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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... The problem with this is DND doesn't have a competitive scene and it centers purely around smaller groups unlike say warhammer (local shops instead from what I have seen) so the players are more than willing to look over the new stuff and say no thank you while going back to playing their older edition with no outside force telling them otherwise. I know a shocking number of grogs who still play/run Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and have recruited younger people to play with them as well. The OGL just made things even easier for that demographic to stay away from the new stuff especially when they were no longer the target market for it. I do think that raises an interesting question if the product was still marketed towards them but the rules changed would they have had as much of a problem with it?
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Apr 30, 2016 08:24
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"Stealing" doesn't necessarily mean "illegally stealing" in regards to the OGL, and it's arguable that convincing Wizards to put D20 up for grabs was stage one in stealing D&D. One thing 7th edition Call of Cthulhu really got right was marking its more controversial changes as optional rules. It deflated a lot of vitriol, and didn't really require any substantial concessions on Chaosium's part.
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Apr 30, 2016 08:25
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Let's repeat it a few more times because I guess it hasn't sunk in: game rules are literally not intellectual property. The D20 OGL defined conditions of attribution and non-modification of core mechanics which, if followed, permitted anyone to publish D20 content and - and this is the key piece - use the D20 trademark and logo. The trademark and logo were the intellectual property. They added value to third party products by indicating their (supposed) "compatibility" with the system. This gave third party products an imprimatur of legitimacy and value. The generally poor quality of the bulk of those (hundreds of) products instead dragged down the value of the trademark. That was Wizard's mistake... they created conditions where they allowed others to get a free ride on their brand, but with no mechanisms for controlling quality, and as a consequence their customers got burned. Paizo did not steal anything, legally or ethically. In fact what they did was salvage a ruined brand that Wizards was forced to abandon because it was so badly tainted by failure.
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Apr 30, 2016 08:40
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Leperflesh posted:Let's repeat it a few more times because I guess it hasn't sunk in: game rules are literally not intellectual property. That being factually true didn't stop people from fearing that if they made a literal 1-1 knockoff of some existing game's rules that they would be mired in C&D's/lawsuits regardless regardless of whether the company issuing the legal noise had a leg to stand on. The Chapterhouse debacle isn't a precise analogue to the situation of someone copying game rules because the argument had more to do with IP trademarks and whether someone was permitted to create aftermarket modifications for someone else's stuff, but how GW behaved is precisely what people have traditionally been concerned by with regards to "I'm going to make a game called Grungeons and Gragons that is literally every rule from Dungeons & Dragons copy/pasted word for word," that TSR or WotC or whoever would throw their legal weight around and hope that the other party, not wanting to deal with the hassle or financial considerations of contesting this regardless of how in the right they were would simply capitulate. Like, I'm pretty sure that a judge would probably declare someone's nonprofit homebrew conversion of Rifts stuff to HERO or GURPS or Teenagers From Outer Space to fall under Fair Use, but this didn't stop Kevin Sembieda from essentially bullying people posting such things online with threats of legal action until they took them down. And it's worth noting that the Chapterhouse suit really only went where it did (i.e. a disastrous backfire for Games Workshop resulting in schadenfreude so thick you have to eat it in tiny slices like those flourless chocolate cakes) because someone was willing to step up and defend Chapterhouse pro bono and even then the suit basically cost the Chapterhouse guy(s) a fair chunk of money if I recall correctly. Whether you call it a magic feather or a security blanket or whatever, the OGL served to "legitimize" the idea of taking someone else's game mechanics and using them for your own work, even outside of the specific OGL framework, and I suspect that it had this effect on both sides of the large press/indie publisher spectrum, whether or not it was necessary for people to do so in the first place. quote:The generally poor quality of the bulk of those (hundreds of) products instead dragged down the value of the trademark. That was Wizard's mistake... they created conditions where they allowed others to get a free ride on their brand, but with no mechanisms for controlling quality, and as a consequence their customers got burned. This is correct (see the d20 shovelware boom and bust). quote:Paizo did not steal anything, legally or ethically. In fact what they did was salvage a ruined brand that Wizards was forced to abandon because it was so badly tainted by failure. This I'm less willing to call correct. Whatever my gripes with 3E, I think it's kind of spurious to say it was a "ruined brand" badly tainted by failure. It's possible I don't understand what exactly you're driving at though. My own issue with Paizo isn't on legal or ethical grounds, I stand by my assessment of Lisa Stevens as a shrewd businesswoman who saw a golden opportunity and pounced on it. What I look askance at is the way that Paizo basically churned the ongoing edition war as a form of marketing. Was it effective? Seems to have been. Do I find it kind of lovely? Yeah, kind of.
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Apr 30, 2016 09:12
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Kurieg posted:Actually.. This is something that I do not get. Why go through all this trouble? Are the designs from Monsterpocalypse so good that it's worth starting a bidding war over and not just make your own alien invaders, sea monsters and giant bugs? Is there a Monsterpocalypse fandom that they are trying to court?
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Apr 30, 2016 09:28
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Yeah I find that lovely too, in the same way as any company that chooses to compete by appealing to an audience's worst impulses and attributes. I'm not a Paizo fan. My main point was that if Paizo picked up a market share, it wasn't via theft: it was a market share that Wizards quite literally gave away. The brand that was ruined was D20, not Dungens & Dragons. The two were often conflated during the period (and that was part of Wizards' error) but they are distinct trademarks covering different content. D20 covered a core subset of the game mechanics, while D&D covers concepts, settings, artwork, fluff, and certain non-core mechanics (ostensibly... but likely not enforceable in a court). The chilling effect of legal threat - actual or, quite often, simply anticipated - is real, I won't deny that, but I don't think it's atually the biggest obstacle. Customers tend to reject products they percieve as knockoffs or fakes, especially when the brand has inspired a lot of loyalty, and the D&D certainly has plenty of that. It's one thing to make and sell third-party supplements, with or without official approval, but a straight-up copy... presumably at a discount... tends to inspire the wrath of the customers unless the original has somehow been "lost." Such as, say the company going out of business, or discontinuing a product.
