TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future - The Something Awful Forums

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Kai Tave: Jul 2, 2012; Fallen Rib

Gravy Train Robber posted:

I know they produced a number of adventure modules for Pathfinder that were designed to tie into Pathfinder Online, all of which involved dungeons (or in one case, a SUPER DUNGEON). If there were really no plans for dungeons in the game then suddenly things have become even more

Pathfinder's Golarion setting is basically your typical fantasy gaming world that's a pastiche of whatever thing the designers were finding cool at the moment. Over here is the Viking Kingdom, over there is Japanland, right here is the Desert of 1001 Arabian Nights, etc. Nothing about it strikes me as particular original or compelling, but it's there if you want it.

Meanwhile, Ryan Dancey set Pathfinder Online smack dab in the boringest, least developed part of the map where absolutely nothing at all is happening or going on because something something sandboxes over theme parks, World of Warcraft is dumb and bad. Imagine being told that someone's going to make a game based on that thing you like, then it turns out that the entire game takes place in a broom closet within the setting. The only thing more baffling than that is that people gave him over two million dollars or thereabouts for this.

# ? May 2, 2016 01:48

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# ? May 9, 2024 15:37

Bieeanshee: Aug 21, 2000; Not keen on keening.; Grimey Drawer

Don't forget the "Crowdforging" angle, where the people who gave them all of that cash bought the privilege of doing lots of worthless development work for the project, too.

# ? May 2, 2016 01:55

xiw: Sep 25, 2011; i wake up at night
night action madness nightmares
maybe i am scum
Cpig Haiku contest 2020 winner

Pathfinder Online threw out just about everything interesting about PF but kept alignments, because D&D alignments are a good fit for MMOs.

# ? May 2, 2016 01:58

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Gravy Train Robber posted:

I know they produced a number of adventure modules for Pathfinder that were designed to tie into Pathfinder Online, all of which involved dungeons (or in one case, a SUPER DUNGEON). If there were really no plans for dungeons in the game then suddenly things have become even more

Well, the dungeon they did was a bonus for backers, but I don't think it was supposed to tie in in any sense. Somebody that cares more can correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:05

Gravy Train Robber: Sep 15, 2007; by zen death robot

As someone who, bizarrely, likes Pathfinder/Golarion while fully aware of its staggering weaknesses, the broom closet they chose is smack in the middle of more interesting locations. You've got Hammer Horror land to the west, barbarians and science fiction robots/aliens to the northwest, and a literal gateway to the Abyss to the northeast. To the south is perpetual French Revolution land.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:07

senrath: Nov 4, 2009; Look Professor, a destruct switch!

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Well, the dungeon they did was a bonus for backers, but I don't think it was supposed to tie in in any sense. Somebody that cares more can correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

Both dungeons exist within the area the MMO was supposed to take place at. Let me quote the sales blurb for Thornkeep:

quote:

The Pathfinder Online MMO will put YOU in command of your very own kingdom in the treacherous River Kingdoms of the Pathfinder world. Get an early start on conquest with Pathfinder Online: Thornkeep, a complete gazetteer of one of the upcoming game�s starting towns and the deadly dungeons that sprawl beneath it!

# ? May 2, 2016 02:07

Nuns with Guns: Jul 23, 2010; It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Gravy Train Robber posted:

I know they produced a number of adventure modules for Pathfinder that were designed to tie into Pathfinder Online, all of which involved dungeons (or in one case, a SUPER DUNGEON). If there were really no plans for dungeons in the game then suddenly things have become even more

Ryan Dancey, the Steve Jobs of Marketing posted:

To be clear, we have not said that it is "too hard" and thrown up our hands.

We've said that doing it will require substantial resources we don't currently have. We cannot continue to follow our roadmap, which includes many features and systems that the game requires regardless of the presence of dungeons or no dungeons, and attempt to build a dungeon feature.

When we have those resources available, we'll do dungeons. Of course we want dungeons in the game. And they're not "too hard". They're just expensive.

Ryan Dancey, the Steve Jobs of Marketing posted:

There are lots of problems with implementing dungeons. Unity is not one of them.

