends, you can find their write-up here.) These books are the designers talking about the design process behind 4e and why they're making the changes they are. How they're splitting elves into elves and eladrin because they can't make a single race that's both smug ivory tower elves and wild ranger elves that's mechanically coherent. How they're changing the racial line-up because playable dragons and devils hook people today the way half-orcs and gnomes very much don't. How people have been waiting for classes like the Warlock and Warlord for ages, and how barbarians and monks need a lot more time in the oven before they'll be ready for prime time. In short, they made it very clear that they were trying to make the best D&D they could. I doubt anyone on the Age of Sigmar team could say they were trying to make the best Warhammer Fantasy Battles they could. (Also, I get what you mean about launch 4e not allowing nearly the same range of characters 3.5 did at the end of it's lifetime, but that's a problem with D&D's business model as much as anything. The supplement treadmill means it's physically impossibly for them to update everything at once, so they have to pick a slice of everything to turn into the new core of D&D.)
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Apr 30, 2016 00:09
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Asimo posted:Yeah, the development of Pathfinder was probably a bigger factor in the long run simply because it allowed the groggish conservative types to keep playing what was literally the same game instead of being "forced" to adapt to and learn the new edition. It was so spectacularly timed to and intentionally made to cut the legs out from under WotC during the edition transition because they knew it would appeal to a certain vocal sort of player. There's not really anything WotC could have really done about it, except of course for not having the disastrous OGL... paradoxGentleman posted:Didn't Monsterpocalypse die because of their distribution model, featuring random packs of miniatures including the huge centerpiece monsters?
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Apr 30, 2016 00:11
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Terrible Opinions posted:Not gonna lie the OGL was loving great. It would have been fantastic for 4th edition to have had one too so we wouldn't have been hosed by Merls. Hell if a 4th edition OGL had existed a bunch of the people laid off from WotC could have just made Pathfinderized 4th edition. I get that Pathfinder's very existence somehow offends you but open source for mechanics is a good idea that can only hurt companies trying to make you re-buy books. The OGL was terrible - it flooded the market with lovely d20 stuff and drowned out a ton of other systems for nearly a decade. We got a glut of awful stuff, a few shining stars and the chance for, yes, Pathfinder to exist.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:12
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Terrible Opinions posted:Mk 1 to Mk 2 Warmahordes was almost all good. Same thing for 1st to 2nd edition Malifaux. The rule has nothing to do with tabletop wargaming and everything to do with GW being poo poo. We haven't had a non-GW wargame really poo poo on its fans since Confrontation. Unless you count Monsterpocalypse being killed, possibly due to Tim Burton. There's Star Trek Attack Wing which hasn't poo poo on its fans through edition changes but has definitely done so through an accelerated release schedule with minimal playtesting, including introducing ultra-broken Borg ships into the meta which basically devastated the game, then waiting too long and doing too little to fix things, then continuing to blithely churn out more unplaytested waves. That's on top of all the other stuff WizKids have done to drive the game into the ground. You can read the STAW thread here to see several players' transition from excited enthusiasm to dead-eyed remorse, it's like a time-compressed summary of the transition GW fans went through culminating with Age of Sigmar. JerryLee posted:Anyway. A lot of people have said or implied things along the lines of "well, shucks, how do you do any necessary edition update without disrupting things??" It's a fair question, because obviously you did need a 4E that would lack some stuff in common with 3E, namely the dumb/broken poo poo that you had to trim out to have a game that was playable at all levels. So I guess my question here then is how are you ("you" being a game publisher) supposed to square these two ideas? That a new edition may be necessary which "breaks compatibility" to a certain extent, but at the same time if you shake things up then whoops, your fanbase will just up and abandon you and it's your own fault for loving it up. Because in my opinion, and it's an opinion backed up by exhaustive analysis and breakdowns that people with far more time on their hands than myself have compiled over the years, you can't fix the flaws of a game like 3E D&D through tiny incremental changes. If your goal is to actually fix the dumb, broken poo poo in 3E then at a certain point you have to acknowledge that you cannot do so simply by changing the X over here to a Y, tightening up the graphics on chapter three, and releasing 3.65 Edition for...how many years? When is it permissible to say "okay guys, we'd like to start fresh from a new foundation?"
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Apr 30, 2016 00:25
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Kai Tave posted:Warhammer Fantasy and 40K both featured edition changes which while they never outright squatted anyone's armies the way AoS did certainly upended things to a significant degree. Well, except squats.