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Apr 30, 2016 09:43
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Leperflesh posted:The chilling effect of legal threat - actual or, quite often, simply anticipated - is real, I won't deny that, but I don't think it's atually the biggest obstacle. Customers tend to reject products they percieve as knockoffs or fakes, especially when the brand has inspired a lot of loyalty, and the D&D certainly has plenty of that. It's one thing to make and sell third-party supplements, with or without official approval, but a straight-up copy... presumably at a discount... tends to inspire the wrath of the customers unless the original has somehow been "lost." Yeah I didn't address the part of your post where you talk about how the d20 System License/OGL lent third parties legitimacy but I actually agree 100% with what you said there as well, being able to declare your third-party glurge Official D&D Compatible Glurge was absolutely a huge factor in the boom (and consequent bust) that occurred. And that allure of legitimacy has carried forward past the original conflation of the d20 OGL era, now we've got multiple systems that are open or semi-open operating as "brands" under which a variety of creators are invited to use them and emblazon their game with that brand (Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse, Gumshoe, 13th Age, and yes, Pathfinder). It's also worth noting that the OGL/SRD is what spurred the existence of the Old School Revolution/Renaissance/Whatever The R Stands For This Week as well, even though the games they're emulating had been "lost" for a lot longer than 3E was. Wikipedia attributes this to the OGL and SRD allowing "the use of much of the proprietary terminology of D&D that might otherwise collectively constitute a copyright infringement," though I'm not sure how accurate that statement really is.
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Apr 30, 2016 09:54
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People keep talking up how insane and amazing it is that WotC ever agreed to the OSL and all that jazz, but if you just glance at his career, it becomes incredibly obvious that it had less to do with WotC, and more to do with Ryan Dancey apparently minmaxing the gently caress out of himself and putting every point possible into selling himself and his ideas (and putting absolutely nothing into actually having worthwhile ideas or making those plans a reality). The main has managed to drift from one outstanding failure to the next, destroying everything he touches, and yet still got hired again and again. And by people who overwhelmingly should've known better, at that!
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Apr 30, 2016 11:13
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It allowed more-or-less free use of D&D's second-tier iconic elements. So you could use goblins and dragons and bugbears, but had to rename your begazers, mind-scrapers, and deceptive beasts. As for "Pathfinder did nothing wrong," am I wrongly remembering that Ryan Dancey had been behind Wizards' dropping the ball and then profiting from Paizo's run with it?
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Apr 30, 2016 11:33
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FMguru posted: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. Two other things about Call of Cthulhu. First, there wasn't much mechanical investment in the system by players, and what I mean that is that characters are designed to be quick and simple and mechanically (if not emotionally) disposable. There are no books of extra bits and bops to attach to your character - or no major ones anyway - and there's not much reason to feel invested in the system other than feels. Second, the amount of players playing Call of Cthulhu is minuscule compared to D&D, and it has a cultural footprint much larger than its actual play base - like, I'd guesstimate that there are like 1/30th the players playing CoC compared to D&D. Leperflesh posted:Paizo did not steal anything, legally or ethically. In fact what they did was salvage a ruined brand that Wizards was forced to abandon because it was so badly tainted by failure. Still, I think it's something that can be absolutely criticized. It's like the asset flips on Steam or the copy-paste games on iOS; they may not be legally culpable but there's a creative bankruptcy about the whole thing. Legality is not the be-all end-all of ethics. In addition, it's not like the d20 license was cooked up by 3e's creative team, who now stand to see their work copied ad infinitum without any recompense, all of which were, of course, fired unceremoniously by the folks they were sold off to (if they didn't quit on their own). It's not like Baker, Tweet, or Williams have seen a check that I'm aware of from Paizo. At least WotC had the decency to hand Gygax and Arneson overdue royalties before 3e came out, though of course they were fat on Magic money , so their situation was a little different. And certainly, the 3e creators were work-for-hire and don't have much of a leg to stand on if they wanted to protest. But ultimately, the whole situation isn't quite so clean to me, and while I don't think that Paizo are history's worst monsters by any stretch, but there's nothing particularly laudable about what they did, either. They may not be thieves, but I'm reminded of the term "grabbers" used by Jack Kirby. Marvel was legally entitled to make millions from his old work without offering credit or money; but that didn't make it right for Marvel to "grab" it. Not thieves, of course. But there was nothing particularly laudable about their actions. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Apr 30, 2016 |
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Apr 30, 2016 11:57
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ProfessorCirno posted:The man has managed to drift from one outstanding failure to the next, destroying everything he touches, and yet still got hired again and again. And by people who overwhelmingly should've known better, at that! Speaking of which: Pathfinder Online. How's Goblinworks doing these days? *checks around* Their last update was two months ago (feb 29), when they said: "The process to transfer Pathfinder Online to a new developer is progressing nicely, but our own deadline of March 1st for the transfer to happen has been pushed for a month or two." So... you didn't meet your deadline then, and it looks like you didn't meet the deadline today either. So how's this working out for you guys?
