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It's a conversation that gets had again and again about the industry. Should sales be directed towards brick and mortar stores because they "support the community" or should lovely stores be allowed to go out of business while innovative entrepreneurs find ways to reinvent their shops while becoming less reliant on moving product?
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May 13, 2016 02:44
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Atlas Hugged posted:It's a conversation that gets had again and again about the industry. Should sales be directed towards brick and mortar stores because they "support the community" or should lovely stores be allowed to go out of business while innovative entrepreneurs find ways to reinvent their shops while becoming less reliant on moving product? The ultimate innovative and successful reinvention of the brick-and-mortar game store is a bar that sells Magic cards.
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May 13, 2016 02:55
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Kai Tave posted:The ultimate innovative and successful reinvention of the brick-and-mortar game store is a bar that sells Magic cards. This is really the lesson Best Buy should have learned.
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May 13, 2016 03:05
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Kai Tave posted:The ultimate innovative and successful reinvention of the brick-and-mortar game store is a bar that sells Magic cards. Seattle has a few Game Stores/coffee shops. Go to a cafe, have a drink, play a game, maybe buy something on the way out.
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May 13, 2016 03:19
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Like many people, I find the whole "support FLGS y/n" debate perplexing and weird because I don't have a FLGS.
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May 13, 2016 03:53
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Mecha Gojira posted:Seattle has a few Game Stores/coffee shops. Go to a cafe, have a drink, play a game, maybe buy something on the way out. That's how the game stores in my town work. The main draw is offerring tables, food and drinks while you "rent" their boardgames, and then maybe you'll buy the game itself off of their retail shelves.
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May 13, 2016 04:02
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So, Mike Mearls just took a big public poo poo on GenCon's guest presenters list, and related it to a push for diversity to boot! Grossness is here Funny thing is, this has sparked a lot of other industry folk calling out that Mearls has reportedly always been a shithead. I personally am just glad the industry is finally trying to take out one of it's biggest pieces of garbage.
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May 13, 2016 04:07
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I'm mad they picked Joshman for that list, but otherwise don't really know anyone so they're probably all cool.
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May 13, 2016 04:15
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Rand Brittain posted:Like many people, I find the whole "support FLGS y/n" debate perplexing and weird because I don't have a FLGS. I can only speak for myself but I've lived in various places at various points in time and had a variety of game store availability at various points therein, and the availability or lack thereof has had a noticeable impact on the sorts of games I've purchased and played at those times. At one point the only game store local to me pretty much only dealt in Magic, so that's what I played. When I lived in areas where there weren't any active game stores in reasonable driving distance not only did I not buy games but I also didn't really play any. Now that I live in an area where there are several quality game stores within a reasonable distance I've bought into heavier boardgames as well as tabletop miniatures in the form of X-Wing because there are actually active communities centered around these stores. I wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on tiny plastic spaceships just to go to someone's house and play that one guy every other weekend, nor would I have bought boardgames like Argent or Steampunk Rally or Kemet because quite frankly I don't have a super close-knit circle of personal friends all willing to get together every week to play boardgames these days. So anecdotal though it may be, the presence of active social circles centered around local game stores has impacted both my purchasing and playing habits.
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May 13, 2016 04:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:So, Mike Mearls just took a big public poo poo on GenCon's guest presenters list, and related it to a push for diversity to boot!
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May 13, 2016 04:26
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Kai Tave posted:I can only speak for myself but I've lived in various places at various points in time and had a variety of game store availability at various points therein, and the availability or lack thereof has had a noticeable impact on the sorts of games I've purchased and played at those times. At one point the only game store local to me pretty much only dealt in Magic, so that's what I played. When I lived in areas where there weren't any active game stores in reasonable driving distance not only did I not buy games but I also didn't really play any. Now that I live in an area where there are several quality game stores within a reasonable distance I've bought into heavier boardgames as well as tabletop miniatures in the form of X-Wing because there are actually active communities centered around these stores. I wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on tiny plastic spaceships just to go to someone's house and play that one guy every other weekend, nor would I have bought boardgames like Argent or Steampunk Rally or Kemet because quite frankly I don't have a super close-knit circle of personal friends all willing to get together every week to play boardgames these days. So anecdotal though it may be, the presence of active social circles centered around local game stores has impacted both my purchasing and playing habits. That makes sense, but I'm basically in a completely different boat because even when I had a local store, I shopped there only rarely. I've never actually had a gaming group that wasn't online. I'm not completely sure if there are any other nerds in this town. I guess there probably are, and we just haven't met?
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May 13, 2016 04:36
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Rand Brittain posted:That makes sense, but I'm basically in a completely different boat because even when I had a local store, I shopped there only rarely. I've never actually had a gaming group that wasn't online. That's the thing, having a FLGS is usually the easiest way to find that out. I only bought odds and ends for years before moving to a place that had a FLGS and since then I've gotten heavily involved in the community and spent a stupid amount of money.