Dungeons require us to have built a lot of art assets and environments. They require more AI programming. They require us to build more camera tech to deal with interior spaces. We have to write tech to manage the sorts of things you will expect in dungeons like doors, locks, switches, etc. We have to deal with the issues of line of sight and the load on the video system. It is almost like making another whole game. We just don't have the time or resources to work on that yet.

bonus fun-

Ryan Dancey, the Steve Jobs of Marketing posted:

I know exactly why the Goons came to EVE. They'll not find the laissez faire reception in Pathfinder Online that they did from CCP. We have to treat the Goons, and folks like them with the Litany Against Fear. (Or maybe the Serenity Prayer)

I play a lot of poker. There's almost nothing in the "rules of poker" about player behavior. (Well, the WSOP seems to be going down that route; maybe they'll wise up before it gets out of hand, but I digress). In poker there's all sorts of behavior that isn't pleasant, but also doesn't break the community standards for behavior. On the other hand, there are such standards and if you've been around that world for even a short period of time, you'll see them and you'll see them enforced.

This situation evolved because the people who created that world had very strict personal standards for what was and was not OK, and they used the tools at their disposal to embue poker society with those same standards. They perpetuate themselves because most people in the community prefer those standards to a "be as jerky as you want as long as you don't violate the letter of the law" society.

Some of that is enforced by the host of the game. Some is enforced by the dealer at the table. Some is enforced by other players. Some is enforced by the community as a whole. Multi-layered, multi-faceted.

And it evolves. Behavior towards women that was accepted in the past is often not today; poker society adapts. New faces show up who have little direct experience with their community except the medium of chat boxes and maybe discussion forums; yet they are swiftly mainstreamed (or the community violently rejects them and they drift away).

Poker's not the answer for MMOs but it's an example of a community where there's a lot of hard core competition and mind games and even some pain and suffering that has not allowed itself to degenerate the way some MMOs have; or walled itself off behind attempts to make rules for human behavior that anticipate every kind of wrongdoing and the process for redressing those grievances.

Only in MMOs (in my experience) is the intolerable tolerated. Like I said, it's the Original Sin of the format. It has tainted and warped the field since Ultima Online (and really, even before in some respects).

A key rule of business is that you look for need/gaps. Things people want but that they can't get. Giving folks a game where there is PvP, but not grief, seems to be to be a valuable need/gap.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:16

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

senrath posted:

Both dungeons exist within the area the MMO was supposed to take place at.

Fair enough!

I was amused at the fact that they hadn't worked out how to keep walls from blocking LoS. You'd think this was a solved issue in video game design, but I only play the things.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:20

Kurieg: Jul 19, 2012; RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20

Gravy Train Robber posted:

As someone who, bizarrely, likes Pathfinder/Golarion while fully aware of its staggering weaknesses, the broom closet they chose is smack in the middle of more interesting locations. You've got Hammer Horror land to the west, barbarians and science fiction robots/aliens to the northwest, and a literal gateway to the Abyss to the northeast. To the south is perpetual French Revolution land.

Yeah, from a high level view Pathfinder is full of all sorts of the crazy bizarre fun stuff that made old old school DND great. "Hey robots are cool, yeah here's a robot race. Aliens? Yeah like.. seven of them. Including a bunch that live inside the gas giant that is not-saturn. They fly around in genetically engineered space whales!' It's absolutely batshit and they're sort of into the era of design that 3.5 was late in it's life cycle where they make a bunch of books for new poo poo trying to balance the classes out. They're just taking the option of basically ignoring that Martials ever existed and making a bunch of melee casters and poo poo instead.

_{_{And then you just choose to carefully ignore the poo poo like evil elves turning into drow because evil is black and that's the way it is}}

# ? May 2, 2016 02:22

dwarf74: Sep 2, 2012; Buglord

Nuns with Guns posted:

bonus fun-

He kept the goons out by making sure it was unplayable. That's a promise kept, my friends.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:41

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

That doesn't keep goons out, but I don't think any really stuck with it, something about it being boring and awful.

# ? May 2, 2016 02:58

Kai Tave: Jul 2, 2012; Fallen Rib

Alien Rope Burn posted:

That doesn't keep goons out, but I don't think any really stuck with it, something about it being boring and awful.

Is there even any actual content? I was under the impression that it had never even left the alpha state. Like, you'd have a more fully realized swords-and-sorcery fantasy gaming experience using Second Life.