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Apr 30, 2016 12:15
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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, 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. I have to agree with this. We'd like a 4e OGL by now because we know that 5e isn't very good and we'd rather try to continue developing the previous ruleset with things like consolidated errata and built-in inherent bonuses and Death to Feats and Death to Ability Scores, but from what I've seen of third-party 4e supplements, it was rather difficult to develop anything outside of adventures (and even those were still hit-and-miss, such as the War of the Burning Sky 4e version not really understanding Minions)
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Apr 30, 2016 16:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:I have to agree with this. We'd like a 4e OGL by now because we know that 5e isn't very good and we'd rather try to continue developing the previous ruleset with things like consolidated errata and built-in inherent bonuses and Death to Feats and Death to Ability Scores, but from what I've seen of third-party 4e supplements, it was rather difficult to develop anything outside of adventures (and even those were still hit-and-miss, such as the War of the Burning Sky 4e version not really understanding Minions) This line of discussion reminds of something which is that looking back on it now, there was a distinct difference in attitude towards the lack of an OGL for 4E between people inclined to dislike 4E and people who did like it. There was a fair bit of complaining and anger that 4E had no OGL but this mainly seemed to come from its detractors, that is to say that people who weren't fans of it often held the lack of an OGL up as one reason why they didn't like it among other things. Meanwhile, at least in the elfgaming circles I was keeping at the time (SA wasn't one of them so idk what the reaction was like here), among 4E fans the lack of an OGL was seen as a good thing, an attitude which was probably bolstered by the fact that despite 4E's numerous flaws of its own (bad adventures, wonky monster math, skill challenges, etc) that a lot of the WotC-created player facing content was actually really loving good compared to its equivalent 3E WotC-created supplemental material. I'm talking stuff like Martial Power et al and things like the PHB2. To give an example specific to one of JerryLee's points, when 4E launched it lacked a lot of the stuff up-front that 3E had accumulated by that point, among other things Bards and Barbarians and Sorcerers and Monks weren't in the PHB. To 4E's detractors this was seen as one of many parts of 4E's horrible betrayal and even cautiously optimistic early adopters were wondering when they'd be seeing that stuff and what it would be like (as hard as it is to envision given the glut of material for it now, one early criticism of 4E was that there wasn't enough stuff. Only four at-wills per class! Boring!). Then the PHB2 came out and reintroduced Bards, Barbarians, Sorcerers, Druids, and brought with it a collection of new classes like the Avenger and Warden and the PHB2 was and still is widely considered among 4E fans to be one of the best releases for the line in terms of overall quality...Bards are amazing, Barbarians and Sorcerers were given interesting mechanical identities, the new classes swiftly became evocative fan-favorites, oh and gnomes were back too...and at that point you could track a shift in attitude. All at once in addition to all the people mad that WotC had first overlooked X race or class and now were mad that WotC was forcing you to buy a new book to get X race or class, there was now a growing contingent that was actually glad that WotC was adopting a "we'll wait to introduce things until we get them right" approach. And the 4E design team managed to keep that up for a while. I mean, 4E didn't get a Monk until the PHB3, one of the later releases in the line, but the prevailing attitude among 4E fans wasn't "how dare WotC those loving assholes!" but "oh man, the Bard was so awesome, those rules for arcane familiars they introduced in Arcane Power were sweet, I love what they did with Brawler Fighters, I hope the Monk is just as rad." And it was, even if the PHB3 on the whole was a weaker entry and the beginning of a steady decline in quality for 4E. All of this ties into the dichotomy between fans and detractors and the lack of a 4E OGL at the time, which was that among people who were extremely satisfied with official 4E material often not only didn't care about an OGL but found the lack of one to be an agreeable tradeoff so long as official material continued to be quality. Another contributing factor to this attitude was the 4E digital character builder which was far from a perfect piece of software but did a reasonable job of consolidating all the official 4E crunch into a single easily usable tool. Any third-party material, no matter how good it might have been, and to a lot of people at the time "third-party D&D supplements" weren't exactly a watchword for quality, wouldn't have been incorporated into the character builder (this was before the CBLoader thing made adding additional material to the character builder possible on the fan side of things) and so this also contributed to an overall attitude that a 4E OGL wasn't only unnecessary but undesirable. That a lot of 4E homebrew people turned out in the early days was visibly garbage on even a casual glance only reinforced this attitude, I imagine.
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Apr 30, 2016 16:59
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So what I am getting out of this argument is 4e is like Apple where you give up a lot of control and freedom in exchange for more consistent quality and are paying more of a premium for it (ignore itunes.)