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May 13, 2016 04:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:So, Mike Mearls just took a big public poo poo on GenCon's guest presenters list, and related it to a push for diversity to boot! I love how the argument made by one of the laziest RPG designers basically boils down to, "conventions require too much work from presenters for compensated badges." 
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May 13, 2016 04:50
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Rand Brittain posted:That makes sense, but I'm basically in a completely different boat because even when I had a local store, I shopped there only rarely. I've never actually had a gaming group that wasn't online. Atlas Hugged posted:That's the thing, having a FLGS is usually the easiest way to find that out. Well not every game store also brings with it that same active and thriving local community, which is also something I've dealt with before and forgot to bring up. It could simply be my perception of things, but it seems to me that there's been a shift within the last ten years or so of more and more game stores doing what they can to drive organized play and community events such as board game nights. Yeah, before there might have been some scant tablespace where you could find a few warhams painting stuff or playing a game (I've browsed more than my fair share of game stores with exactly this setup) , but nowadays a game store that doesn't have the space to host Friday Night Magic, local tournaments, and stuff like Pathfinder Society is at a disadvantage. The days of local game stores that are literally nothing but brick-and-mortar retailers are effectively over in the sense that they have nothing to offer customers that they can't simply get from Amazon or Coolstuff. I'm pretty sure that when people bring up the idea of the FLGS in these latest pro/con debates that what they mean are "brick-and-mortar retailers that also function as social hubs for gamers through playspace and promotion of organized play." Privateer and FFG probably don't care as much about some store that sells their product at full MSRP but doesn't actually give interested participants any venue with which to actually play Warmahordes or X-Wing because those retailers aren't going to get any sort of community off the ground, and community is what drives games like that. Without a network of stores hosting leagues, tournaments, regionals, and the like I can only assume that X-Wing would not be nearly as big a seller as it is, nor do I imagine would it exist in its current state.
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May 13, 2016 04:53
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Atlas Hugged posted:That's the thing, having a FLGS is usually the easiest way to find that out. I'm not sure if this is true in the age of Meetup and Facebook groups,but I guess without doing an actual study, all I can ever present is anecdotal evidence. It is definitely an option that circumvents the FLGS though.
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May 13, 2016 05:57
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GrandpaPants posted:I'm not sure if this is true in the age of Meetup and Facebook groups,but I guess without doing an actual study, all I can ever present is anecdotal evidence. It is definitely an option that circumvents the FLGS though. Those are definitely options, but they lack the casual drop in/drop out sort of thing that a lot of folks want in their tabletop gaming funtimes. "Just show up and play" is the foundational basis of Friday Night Magic, for instance, as it is with stuff like Pathfinder and D&D organized play. Meetup is definitely a thing, but on the other hand the closest nerdgaming Meetup functions to where I am are in Portland which, frankly, I don't feel like driving to in order to play some boardgames or X-Wing barring special occasions like the X-Wing Regionals I'll be going to next weekend. Casual play and store championships? No thanks, I'd like something closer to home. edit; and of course the unspoken option is that I could always try to organize such a community my own self but that sounds like a lot of thankless work and I'm honestly pretty lazy, so.
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May 13, 2016 06:03
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ProfessorCirno posted:So, Mike Mearls just took a big public poo poo on GenCon's guest presenters list, and related it to a push for diversity to boot!
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May 13, 2016 09:04
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Kurieg posted:Right, and D&D still has a supplement treadmill even if it is slower than 3.5/4e, it's just now devoted entirely towards the DM as opposed to every player. Supplement treadmill is straight up necessary for any RPG to stay in print as a long term business.
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May 13, 2016 11:36
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Kai Tave posted:The ultimate innovative and successful reinvention of the brick-and-mortar game store is a bar that sells Magic cards. And x-wing. The online buyers in my warmahordes group were raging about this change. A lot of them didn't seem to correlate their buying habits with our FLGS mulling giving priority spacing to x-wing players when there's a wait for tables. Since despite occupying roughly the same real estate in game space and shelf space, the x-wing crowd was earning the store 4-5x what the warmahorde crowd was. Personally I'd like to see the gaming club model take off in the US more. As it is now though, I can see PP's point.
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May 13, 2016 12:54
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Payndz posted:Lew Pulsipher! There's a name from the past. I remember Pulsipher mainly from a whiny slapfight he had with Ken St Andre in the letters pages of White Dwarf circa 1982 over whether or not Tunnels & Trolls was a bad ripoff of D&D. Pulsipher flaunted his medical qualifications as a way to establish his authority in an entirely unrelated area, which St Andre rightly mocked him for. Nerds. Nerds never change. 