# ? May 2, 2016 03:05

Maxwell Lord: Dec 12, 2008; I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.; Grimey Drawer

PF Online has so many mistakes in its history it's hard to get started.

Like to be sure, starting a software company and making an MMO your first product is up there. So many MMOs have failed and dragged publishers with them. Do a single player RPG! People like those!

There's setting it in the dullest part of Golarion. There's tying it all to "player generated content". There's promising open PVP but we'll totally keep out the goons, guys, we have plans. There's crowd funding when that money clearly won't cover your actual costs, meaning backers are rewarded with an incomplete product.

I'm surprised Dancey hasn't fled to the Cayman Islands already.

# ? May 2, 2016 03:10

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Gravy Train Robber posted:

As someone who, bizarrely, likes Pathfinder/Golarion while fully aware of its staggering weaknesses, the broom closet they chose is smack in the middle of more interesting locations. You've got Hammer Horror land to the west, barbarians and science fiction robots/aliens to the northwest, and a literal gateway to the Abyss to the northeast. To the south is perpetual French Revolution land.

I always thought Golarion worked as a place where all the fantasy cliches are there somewhere on the map. If you want to play a viking or a samurai or a native american shaman or a greek hoplite or a bedouin in your D&D campaign, well, Golarion has a place on its map somewhere that you can say you come from. And the DM has someplace to put any kind of dumb adventure he wants - here's where the pyramids and deserts and mummies are, here's the island full of swashbuckling pirates, here is the swamp full of undead and evil wizard towers, all in the same world. It runs into problems when 1) people insist on treating all these pastiche lands as one giant, coherent setting with tons of fluff and lore and coherent backstory and 2) a lot of beloved traditional fantasy cliches are more than a little problematic in the harsh light of the 21st century (my primary interaction with the PF setting was playing a friend's copy of the card game, whose first scenario has you hunting down and slaughtering a bunch of not-Gypsies because everyone knows the not-Gypsies are untrustworthy thieves who are always up to something).

# ? May 2, 2016 03:45

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Alien Rope Burn posted:

That doesn't keep goons out, but I don't think any really stuck with it, something about it being boring and awful.

The best way to grief PFO players was to let them continue to play PFO unmolested. There was nothing for goons to do.

# ? May 2, 2016 05:13

DalaranJ: Apr 15, 2008; Yosuke will now die for you.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Fair enough!

I was amused at the fact that they hadn't worked out how to keep walls from blocking LoS. You'd think this was a solved issue in video game design, but I only play the things.

Small production teams usually license a physics engine.
Large production teams sometimes are able to 'roll their own'.
Ryan Dancey.

You now have all the pieces you need to determine what went wrong.

# ? May 2, 2016 05:58

Dulkor: Feb 28, 2009

DalaranJ posted:

Small production teams usually license a physics engine.
Large production teams sometimes are able to 'roll their own'.
Ryan Dancey.

You now have all the pieces you need to determine what went wrong.

I dunno, you'd think Dancey and Paizo of all people would understand the benefits of licensing! :v:

# ? May 2, 2016 06:46

Sage Genesis: Aug 14, 2014; OG Murderhobo

Nuns with Guns posted:

There are lots of problems with implementing dungeons. Unity is not one of them.

Dungeons require us to have built a lot of art assets and environments. They require more AI programming. They require us to build more camera tech to deal with interior spaces. We have to write tech to manage the sorts of things you will expect in dungeons like doors, locks, switches, etc. We have to deal with the issues of line of sight and the load on the video system. It is almost like making another whole game. We just don't have the time or resources to work on that yet.

So on the one hand...
"Doing interior spaces is too demanding for our team."

But on the other hand...
"This game is all about building forts, and protecting villages, and buying taverns for LegitCash� and all sorts of other interior spaces."

How? :psyduck:

# ? May 2, 2016 08:37

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

Falstaff posted:

the D20 boom did do real damage to the industry as a whole, though. A lot of FLGSs were left with a lot of dead stock when things went bust - some went under as a result, others decided to pull out of RPGs almost entirely to focus instead on comics and CCGs. While you could make the argument that this is something that would have happened anyway, since buying whole hog into the boom betrays some poor business decisions in the first place (and you might be right), at the very least this means it hastened an inevitable decline in the hobby's visibility.