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Apr 30, 2016 18:48
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Kai Tave posted:To give an example specific to one of JerryLee's points, when 4E launched it lacked a lot of the stuff up-front that 3E had accumulated by that point, among other things Bards and Barbarians and Sorcerers and Monks weren't in the PHB. To 4E's detractors this was seen as one of many parts of 4E's horrible betrayal and even cautiously optimistic early adopters were wondering when they'd be seeing that stuff and what it would be like (as hard as it is to envision given the glut of material for it now, one early criticism of 4E was that there wasn't enough stuff. Only four at-wills per class! Boring!). Then the PHB2 came out and reintroduced Bards, Barbarians, Sorcerers, Druids, and brought with it a collection of new classes like the Avenger and Warden and the PHB2 was and still is widely considered among 4E fans to be one of the best releases for the line in terms of overall quality...Bards are amazing, Barbarians and Sorcerers were given interesting mechanical identities, the new classes swiftly became evocative fan-favorites, oh and gnomes were back too...and at that point you could track a shift in attitude. All at once in addition to all the people mad that WotC had first overlooked X race or class and now were mad that WotC was forcing you to buy a new book to get X race or class, there was now a growing contingent that was actually glad that WotC was adopting a "we'll wait to introduce things until we get them right" approach. That delay is is a decent example of what I meant, yeah. The thing is that, I guess unlike you and the glad contingent to which you refer, I'm not willing to take a charitable view of the delay in porting everything over. You seem to think it was because they just needed that dang long to figure out how to get everything right; I tend to have the more cynical default hypothesis that it's because they think they can make more money by stringing everything out. With apologies, let me once again compare apples to oranges in the search for understanding of fruit: when Games Workshop spaces its releases out over months and years, to the extent that they take hilariously long to update some things compared to others and, for practical purposes, never update some things at all, would you argue that it's because they're getting everything right? Clearly not, because the rules are usually still suboptimal (to put it kindly) from the point of view of good game design. So there must be a different or at least an additional incentive to space out releases, and it's probably a financial one: for whatever reason, nerdgame consumers buy more readily if they're kept half-starved and on a steady drip than if they're allowed to select what they want from the very beginning. The downside of this is that, as GW and (as I've been arguing) WOTC are both finding out, nerdgame consumers aren't nearly as much of a captive audience as they used to be. (An aside: I went back and looked up the release date for these respective books, since it's been so long that I couldn't remember. PHB released in June 2008, PHB2 released in March 2009. That, to me, is a heck of a time to wait for a substantial dose of feature-completeness, especially since it's perceived as less of a proper expansion and more of a rung on the climb to just getting back where you were before WOTC opened the trapdoor underneath you.) So now back to the post you made at me a while back, which I didn't mean to ignore. To paraphrase what I think your point was, what does a backwards-compatible 4E even look like? Well, the easy (and true as far as it goes) answer is that, frankly, it isn't my job to figure it out, since I'm not the one whose company is going to be selling thousands of copies of the resulting book. But if we assume, as you do, that it is ultimately impossible to make D&D a workable game by simply incrementally improving and replacing things while keeping everything mutually comprehensible with the previous material-- or at least making it so that the transformations necessary in order to update a concept are clearly defined and straightforward in their application, like a patch to bring everything up to the latest version-- then I would say that at the very least the publisher should make updates/errata to previous content available immediately and for free, like the more ethical wargames manufacturers that we've been talking about. They don't piss us off by completely deprecating the past 5 or 10 or whatever years of investment, and in return they have a pretty good shot at us smoothly continuing to buy products going forward. Mind you, I realize that I'm living in rainbow fantasy land here, but this whole discussion started out with me saying that WOTC/D&D could, with a time machine, have learned something from GW and AoS about not driving your own long-term customers out of their brand loyalty, or letting your competitors swoop in and eat your entire lunch. I don't think I said anything about the likelihood of either of these two industry titans swallowing their pride long enough to do that. If I did, I probably misspoke.
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Apr 30, 2016 18:48
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Aaod posted:So what I am getting out of this argument is 4e is like Apple where you give up a lot of control and freedom in exchange for more consistent quality and are paying more of a premium for it (ignore itunes.) No.
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Apr 30, 2016 18:59
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JerryLee posted:That delay is is a decent example of what I meant, yeah. The thing is that, I guess unlike you and the glad contingent to which you refer, I'm not willing to take a charitable view of the delay in porting everything over. You seem to think it was because they just needed that dang long to figure out how to get everything right; I tend to have the more cynical default hypothesis that it's because they think they can make more money by stringing everything out. Well the thing is that a lot of people felt this way about it at first and "let's see if we can play this into more sales of future books" was almost assuredly part of it but, at the same time, people didn't come on board with the "wait to get it right" idea until WotC demonstrated that the subsequent material was actually worth waiting for, do you get me? People didn't start out going "oh sweet, Bards aren't in the PHB," it was only after Bards came out later and they were super rad and well designed that things fully shifted over into that direction. The party line from WotC was "we wanted to wait to get it right" which could have been a hot load of horseshit and plenty of people suspected it was, but then they actually produced good content and suddenly people were willing to embrace that. This would be like if in some hypothetical alternate universe Games Workshop still spaced out its releases but when they came out they were actually good and well-balanced and added to the game instead of being a bunch of incredibly awful garbage that sucks. Also the wait between PHB1 and PHB2 is perhaps more impressive when you consider the amount of work that has to go into eight entirely new 4E classes from levels 1-30. With all due respect, given that you maybe aren't very familiar with 4E, that is a lot of loving work to do and do well and the fact that they did it and did it well is legitimately impressive. Also a fundamental difference between out perspectives here is that you look at the PHB/PHB2 split in 4E to be WotC selling a game that's "feature incomplete" whereas I don't. Monks weren't always a core D&D class, 3E added that. Assassins and Illusionsis used to be "core classes" and stopped being so. My perspective is that "D&D PHB class selection isn't a thing that's set in stone." Again, you're couching things in terms of betrayal, trapdoors being opened beneath you, etc, and I just don't see it that way, sorry. To use another tabletop miniatures game as an example, you can be 100% sure that Fantasy Flight's component distribution model for X-Wing is designed to maximize their profits. You want the Emperor Palpatine crew card and the sweet upgrades for the TIE Advanced? Better be read to buy an expensive Imperial Raider. You want Autothrusters for your Interceptors or A-Wings? That only comes in the Starviper. It's absolutely unquestionable that this is