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Apr 30, 2016 02:54
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grassy gnoll posted:Well, except squats. Well sure, but there were also other edition changes that didn't actually squat any factions but might as well have. Tyrannids are the big standout losers here but entire types of army got shot into space between editions even as the factions themselves remained playable. I recall that you used to be able to do various sorts of themed Chaos armies which then had their compatibility broken from one codex to the next. It's a fair point that GW is a bad and lovely company that shouldn't have done this, but comparisons between that or other games and Age of Sigmar fall short because, as moths pointed out rather aptly, Age of Sigmar isn't a new edition, it's a straight-up culling in a way that no new edition of D&D, 40K, whatever has ever been. I'm not entirely sure if there is another situation comparable to Age of Sigmar in traditional gaming. The old World of Darkness/new World of Darkness transition qualifies maybe? Even there I feel that the comparison is a disservice even though the oWoD literally had its own End Times because at least the nWoD is a reboot from scratch instead of parading around in the corpse of the oWoD as a constant reminder that, oh yeah, all that poo poo you were invested in was all leading up to Sigmarines and Squareass Bloodbleeders forever. Age of Sigmar is the Highlander 2 of tabletop gaming.
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Apr 30, 2016 03:02
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Why didn't we get edition wars with the number of revisions Call of Cthulhu has done to itself, though? You've got standard arrays and Advantage/Disadvantage with 7th Edition and it didn't seem to light fires under anyone's rear end.Lurks With Wolves posted:(Also, I get what you mean about launch 4e not allowing nearly the same range of characters 3.5 did at the end of it's lifetime, but that's a problem with D&D's business model as much as anything. The supplement treadmill means it's physically impossibly for them to update everything at once, so they have to pick a slice of everything to turn into the new core of D&D.) It's similar to what developers like Paradox and Firaxis face in the video game space with DLC and expansion content: if and when you make a Crusader Kings III, it's probably not going to have playable Muslims in it from the get-go, but then you're also going to get a slice of the fanbase that's going to say "those loving bastards could have included Muslims in the initial release, they're just holding out on us because they want to make more money!" And we know that this happens because that was EXACTLY what happened with 4e releasing without Barbarians in the first PHB, or when Civilization 5 released without religion.
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Apr 30, 2016 03:22
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Let's be fair to Civ 5. No religion wasn't even in the top 20 biggest problems with Civ 5s release. It did turn into a great game 2 expansions later
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Apr 30, 2016 03:28
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Speaking of Call of Cthulhu and not edition wars, Geek & Sundry have an article about pretty much every drat thing that went wrong with the Call of Cthulhu kickstarts and how Chaosium almost went out of business. Unsurprisingly, a large part of the problem was shipping and stretch goals.quote:The problems began with the Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter. The previous management only charged international backers $20 to ship a ten pound game. The actual cost of shipping was vastly higher, sometimes as much as $150 for backers in Japan. Meints said that this Kickstarter alone likely lost Chaosium $170,000. When Greg Stafford took over the company, there were still a number of backers who had yet to receive their products. quote:Meints estimates that by the time all the backer rewards are shipped, they will have spent more than $100,000 on shipping alone.
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Apr 30, 2016 03:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:Why didn't we get edition wars with the number of revisions Call of Cthulhu has done to itself, though? You've got standard arrays and Advantage/Disadvantage with 7th Edition and it didn't seem to light fires under anyone's rear end. I could be wrong as I've never been a Call of Cthulhu fan at all but I was under the impression that CoC actually did follow the format of "mostly the same game with gradual, incremental changes over a period of decades" which is the exception rather than the rule as far as TRPGs go. Like yeah, it has woah poo poo seven editions but at the same time none of those editions have ever really introduced anything so dramatic and "compatibility breaking" that it's caused any sort of major rumpus. Hasn't this on occasion been a criticism of CoC, that it's basically the equivalent of buying the latest revision of a college textbook with some minor changes just to stay current? edit; holy poo poo, from 1992 to 2001 Chaosium sold incrementally revised versions of 5th Edition CoC. That is they sold 5th Edition, then 5.1 Edition, then 5.1.1 Edition, all the way to 5.6.1 Edition. Jesus. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Apr 30, 2016 |
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Apr 30, 2016 03:51
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Terrible Opinions posted:It's possible but the big centerpiece models even were only 15 bucks, and the last set was all non-random sales. The game going under due to poor sales would make enough sense, but a persistent rumor is that a part of the Tim Burton movie deal stipulated no new sets to make sure the movie was still "current" to the game when it came out. Then the movie never loving came out. Actually.. http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2016/04/28/bidding-war-erupts-over-monsterpocalypse-film-adaptation-from-evil-dead-helmer/
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Apr 30, 2016 04:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:Why didn't we get edition wars with the number of revisions Call of Cthulhu has done to itself, though? You've got standard arrays and Advantage/Disadvantage with 7th Edition and it didn't seem to light fires under anyone's rear end. Before that, changes were incredibly gradual.