Blaming the OGL for stockists making bad decisions is like blaming the idea of event comics for the comics crash in the 90s, or the Asylum for Blockbuster going under, or the Robotech kickstarter for potentially killing Paladium, or the various TCGs my local store bought into for it going out of business. d20 shovelware isn't anymore toxic than all the video game shovelware floatin around your average Walmart. If someone has so little business acumen that they take on a financially dangerous number of copies of "legend of the sphinx" or the transmorphers tie-in game they probably don't have what it takes to run a business. Maybe it's harsh but hobby enthusiasts should not run businesses. If it wasn't d20 shovelware it would have been the BLEECH TCG or the genius idea to get a bartender's license and try to sell booze at the FLGS.

Kurieg posted:

_{_{And then you just choose to carefully ignore the poo poo like evil elves turning into drow because evil is black and that's the way it is}}

Good news and bad news. Learning from jinx in pokemon Pathfinder made all drow purple.

# ? May 2, 2016 09:56

Asimo: Sep 23, 2007

Terrible Opinions posted:

Maybe it's harsh but hobby enthusiasts should not run businesses.

While this is true and correct you should be careful since in practice it also basically means "RPG companies should not exist" since there sure as gently caress isn't anyone in this business to make a livable wage.

# ? May 2, 2016 11:32

neonchameleon: Nov 14, 2012

Gravy Train Robber posted:

As someone who, bizarrely, likes Pathfinder/Golarion while fully aware of its staggering weaknesses, the broom closet they chose is smack in the middle of more interesting locations. You've got Hammer Horror land to the west, barbarians and science fiction robots/aliens to the northwest, and a literal gateway to the Abyss to the northeast. To the south is perpetual French Revolution land.

And if there's one thing that makes me really dislike Golarion as a setting it's perpetual French Revolution land. Not because the French Revolution is bad for a setting; far from it. But because a perpetual French Revolution takes away a huge part of what makes the French Revolution great for a setting. I mean sure you can play Scarlet Pimpernell there or a black comedy (either Blackadder Goes Forth or a sitcom). But most stories are about change and one of the key things about the real French Revolution was that almost anyone could make a grab for power and no one had a clue where it was going to end up. Who would end up on top and who would get the chop. Whether there would be an Emperor at the end of it, whether some group of oligarchic chancers would take control, or whether it was going to live up to its ideals. And you have the War of the First Coalition going on where every other major power in Europe deicdes to try to reverse the Revolution by force of arms - and get their asses kicked.

Seriously there is an absolutely awesome adventure path to be written that's only a thinly fictionalised version of the French Revolution, and it's one of the few places in history that can actually take Pathfinder's power curve. And the one place in the setting where you absolutely can not run it? Perpetual Revolutionary Land. Because a perpetual revoluton is simultaneously static and gets everyone smart to leave however they can.

# ? May 2, 2016 13:54

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

Asimo posted:

While this is true and correct you should be careful since in practice it also basically means "RPG companies should not exist" since there sure as gently caress isn't anyone in this business to make a livable wage.

Even just having one real business person and one accountant who had final say to reign in all them creative types could help far far more RPG companies be legitimate financial successes. FLGS that stock any RPG books besides the core books for the 5 or so most popular RPGs are an exercise in bad business kept aloft by nerd charity and TCGs.

# ? May 2, 2016 16:22

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Even just having one real business person and one accountant who had final say to reign in all them creative types could help far far more RPG companies be legitimate financial successes. FLGS that stock any RPG books besides the core books for the 5 or so most popular RPGs are an exercise in bad business kept aloft by nerd charity and TCGs.

Hey, know any businesspeople who want to come in and make my RPG a huge success? That'd be great. The game is already super good. They could keep half the money. Not that there's any money right now, but that's what they're for, right? If all it takes is some finance skills, then surely there is someone who wants to get in on this sweet sweet RPG cash.

Or maybe you're being a bit smug and over-simplistic.