set up this way to make FFG more money than they'd get simply by selling little upgrade card packs on their own, however the fact that these upgrades do meaningfully improve the game (for the most part) means that X-Wing players will largely give it a pass and even embrace the fact that underperforming ships will eventually get a new upgrade set that makes them good. It's happening right now with the Imperial Veterans pack, a two-ship pack of two of the least played Imperial fighters in the game. Is it a naked money-grab? You could certainly look at it that way, they get to reuse the molds and sell people a $30+ dollar expac in the process. Are people excited about it? Absolutely. And it stands to actually improve the overall robustness of the game since one of X-Wing's favorable points is that the meta isn't ossified and centered around one or two must-have netlists and everything else is dross. JerryLee posted:So now back to the post you made at me a while back, which I didn't mean to ignore. To paraphrase what I think your point was, what does a backwards-compatible 4E even look like? Well, the easy (and true as far as it goes) answer is that, frankly, it isn't my job to figure it out, since I'm not the one whose company is going to be selling thousands of copies of the resulting book. But if we assume, as you do, that it is ultimately impossible to make D&D a workable game by simply incrementally improving and replacing things while keeping everything mutually comprehensible with the previous material-- or at least making it so that the transformations necessary in order to update a concept are clearly defined and straightforward in their application, like a patch to bring everything up to the latest version-- then I would say that at the very least the publisher should make updates/errata to previous content available immediately and for free, like the more ethical wargames manufacturers that we've been talking about. They don't piss us off by completely deprecating the past 5 or 10 or whatever years of investment, and in return they have a pretty good shot at us smoothly continuing to buy products going forward. I don't think it's actually very reasonable to expect a game publisher that wants to create a new iteration of a game with a new-ish foundation instead of simply following the Call of Cthulhu pattern of 4.1.3.4.5.9 Edition increments to have to simultaneously produce what amounts to an interim edition that encapsulates however many years of dozens of sourcebooks worth of stuff up-front, I don't think it's fair or productive to tell a publisher "sorry but you have to be held hostage to everything you've ever made before regardless of the fact that it's showing its seams pretty badly and there's no good way to fix it with a simple patch." I absolutely don't dispute that Pathfinder exists and is successful and therefore there's a hot market of 3.X fans even to this day, but I also think it's pretty telling that nothing Pathfinder has ever done has actually addressed any of the fundamental flaws with 3E as a game and Paizo seems wholly uninterested in actually doing so. Pathfinder is great if your ultimate goal is "I never want to have to live in a world where 3E D&D isn't constantly supported," but it's not super great if your goal is "I wish 3E D&D was getting patched and improved and made into an overall better game." I remain unsure how WotC could have squared these incompatible goals unless the idea is that they could work their way to something like 4E over a further 10 year period.
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Apr 30, 2016 19:25
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The delay in releasing material for bards and gnomes could—and probably should—be chalked up to space constraints more than anything else.JerryLee posted:To paraphrase what I think your point was, what does a backwards-compatible 4E even look like? Well, the easy (and true as far as it goes) answer is that, frankly, it isn't my job to figure it out, since I'm not the one whose company is going to be selling thousands of copies of the resulting book. Your position appears to be that everyone should be obliged to support any given iteration of their material in perpetuity. It's not greed or laziness to not do that.
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Apr 30, 2016 19:42
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That Old Tree posted:The delay in releasing material for bards and gnomes could—and probably should—be chalked up to space constraints more than anything else. It's also worth noting that the delay was measured in months, and not years. If 5e was operating on 4e's timescale, There would be a 5e essentials book sometime in Late December '16/Early-January '17.
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Apr 30, 2016 19:46
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Also phone posting to add that D&D isn't a competitive wargame, is the thing. I agree that it's good and laudable of Privateer to make successive iterations of their competitive game "backwards compatible" but I don't necessarily think it's as necessary or even desirable for non competitive tabletop roleplaying games to have to follow that same ethos, or else we wind up in a situation where White Wolf is constantly beholden to the old World of Darkness instead of being able to reboot and start fresh for instance.
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Apr 30, 2016 19:52
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That Old Tree posted:The delay in releasing material for bards and gnomes could—and probably should—be chalked up to space constraints more than anything else.
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Apr 30, 2016 20:07
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That Old Tree posted:Your position appears to be that everyone should be obliged to support any given iteration of their material in perpetuity. It's not greed or laziness to not do that. I think that "any given iteration" is the ad absurdum version that I agree it's unreasonable to support at some point. I wouldn't pillory them for not incorporating the equivalent of some obscure mechanic from D&D circa 1974, or even 1990. But their own material that they were actively maintaining and supporting at the time 4E was being developed? I kinda think it's reasonable to expect anything from that to carry over, at least if they're intending to also keep the loyalty that goes along with it. Kai Tave posted:To use another tabletop miniatures game as an example, you can be 100% sure that Fantasy Flight's component distribution model for X-Wing is designed to maximize their profits. You want the Emperor Palpatine crew card and the sweet upgrades for the TIE Advanced? Better be read to buy an expensive Imperial Raider. You want Autothrusters for your Interceptors or A-Wings? That only comes in the Starviper. It's absolutely unquestionable that this is set up this way to make FFG more money than they'd get simply by selling little upgrade card packs on their own, however the fact that these upgrades do meaningfully improve the game (for the most part) means that X-Wing players will largely give it a pass and even embrace the fact that underperforming ships will eventually get a new upgrade set that makes them good. It's happening right now with the Imperial Veterans pack, a two-ship pack of two of the least played Imperial fighters in the game. Is it a naked money-grab? You could certainly look at it that way, they get to reuse the molds and sell people a $30+ dollar expac in the process. Are people excited about it? Absolutely. And it stands to actually improve the overall robustness of the game since one of X-Wing's favorable points is that the meta isn't ossified and centered around one or two must-have netlists and everything else is dross. I take your point about greed generally, and obviously at some point we take or leave that greed on the publisher's terms. I'd say that buying that sort of X-wing packs is roughly analogous to buying a $30 book to get (legitimate) access to one or two feats or prestige classes that you care about. And obviously that was the sort of thing that I accepted over the course of the decade or so that I consumed D&D proper, just as X-Wing fans have for their game. But how would those X-Wing fans react if they were suddenly told "lol the entire concept of a TIE Advanced is now removed from the game, maybe in a year or two we'll bring it back for you to buy all over again"?