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Apr 30, 2016 04:30
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What did 7E Call of Cthulhu change, is there a summary somewhere? Now I'm curious.
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Apr 30, 2016 04:30
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Yog-Sothoth.com, the premiere fan news/discussion site for Call of Cthulhu, had to strictly ban all edition discussion when the D20 version was released and for several years afterwards. D20 CoC vs.BRP CoC nearly burned that entire forum to the ground. So it's not like CoC has been entirely free of edition warring... But for the most part, most editions of BRP CoC were just reprints with errata and tweaks applied and additional material from scenarios and supplements (additional spells, monsters, magic items, etc.) folded in, and some editions would get a graphic overhaul. Most importantly, scenarios from any edition could be played with any edition of the rules. You could run 1982's Shadows of Yog Sothoth with 2005's sixth edition rulebook, or the scenarios from 2012's Terror From The Skies with the original box rule set.
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Apr 30, 2016 04:53
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One of my favorite RPGnet posters of all time was AmericanBadass, whose balls-out enthusiasm for Call of Cthulhu d20 caused some people to have meltdowns.
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Apr 30, 2016 05:02
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Kai Tave posted:One of my favorite RPGnet posters of all time was AmericanBadass, whose balls-out enthusiasm for Call of Cthulhu d20 caused some people to have meltdowns.
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Apr 30, 2016 05:14
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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh, man there's a name I haven't heard in ages. Didn't he flame out himself? I don't think so, I believe he simply faded away never to be heard from again.
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Apr 30, 2016 05:16
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Terrible Opinions posted:Not gonna lie the OGL was loving great. It would have been fantastic for 4th edition to have had one too so we wouldn't have been hosed by Merls. Hell if a 4th edition OGL had existed a bunch of the people laid off from WotC could have just made Pathfinderized 4th edition. 1 the ogl is the gaming equivilant to a tire fire and 2 they really could because guess game mechanics can't be copywritten and just about everything you need to make 4e is already under the 3e ogl if someone wanted to make a true to life bastardized 4e i doubt wizards could stop them. also i love how everyone acts like 3.5 to 4e is some big groundbreaking shift but it isn't all they did was try to make the math line up and give everyone abilities 4e is basically the same as 3e just with a nicer coat of paint.
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Apr 30, 2016 05:33
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Elfgames posted:1 the ogl is the gaming equivilant to a tire fire and 2 they really could because guess game mechanics can't be copywritten and just about everything you need to make 4e is already under the 3e ogl if someone wanted to make a true to life bastardized 4e i doubt wizards could stop them. The thing is, you're probably legally in the right, and legally the OGL isn't even necessary. But nobody has the money to fight a lawsuit from Wizards, so any C&D they issue is going to be followed even if it wouldn't hold up in court.