# ? May 2, 2016 17:08

Kai Tave: Jul 2, 2012; Fallen Rib

The comparison between d20 shovelware and cheap video game shovelware doesn't quite hold up. Stores weren't stupid to stock third-party d20 material because for a while that's exactly what people were buying, not just bewildered grandmas looking for a last-minute birthday gift. There was a boom before the bust, not just on the production end but on the consumer end as well, which can be attributable among other things to a combination of 3E D&D being hotly anticipated especially given that TSR was dead and for a while it had looked like there might not be any new D&D ever again, and the fact that being associated with the biggest name in elfgaming lends one's third-party supplement a degree of cachet that up until that point hadn't really existed in the hobby in the sense that now you too could write for D&D from the comfort of your own home (sort of not really, but the distinction was lost on a lot of folks, "compatible with 3E D&D" was seen as pretty much the next best thing to actually working on D&D).

Of course game stores didn't have to stock third-party material. But that's what was hot and what was selling. If cheaply produced video game shovelware or Asylum knockoff movies were also hot sellers, would you call store owners stupid for moving to stock those too? That WotC allowed people to make material under the OGL/d20 license in and of itself wasn't necessarily the issue, but they did so without any sort of oversight process or quality control in place...no "Wizards of the Coast Official Seal of Quality" or anything...and there was no real effective way for store owners to easily understand what out of the increasingly vast selection of material on hand was actually halfway good. It wasn't all utter garbage, but differentiating the good from the bad was practically a full time job in and of itself.

In the whole discussion/argument with JerryLee about WotC breaking compatibility between 3E and 4E it also somehow escaped my mind that WotC actually already sort of did that beforehand with Edition 3.5 which was intended to be less a full edition and more of a revision (hence the name) but nonetheless wound up being one of the first things which caused a hiccup in the whole third-party push since suddenly a bunch of published 3P material was now incompatible/using outdated rules from the old corebook, so even as some 3P publishers pulled back there was something of another scramble following that, on top of growing consumer fatigue in d20 stuff as the lack of quality control began to become a noticeable issue. Nobody sent a memo out saying "hey game store owners, now's the time to stop stocking this stuff, deadline's two weeks from today," it was like a lot of things a process that was messy around the edges and only seems cut-and-dried with the benefit of hindsight.

# ? May 2, 2016 17:47

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Kai Tave posted:

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 ~~social experiment~~ parody~ and that everyone was just a puppet dancing on his strings before flouncing back to his forums in a snit.

The Bane Guard. Highlights include:

1. Based on being a goblinoid Bane worshiper, while tying a base class to specific race/deity combos is wholly inappropriate to 4e's design sense,
2. Using the word "opponent" instead of enemy. This is either because Trollman was too lazy/stupid to learn 4e's vocabulary, or because he threw a hissy fit about how the definition of enemy "means a creature or creatures that aren�t your allies," and no reasonable person would define themselves as their own ally, so all your powers force you to hit yourself, obviously.
3. Having attacks based on 3 different ability scores
4. The class getting 8 at-wills over the course of 30 levels
5. Being ridiculously overpowered in every conceivable way. Too many to name, but it had powers to end marks, end combat advantage, knock prone, stun, blind, and immobilize at level 1.
6. Most importantly, the original version of the class's marking power was an immediate reaction, which you can't use on your own turn, meaning the class could never actually mark.

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.

I remember that guy. People just lost their poo poo that a guy was having fun playing Resident Evil themed games using a book that had "Call of Cthulhu" written on the cover, to the point that he was accused of being a troll for having the audacity to describe his sessions.

# ? May 2, 2016 18:33

Piell: Sep 3, 2006; Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer; Young Orc

Call of Cthulhu d20 was surprisingly good.

# ? May 2, 2016 18:57

dwarf74: Sep 2, 2012; Buglord

Piell posted:

Call of Cthulhu d20 was surprisingly good.

As I've said before, what's arguably my most successful campaign of all time used my hack of the Call of Cthulhu d20 rules. (I even made a character sheet specially for it.)

The rulebook itself has excellent advice on how to run a horror campaign. And a lot more than you probably ever wanted to know about 20th Century guns and gun laws.

# ? May 2, 2016 19:11

Falstaff: Apr 27, 2008; I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Blaming the OGL for stockists making bad decisions is like blaming the idea of event comics for the comics crash in the 90s, or the Asylum for Blockbuster going under, or the Robotech kickstarter for potentially killing Paladium, or the various TCGs my local store bought into for it going out of business. d20 shovelware isn't anymore toxic than all the video game shovelware floatin around your average Walmart. If someone has so little business acumen that they take on a financially dangerous number of copies of "legend of the sphinx" or the transmorphers tie-in game they probably don't have what it takes to run a business. Maybe it's harsh but hobby enthusiasts should not run businesses. If it wasn't d20 shovelware it would have been the BLEECH TCG or the genius idea to get a bartender's license and try to sell booze at the FLGS.