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Apr 30, 2016 20:29
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It'd make sense to consider the cynical angle if 4e classes were like 3e classes, where they were given some caster levels (or not, lol), a BAB growth table, and a handful of class features. Most classes just referenced the same spell list and sometimes if they were feeling generous would be given Spell-Like Abilities which, what do you know, still referenced the spell book. Classes and even races had a lot more work to do to publish them. There was no master list of spells to cross reference from every class, each one had a completely unique list of abilities, both for combat and non-combat purposes. That's a massive undertaking (and a much larger page count per class).
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Apr 30, 2016 20:44
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JerryLee posted:I think that "any given iteration" is the ad absurdum version that I agree it's unreasonable to support at some point. I wouldn't pillory them for not incorporating the equivalent of some obscure mechanic from D&D circa 1974, or even 1990. But their own material that they were actively maintaining and supporting at the time 4E was being developed? I kinda think it's reasonable to expect anything from that to carry over, at least if they're intending to also keep the loyalty that goes along with it. I mean this is figuratively a thing that's already happened. People buy X-Wing ships and discover that oh wait, the Syck is actually not very good. The TIE Advanced was a Wave 1 ship, it only recently got bumped up to full usefulness. What's the meaningful distinction there between that and the ship "disappearing" for the years it took to get patched? Your ultimate point here seems to boil down to "WotC done hosed up" which you and I both agree on, but where we disagree is what exactly that fuckup was. You say it's the change to 4E, where I think they hosed up is the OGL which allowed Paizo to sweep in and steal their lunch. Without that, I can only strongly suspect that the 3E to 4E transition would have followed the same pattern of most every other RPG edition transition out there, a furious period of complaining followed by a gradual and inevitable transition. The perpetuation of 3E beyond its period of official support is the exception in the TRPG hobby and not the rule. To once again use the White Wolf example, there was FURIOUS bitching over the nWoD, but without a World of Darkness equivalent to Paizo there to grab things and keep things spinning White Wolf could simply press ahead and wait for things to even out.
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Apr 30, 2016 20:45
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Countblanc posted:Classes and even races had a lot more work to do to publish them. There was no master list of spells to cross reference from every class, each one had a completely unique list of abilities, both for combat and non-combat purposes. That's a massive undertaking (and a much larger page count per class).
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Apr 30, 2016 20:55
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On top of that, each class had to have multiple options and potential builds, paragon paths, an epic destiny or two half the time...
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Apr 30, 2016 21:10
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Kai Tave posted:Without that, I can only strongly suspect that the 3E to 4E transition would have followed the same pattern of most every other RPG edition transition out there, a furious period of complaining followed by a gradual and inevitable transition. The perpetuation of 3E beyond its period of official support is the exception in the TRPG hobby and not the rule. To once again use the White Wolf example, there was FURIOUS bitching over the nWoD, but without a World of Darkness equivalent to Paizo there to grab things and keep things spinning White Wolf could simply press ahead and wait for things to even out. Doesn't always happen I would say half the people I see playing white wolf are playing nWOD and the other half are using the old version and that is being extremely generous to nWOD number of players. According to wikipedia that came out in 2004 that is 12 years of holding out that should have diminished more by now. Hell I think even the company realized they made a mistake given all the kickstarters for stuff like vampire 20th edition, lore of clans, dark ages vampire, etc etc etc that they have done. Yeah there is always going to be holdouts but sometimes the company splits the playerbase and it ruins things.
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Apr 30, 2016 21:12
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The 20th edition books half collectors items and half "Neat lore books that are nice to have". The Majority of White Wolf-ites play a mixture of old and new games, or primarily new games. The only major holdouts are the oMage players for much the same reason that people like 3.5 more than 4e. oMage let you do basically anything you could badger your ST into allowing.
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Apr 30, 2016 21:22
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Aaod posted:Doesn't always happen I would say half the people I see playing white wolf are playing nWOD and the other half are using the old version and that is being extremely generous to nWOD number of players. According to wikipedia that came out in 2004 that is 12 years of holding out that should have diminished more by now. Hell I think even the company realized they made a mistake given all the kickstarters for stuff like vampire 20th edition, lore of clans, dark ages vampire, etc etc etc that they have done. Yeah there is always going to be holdouts but sometimes the company splits the playerbase and it ruins things. There are still OD&D holdouts too, that doesn't really change the fact that more people are going to gravitate towards 5E than OD&D these days. OPP absolutely does not view the nWoD as a mistake, that's absurd and borne out by absolutely nothing.
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Apr 30, 2016 21:35
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Wait, why would OPP think nWoD/CofD was a mistake? Now, there will be new oWoD material coming out soon from Paradox, who care only about that one, but that's not the same thing at all.