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Apr 30, 2016 05:58
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True20 already converts Saving Throws into Defenses (insofar that itself was a 3.5e UA variant rule), and you already have the Move-Standard-Swift actions as the equivalent of Move-Standard-Minor actions, and we've seen games like FantasyCraft muck around with what actually triggers OAs, and 5e itself can define a Short Rest as 5 minutes and an ability as only being reusable once every Short Rest, and so on and so forth, so yeah, it should be possible to make "not-4e within the OGL" if you had enough time and effort. It'd be wordy as gently caress if you tried to describe these abilities the way 3.5e/Pathfinder does it*, but it should be possible. * there's also something to be said about differentiating 3.5e/Pathfinder's "writing style" with 5e's "naturalistic" writing style. 3.x wrote out rules in full paragraphs, but it was still firmly ensconced in mechanics and were generally structured to be mostly bulletproof.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:02
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Maxwell Lord posted:The thing is, you're probably legally in the right, and legally the OGL isn't even necessary. But nobody has the money to fight a lawsuit from Wizards, so any C&D they issue is going to be followed even if it wouldn't hold up in court. but the ogl does exist and if pathfinder hasn't been sued neither will you.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:True20 already converts Saving Throws into Defenses (insofar that itself was a 3.5e UA variant rule), and you already have the Move-Standard-Swift actions as the equivalent of Move-Standard-Minor actions, and we've seen games like FantasyCraft muck around with what actually triggers OAs, and 5e itself can define a Short Rest as 5 minutes and an ability as only being reusable once every Short Rest, and so on and so forth, so yeah, it should be possible to make "not-4e within the OGL" if you had enough time and effort. Well there's also the boatload of status effects that aren't the same as 3.5/SRD status effects, and in general the problem is 4e is written in a concise technical fashion that's hard to reword without losing some clarity.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:07
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Maxwell Lord posted:The thing is, you're probably legally in the right, and legally the OGL isn't even necessary. But nobody has the money to fight a lawsuit from Wizards, so any C&D they issue is going to be followed even if it wouldn't hold up in court. Yeah, the thing about the OGL as an abstract concept is it formally and with a degree of legal protection really introduced to people the idea of "write a game using someone else's system, you don't even need to file the serial numbers off," as well as I think inspiring other game designers to encourage fans and other designers to borrow their systems for their own use...remember that while at one point the OGL was pretty much synonymous with 3E D&D these days there are a number of systems released under open game licensing or Creative Commons as a matter of course. It's not a stretch to suggest that the establishment of the OGL was an integral part of paving the way for things like Eclipse Phase going full Creative Commons or FATE being an OGL thing. In terms of what the OGL did for WotC and D&D specifically, I also don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the OGL was basically a net negative in that regard. I've said it before but Ryan Dancey sold WotC on the idea of the OGL/d20 license business being a way for WotC to dominate the RPG market forever and for all time with WotC sitting atop a pyramid of loyal d20 content creators churning out niche supplements while everyone came to WotC for the necessary core rules and everyone converted to d20 forever amen. And literally none of that happened. Instead the d20 third-party craze led to the elfgame equivalent of a bubble-and-burst which had deleterious effects on retailers many of which went out of business or found themselves weighed down by shelves full of d20 shovelware they couldn't push and WotC gave the keys to their market away to the first person savvy enough to capitalize on that. Here's the thing, I don't think a 4E OGL would have accomplished as much because the 3E bubble burned a lot of people out on third-party cash-in D&D stuff, and also because creating new quality 4E material is not easy, and by the point that 4E came around enough people had honed their sense of D&D-ese to parse the difference between something hastily slapped together in an afternoon and something that was actually tested and tuned and in-line with existing material. Probably an entire college thesis worth of breakdowns and analysis of 3E D&D's systems existed by that point which anyone more than casually involved in roleplaying was probably at least vaguely aware of whether they'd gone looking for it or not, and it also didn't help would-be content producers that 4E's mechanics and systems were in several respects much more transparent than 3E's had been. So while a 4E OGL might be a neat thing nowadays, at the time I don't think the market was in a real receptive mood for another wave of third-party material so soon after the last one had come and gone.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:13
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Terrible Opinions posted:Not gonna lie the OGL was loving great. (..) Mors Rattus posted:The OGL was terrible - it flooded the market with lovely d20 stuff and drowned out a ton of other systems for nearly a decade. We got a glut of awful stuff, a few shining stars and the chance for, yes, Pathfinder to exist. Kai Tave posted:Here's the thing, I don't think a 4E OGL would have accomplished as much because the 3E bubble burned a lot of people out on third-party cash-in D&D stuff, and also because creating new quality 4E material is not easy, That reason is because Mearls is a lazy hack.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:21
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Most infamously I remember Frank Trollman declaring 4E being piss-easy to design for and creating some Eldritch Hellknight class or something that was so laughably bad that it forced him to backpedal hilariously and state that it was all a ~clever
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Apr 30, 2016 06:28
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FMguru posted:Yog-Sothoth.com, the premiere fan news/discussion site for Call of Cthulhu, had to strictly ban all edition discussion when the D20 version was released and for several years afterwards. D20 CoC vs.BRP CoC nearly burned that entire forum to the ground. So it's not like CoC has been entirely free of edition warring... Haha, D20 CoC was the very first game I ever GMd. I was really drat confused when I went to Yog-Sothoth and saw the utter hatred so many had for it. I just liked the pretty art and that I could read the book fairly quickly.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:30
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Asimo posted:Beyond being an unmitigated disaster for Wizards (by way of having their IP literally stolen)
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Apr 30, 2016 06:44
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Apr 30, 2016 08:23
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