Well, no, I think that's a rather idealistic view of the realities of a market. If there's a boom going on, then you as a retailer need to get on that boom or else you're leaving profits on the table - and worse, you're giving a competitor an advantage if they do so and you don't. Suddenly your competitor is going to be able to serve your customers that much better because they're investing in this booming stock that "everybody" wants, and by the time you try to correct course it could be too late. I saw this happen in real time locally during the d20 boom, when one of the two local gaming stores was a bit more cautious about the whole thing, lost too much of its customer base as a result, and then by the time the owner tried to fix things it was too late and he had to close up shop and sell off his stock.

Then the boom goes bust as things inevitably do, which causes all sorts of other problems - including the potential for a business owner to scale way back on RPGs in general (d20 or not) for being burned. I saw this happen, too.

Bad business decisions? Sure, probably. But it's pretty rare to be able to time a boom-bust cycle perfectly, unless you're a clairvoyant. Hence my comment about hastening an inevitable decline.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Even just having one real business person and one accountant who had final say to reign in all them creative types could help far far more RPG companies be legitimate financial successes.

By my count, that's two more employees than most RPG companies can afford.

# ? May 2, 2016 20:42

ProfessorCirno: Feb 17, 2011; The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

I mean it's clear that a nonstop tide of lovely products that flood the market in over saturation and a complete absence of quality control couldn't actually be what kills anything off. Terrible Opinions is right! Why, just ask Atari! Nothing bad ever happened there, even when their conditions were almost completely identical!

# ? May 2, 2016 21:09

ProfessorCirno: Feb 17, 2011; The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

neonchameleon posted:

But most stories are about change

Unfortunately, the fantasy genre is practically made explicitly to not be about change. It is if anything the opposite - your standard fantasy story is that a bad thing is going to make things change, and it's up to you to stop it. It's one of the reasons fantasy ends up being such a perhaps paradoxically conservative genre - the vast majority of the time, it's built around ensuring a status quo never gets altered.

# ? May 2, 2016 21:11

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

ProfessorCirno posted:

Unfortunately, the fantasy genre is practically made explicitly to not be about change. It is if anything the opposite - your standard fantasy story is that a bad thing is going to make things change, and it's up to you to stop it. It's one of the reasons fantasy ends up being such a perhaps paradoxically conservative genre - the vast majority of the time, it's built around ensuring a status quo never gets altered.

Or, if it has been altered, returning things to the old status quo. The "true king" is always good and just, and the people who ousted him and took power are always greedy and evil. Why? They just are.

One of the things I love about the Discworld series is how the standard fantasy trope of "restoring the rightful king" is treated as something that would actually be bad for anyone who isn't the upper classes, is only a plan of madmen or the fantasy equivalent of one-percenters, and how the rightful king actually doesn't want to take the throne because the current situation is better for everyone.

(GNU Terry Pratchett.

He saved me from the quicksand that is generic standard fantasy.)

# ? May 2, 2016 21:22

Aaod: May 29, 2004

Terrible Opinions posted:

Even just having one real business person and one accountant who had final say to reign in all them creative types could help far far more RPG companies be legitimate financial successes. FLGS that stock any RPG books besides the core books for the 5 or so most popular RPGs are an exercise in bad business kept aloft by nerd charity and TCGs.

But then they hire their cousin or brother in law to do it who embezzles the money on granite counter tops as seems common in the industry because they can not offer poo poo for wages and nepotism abound.

# ? May 2, 2016 21:40

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Zereth posted:

I think the plan was "let's make a game like UO, but way better".

You may notice a lack of things like "understanding the current MMO market" or any other very critical things to making a videogame, let alone an MMO, in there. And that's where I think things went wrong.

unseenlibrarian posted:

Not even like UO but better, but "EVE, but get this, with goblins, and on the ground" Dancey's whole pitch was that he was coming off being a marketing guy for EVE online. (IIRC while there he was involved with the whole 60 dollar monocle debacle, so, uh....yeah.) That's why there's a pathfinder MMO with no classes or any familiar elements, just skills that you can queue up to train while offline, everything's supposed to be player based content, etc, etc.