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Apr 30, 2016 21:36
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One thing to remember as far as "but I only see people playing these old games..." goes is that the industry is by all accounts stagnating hard. There's a lot of 3.x holdouts and a lot of oWoD holdouts because nerds that grew up on that poo poo in the earlier internet days were, you know, nerds, and hated change, and largely took a salt and burn approach to anything new. Which in turn meant keeping new players out of the hobby. It wasn't entirely on purpose, but the vast amounts of negativity did a terrible job at convincing people to play the games the detractors wanted, and a great job of convincing others they wanted nothing to do with these games. In a hobby that already had issues recruiting new players! Not that the detractors had a problem with that - plenty of them didn't want new players anyways, and even without that all they cared about was the new game dying, even if it killed everything else. The average age of ttg players is going up every year. New blood just isn't getting in. So you're stuck with old players who cling to their security blanket games.
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Apr 30, 2016 21:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:They may not be thieves, but I'm reminded of the term "grabbers" used by Jack Kirby. Marvel was legally entitled to make millions from his old work without offering credit or money; but that didn't make it right for Marvel to "grab" it. Not thieves, of course. But there was nothing particularly laudable about their actions. Asimo posted:Yeah, that's basically it. The OGL really, really wasn't good. Beyond being an unmitigated disaster for Wizards (by way of having their IP literally stolen), it nearly killed the RPG market due to the absolute flood of horrible third-party supplements and games. There's hobby stores near me that still have a few shelves or boxes of d20 crap in a back corner because it didn't sell then and hasn't gotten any fresher since. It might have actually killed the hobby if the worst part of it didn't coincide with the rise of POD publishing and kickstartered projects. The handful of decent OGL releases are nice, I guess, but as much as I love Mutants & Masterminds and the like none of them really needed to be d20 games, and a lot of the actual genuinely good OGL games stripped away almost all of the D&Disms anyway. ProfessorCirno posted:The average age of ttg players is going up every year. New blood just isn't getting in. So you're stuck with old players who cling to their security blanket games.
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Apr 30, 2016 23:17
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ProfessorCirno posted:One thing to remember as far as "but I only see people playing these old games..." goes is that the industry is by all accounts stagnating hard. There's a lot of 3.x holdouts and a lot of oWoD holdouts because nerds that grew up on that poo poo in the earlier internet days were, you know, nerds, and hated change, and largely took a salt and burn approach to anything new. Which in turn meant keeping new players out of the hobby. It wasn't entirely on purpose, but the vast amounts of negativity did a terrible job at convincing people to play the games the detractors wanted, and a great job of convincing others they wanted nothing to do with these games. In a hobby that already had issues recruiting new players! Not that the detractors had a problem with that - plenty of them didn't want new players anyways, and even without that all they cared about was the new game dying, even if it killed everything else. Explains why getting people to play a tabletop game aside from DND is like pulling impacted wisdom teeth. I don't think the old grogs really drove people away from the hobby as much as you think the DND 4e generation just did not play it for very long because the ooh shiny effect wore off fast and they had tons of other things competing for the slot in my opinion. It is incredibly hard to compete with video games especially when pen and paper requires people to meet face to face for 4-5 hours. (Yes I know online exists but lots of people do not and frankly it requires more work.)
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May 1, 2016 00:04
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Terrible Opinions posted:If someone was making a 4E Pathfinder of any quality I'd buy it if only to spite WotC. Strike is good
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May 1, 2016 00:30
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JerryLee posted:I think that "any given iteration" is the ad absurdum version that I agree it's unreasonable to support at some point. I wouldn't pillory them for not incorporating the equivalent of some obscure mechanic from D&D circa 1974, or even 1990. But their own material that they were actively maintaining and supporting at the time 4E was being developed? I kinda think it's reasonable to expect anything from that to carry over, at least if they're intending to also keep the loyalty that goes along with it. That obscure 1970s rule might still be with us today if you had your way. I hope it's not a bad rule!
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May 1, 2016 01:09
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JerryLee posted:I think that "any given iteration" is the ad absurdum version that I agree it's unreasonable to support at some point. I wouldn't pillory them for not incorporating the equivalent of some obscure mechanic from D&D circa 1974, or even 1990. But their own material that they were actively maintaining and supporting at the time 4E was being developed? I kinda think it's reasonable to expect anything from that to carry over, at least if they're intending to also keep the loyalty that goes along with it. so your entire beef is that wotc isn't still publishing 3e to your exact specifications at this time, and all of the ways that 4e is functionally same but cleaner-running are invalidated because some (all?) of the legacy mechanics and lore you like didn't have detailed writeups in the 4e core rulebooks and you don't want to port them over yourself because  and this is all the fault of Wi$ard$ of the Coa$tit sounds to me like no substantial edition change could have ever satisfied you and you should have stuck to the game that made you happy?? Or maybe Pathfinder? like, what is an ideal D&D edition for you? On top of that, what guarantee do you have that anything you liked about 3e would survive in current-day 3e material in this hypothetical universe where 3.893e just came out? Because the path wotc was already on with the late 3e books was heavily flavored with what they were planning in 4e. or do you expect them to keep publishing more and more niche splats into infinity with the rules set as they were circa 2005?