I don't believe that Dancey started out with a master plan to make a Pathfinder MMO that would be like EVE or UO because that's what the market really wanted. That all came about as ad hoc answers to the many people asking, quite reasonably, "How can you possibly pull this off without a lot more money and industry experience?" His credibility was partly based on EVE. Any resemblance to UO was based on the claim that making the game a sandbox with player-generated content would make the game possible with fewer resources (as well as providing perfect verisimmersionilitude for fans of the tabletop).

ProfessorCirno posted:

Again, Dancey has an almost supernatural ability to get cozy with people and products that anyone should be able to just glance at and immediately know it's a bad idea. It's not that he ruins everything he touches that's amazing, it's that he keeps being given more chances.

My armchair assessment of Dancey is that he has 2 things going for him: one, the gift of gab, and two, having been associated with an important product, once. Guys like that can keep getting work based on the properties they've been associated with, taking all the credit while assigning blame for any failures to other people. He's the Vince Russo of the RPG industry.

ProfessorCirno posted:

I don't know about it first hand, but the thing is, everything I've heard about Rolling Thunder paints it as an unmitigated disaster. The OGL likewise almost immediately became a horrific disaster, and it was one everyone here probably could've called out as such if told about it firsthand.

There's a key difference here. Rolling Thunder was a shameless attempt to gain advantage in a saturated market. The OGL, meanwhile, saturated the market!

Something something, no refuge except in audacity.

# ? May 2, 2016 21:47

Chill la Chill: Jul 2, 2007; Don't lose your gay

Halloween Jack posted:

My armchair assessment of Dancey is that he has 2 things going for him: one, the gift of gab, and two, having been associated with an important product, once. Guys like that can keep getting work based on the properties they've been associated with, taking all the credit while assigning blame for any failures to other people. He's the Vince Russo of the RPG industry.

Summary
My life goal is to identify the hardest available problems, and then try to solve them creatively.

I excel at business process engineering, strategic analysis, and customer segmentation.

I enjoy leading large teams of professionals.

My previous experience includes:

* Intense startup experience as CEO from initial concept to product launch
* Increased sales of a 5 year-old MMO by 50% in 3 years (EVE Online)
* Leading the team that created the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons
* Creating a successful marketing consultancy
* Co-created Legend of the Five Rings IP

Specialties: Business plan development

Marketing plan development

Organizational structure & goal setting

Separating the "wheat" from the "chaff" of tactics vs. strategy

# ? May 2, 2016 21:53

JerryLee: Feb 4, 2005; THE RESERVED LIST! THE RESERVED LIST! I CANNOT SHUT UP ABOUT THE RESERVED LIST!

Kai Tave posted:

In the whole discussion/argument with JerryLee about WotC breaking compatibility between 3E and 4E it also somehow escaped my mind that WotC actually already sort of did that beforehand with Edition 3.5 which was intended to be less a full edition and more of a revision (hence the name) but nonetheless wound up being one of the first things which caused a hiccup in the whole third-party push since suddenly a bunch of published 3P material was now incompatible/using outdated rules from the old corebook, so even as some 3P publishers pulled back there was something of another scramble following that, on top of growing consumer fatigue in d20 stuff as the lack of quality control began to become a noticeable issue. Nobody sent a memo out saying "hey game store owners, now's the time to stop stocking this stuff, deadline's two weeks from today," it was like a lot of things a process that was messy around the edges and only seems cut-and-dried with the benefit of hindsight.

If you think it's relevant, I'd be interested to hear you elaborate a bit more on the 3.0/3.5 transition, because there being any sort of serious obstacle to continuity wasn't really something that I perceived as someone who played through that. Some old material became outdated, but it usually wasn't a burden to roll with it.

I only used official WotC products, though, so maybe that made for fewer problems.

# ? May 2, 2016 23:07

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Chill la Chill posted:

Summary
My life goal is to identify the hardest available problems, and then try to solve them creatively.

I excel at business process engineering, strategic analysis, and customer segmentation.

I enjoy leading large teams of professionals.

My previous experience includes:

* Intense startup experience as CEO from initial concept to product launch
* Increased sales of a 5 year-old MMO by 50% in 3 years (EVE Online)
* Leading the team that created the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons
* Creating a successful marketing consultancy
* Co-created Legend of the Five Rings IP

Specialties: Business plan development

Marketing plan development

Organizational structure & goal setting

Separating the "wheat" from the "chaff" of tactics vs. strategy

Where do you see yourself in five years?

# ? May 2, 2016 23:10

Libertad!: Oct 30, 2013; You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

ProfessorCirno posted:

Unfortunately, the fantasy genre is practically made explicitly to not be about change. It is if anything the opposite - your standard fantasy story is that a bad thing is going to make things change, and it's up to you to stop it. It's one of the reasons fantasy ends up being such a perhaps paradoxically conservative genre - the vast majority of the time, it's built around ensuring a status quo never gets altered.

The Final Fantasy games had some pretty good aversions to this, and they're pretty much the iconic standard for a time when it comes to video game RPGs. In 6 you had the tough choice of killing Kefka who became an almost-god, at the risk of taking magic from the world. 10 was all about breaking a millennia-long cycle of death and misery by exposing the corruption of the major religion and finding another way to kill the "returning immortal monster" for good this time. Final Fantasy 9 had an entire continent where an omnipresent corrupting force taking the form of Mist was vital for modern machinery and airship travel, and at one point in the game you find a way to staunch the flow.

In these examples such change had negative consequences, but were ultimately seen as a long-term good.

Yeah, I know that Final Fantasy has recently been going more in the sci-fi route, and has a lot of differences from conventional 70s and 80s era RPGs, but given its prominence I have hope that not only more gamers will be inspired by it, but take away good things in their own works.

It also gave birth to the most unintentionally complimentary insult for Eberron.

# ? May 2, 2016 23:21

Kurieg: Jul 19, 2012; RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20

Libertad! posted:

10 was all about breaking a millennia-long cycle of death and misery by exposing the corruption of the major religion and finding another way to kill the "returning immortal monster" for good this time.

Also dealing with your daddy issues, by punching them to death.

13 was also all about breaking the current completely broken cycle in the way that caused the least loss of life.... then 13-2 and 3 came along and.... yeah.

# ? May 2, 2016 23:25

Kai Tave: Jul 2, 2012; Fallen Rib

JerryLee posted:

If you think it's relevant, I'd be interested to hear you elaborate a bit more on the 3.0/3.5 transition, because there being any sort of serious obstacle to continuity wasn't really something that I perceived as someone who played through that. Some old material became outdated, but it usually wasn't a burden to roll with it.

I only used official WotC products, though, so maybe that made for fewer problems.

It's been so many years that I've forgotten a lot of the technical side myself, 3E and 3.5 weren't precisely "broken" compatibility-wise but there were enough changes (I believe the Ranger class received a rather extensive overhaul to give one example, Attack of Opportunity rules were changed, spells were amended in some cases significantly such as things like Polymorph, stuff like that) that older third-party material was perceived as being "out of date." Furthermore I don't think people were expecting 3.5E to be a thing. There was some early paranoia surrounding the OGL and what it mean to content creators but the long and the short of it is that the OGL is for life, there's literally no way that WotC can ever revoke or cancel it...but that doesn't mean that WotC themselves were beholden to stick with 3E as first conceived. I think that 3.5E was the beginning of d20 fatigue for a lot of folks even though it was technically nothing but a revision of 3E rather than a new edition the way 3E to 4E was, but at the same time I mean there were a whole new set of core rulebooks so, y'know. Basically there wasn't just one smooth unbroken line throughout 3E's existence that got derailed when 4E came along.

# ? May 2, 2016 23:25

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# ? May 9, 2024 15:37

Bedlamdan: Apr 25, 2008

Libertad! posted:

10 was all about breaking a millennia-long cycle of death and misery by exposing the corruption of the major religion and finding another way to kill the "returning immortal monster" for good this time.

There was a novella for 10 written by the game's original author, that takes place after 10-2. Among many other things that happen, Tidus and Yuna break up, Sin comes back, also Tidus is blown up because he kicked a bomb cleverly disguised as a blitzball, and then he comes back as an Unsent like Auron or Seymour.

It is a treasure :haw:

# ? May 3, 2016 00:50

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