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May 1, 2016 04:27
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Terrible Opinions posted:What in the gently caress are you talking about. Did d20 somehow make otherwise decent game designers into hacks or somehow make d20 so popular that it pressured all other RPGs off the market? Hell no, games at the time were already imploding from well all the excesses of 90s RPG design. oWoD didn't collapse in the early 2000s because mean old d20 killed it. oWoD collapsed because White Wolf's massive excesses could no longer be sustained. Same general thing with RIFTs, Deadlands, and all the other 90s rpgs that killed themselves out of purestrain 90s game design. Unless of course you mean that d20 didn't nearly kill gaming until after 4th edition came out which wouldn't make any sense because during that time D&D 4th edition was the most popular game on the market until Essentials murdered it stone dead.  Every other loving game was getting a d20 port, no matter whether it deserved it or the setting could justify it or whether the writers knew how to write for the system or not because it was a massive fad and that's all anyone was buying. You had poo poo like Silver Age Sentinels d20 and L5R d20 and Aberrant d20 and Deadlands d20 and so on and so on, and that's not even counting the hundreds (thousands?) of lovely third-party D&D supplements that came out over the same time period. It absolutely hurt the market in the long run by squeezing shelf space from decent products and encouraging unwise companies to invest in big print runs of inventory that wound up unsold. Very very few companies actually did well in the long run due to this, and the ones that did were generally the ones who made huge changes to the system (like Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds and True20) rather than just slapping classes and levels onto an existing product.I mean there was all sorts of other unrelated failures in the same time period too but that's because RPGs are a hobby industry run by fans working on razor-thin margins and its natural state is ongoing decline, but hey.
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May 1, 2016 04:43
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^^^Also Rifts didn't die or get killed by anything 90s or no, and I think characterizing the end of the oWoD as a "collapse" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, the nWoD had a release schedule that was if not as prolific as its nWoD counterpart still rather active.Nuns with Guns posted:so your entire beef is that wotc isn't still publishing 3e to your exact specifications at this time, and all of the ways that 4e is functionally same but cleaner-running are invalidated because some (all?) of the legacy mechanics and lore you like didn't have detailed writeups in the 4e core rulebooks and you don't want to port them over yourself because Well JerryLee is saying that he did stick with the edition that made him happy, hence why he decided not to buy in to 4E. I think that's a perfectly valid decision by anyone, I don't think he's being silly or stupid for not deciding to jump on the new edition train. I do think that it's a bit silly to expect a TRPG publisher to have to continue to support old editions ad infinitum and effectively anchor themselves to them for the sake of eternal backwards compatibility...even Pathfinder, which originally sold itself as "fully backwards compatible with all the 3E stuff you own!" isn't really truly backwards compatible these days, but I came into the 3E-4E transition already being aware that edition changes happened and frequently changed things to a sometimes significant degree and so I can't claim the same degree of investment in any particular RPG that JerryLee had with 3E. My gripe with 5E isn't that it's not more 4E, it's that 5E isn't more of a better game period. I didn't want 4.5E, I would have liked in some pie-in-the-sky universe a new edition of D&D that took good learned lessons from 4E and threw out the broken dumb poo poo and added new good poo poo even if that meant buying a new PHB all over again, and instead what we got was Mike Mearls phoning in a lazy warmed-over 3.5E lite. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 1, 2016 |
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May 1, 2016 04:45
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Kai Tave posted:Well JerryLee is saying that he did stick with the edition that made him happy, hence why he decided not to buy in to 4E. he can't have been that satisfied with how 3e was if he became disaffected enough to stop playing altogether for a while before switching to Dungeon World
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May 1, 2016 05:05
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That Old Tree posted:That obscure 1970s rule might still be with us today if you had your way. I hope it's not a bad rule! I think there may be some confusion; I'm not saying "please have us still literally rolling thac0 in tyool 2016." If we were talking about transitioning out of 2E and into 3E and if I were making this argument at a point when that was still the hill that everyone was dying on, I might be saying "please make it super easy and straightforward to figure out what a thac0 statline translates to in whatever the hot new edition is, because engineering that sort of import function should not be the consumer's job." In terms of how far back one should want to provide this compatibility, any line that you draw is going to be arbitrary to some extent but I think it's pretty clear that there is at least much more of a reason for them to make a smooth transition out of, you know, the immediately previous edition that they are making and selling right up to that point. That's your primary target audience. People who just stepped out of a cryogenic storage capsule from 1974 are a somewhat smaller demographic, to say the least. Yeah, I bought the Pathfinder core book at some point, though I never did play it because by that point it was years later and my group had broken up after the release of 4E, which partially addresses Nuns with Guns's implied question above. I admit that it's kind of stupid in retrospect to let an edition shift disrupt your will to play the game and to miss the obvious solution of just keeping rolling with 3E, but you have to understand, I was excited about 4E at first. I preordered the books and everything, and I spent a while trying to justify that initial excitement, combined with the (again, stupid in retrospect) line of thinking that "it's the new edition, this is what D&D is now, I have to like it." When I drifted away from it, I drifted away from TTRPGs generally. So yeah, I have this Pathfinder book that I've never actually used in a game. I'm more likely to play Pathfinder than I am to ever touch 4E again, though. It's not really anything personal to 4E; it's the same reason why I wouldn't jump at the chance to try and carry over all my source material to 13th Age or anything else. From what I've seen of it so far, Dungeon World just happens to hit the sweet spot of having modern, goon-approved rules whilst seeming to ask very little of me for importing whatever ideas I want. Anyway, this thread isn't about tradgames disillusionments, at least not directly; it's about the moves made by the industry. So along those lines, just remember that in my post that kicked off this whole mess, the only point I made (albeit in more words, and with examples that other people disagreed with) was that WOTC could have learned some things from GW about the dangers of alienating significant amounts of their community by slaughtering more sacred cows than they needed to and doing it all at once. Some people seem to think I'm on the verge of dialing up my lawyer to start a class-action lawsuit against the injustices perpetrated by WOTC, and that's not the case at all. I think it was dumb of them, but WOTC gonna WOTC.
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May 1, 2016 05:36
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