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May 13, 2016 13:10
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Terrible Opinions posted:Supplement treadmill is straight up necessary for any RPG to stay in print as a long term business. It can definitely be done in an unobtrusive, laterally expanding way is the thing. WoD spread the breadth of the games without (typically) increasing the depth. That is to say it's better for a game's longevity to introduce discrete stand-alone elements than to tinker with existing ones. It's better to introduce a self-contained new kind werewolf than routinely dump 17 new Wizard feats into the game. A detailed guide to the Dark City of Jacksonville is a healthier addition than introducing the "quick half-action" (or whatever that was.) The downside is that they're very much take it or leave it, but by making splats mandatory purchases you can essentially tax your players into abandoning the game entirely or ruling "core only."
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May 13, 2016 13:26
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With the supplement treadmill, there are a lot of entrenched expectations regarding what those supplements should contain, especially for longstanding properties. The Vampire: the Requiem team tried to get away from publishing bathroom readers stuffed with centuries of vampire lore in favour of content useful in crafting a unique campaign, and was widely criticized as boring and without flavour.Evil Mastermind posted:"They're just in it for the free GenCon pass," says man who got handed the easiest loving ride in the entire industry.
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May 13, 2016 14:23
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It's important to note that most of that particular VtR criticism came from jilted VtM players, which basically amounts to "Boo it's different now." What's more significant is that VtR has outlived (depending how you look at it) at least two iterations of D&D.
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May 13, 2016 14:34
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It's telling that Mearls is more embarrassed about making a small mistake about volcanoes than insulting a bunch of his industry peers.
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May 13, 2016 14:35
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He's not embarrassed, he's saying he'll hide from all the volcanos.
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May 13, 2016 14:54
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moths posted:It can definitely be done in an unobtrusive, laterally expanding way is the thing. WoD spread the breadth of the games without (typically) increasing the depth. There is a certain balance that has to be reached. You can't go too lateral or else you end up like late era TSR with 8 different mutually exclusive campaign settings. You need to make sure that each of your, by necessity, very expensive books is something that most players would see and think "I could use that". So your guides to different locations mostly need to fit into the same world or be modular enough to plop down into any given game world. Like say the Carnival supplement for Ravenloft, which actually ended up getting multiple printings despite being campaign specific book because it could be used in so many different games. Preferably your products appeal to both GMs and PCs would want but a few GM only things are fine so long as they aren't most of your output. In that particular direction though you do need to have new PC option books fairly consistently but preferably as something that expands the game rather than invalidates previous options. Take for example most of the players options books for 4th edition D&D, the god specific books for Black Crusade, or the better players companion books for Pathfinder. Also holy poo poo Mearls is terrible. Edit: Though something to point out is that WoD did suffer from vastly increasing the number of skills players could get without increasing starting skills. Kinda similar to d20 and increasing feats without increasing the number of feats players get. Neither really seems to have hurt the individual lines in keeping people paying for new books. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 15:06 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 15:03
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Evil Mastermind posted:insulting a bunch of his industry peers. To be fair, those folks aren't his peers; They're respected RPG designers.
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May 13, 2016 15:04
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While many RPG publishers have flagship RPGs or exist only to manage a single IP, there's no particular need to run a supplement treadmill to stay in business. It's also possible to release a large number of standalone RPGs, with perhaps a supplement or two. This ensures there's new content to sell while also not gambling on buyers becoming and staying interested in a single property. It naturally leads itself to small, specialized, and easy-to-learn RPGs with a narrow scope.
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May 13, 2016 15:10
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moths posted:To be fair, those folks aren't his peers; They're respected RPG designers.       Also I hope someone responds to Puscifer with the "65-year-old who hasn't designed a game in 30 years doesn't recognize names of designers?" burn Do you all think there is value in having at least a name or two that Grumpy Old People will recognize for lists like this, though? I grant that the consternation would be the same almost no matter how many token 1970s designers were tossed onto the group though, so it might not even be worth the bother.
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May 13, 2016 15:18
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I was just about to give Mearls the benefit of the doubt on responding to just the claim and missing the context of the diversity dig (which seems like a pretty Mearls thing to do). But then I saw Pundowski in the thread and not getting called out on any of his poo poo. Yuck. Does someone have a link to the Industry Insider list they're talking about? The GenCon site is garbage.
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May 13, 2016 15:28
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ImpactVector posted:Does someone have a link to the Industry Insider list they're talking about? The GenCon site is garbage.
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May 13, 2016 15:32
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My favorite part of the GenCon site is the "Spouse Activities" event category, which a friend described as "Girlfriend Daycare".
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May 13, 2016 15:37
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Dr. Quarex posted:Also I hope someone responds to Puscifer with the "65-year-old who hasn't designed a game in 30 years doesn't recognize names of designers?" burn I suppose you could tag the list of presenters as having a notable emphasis on feminism in gaming. I'm not familiar with the history of GenCon panelists, but it looks like the overall emphasis is on including journalists and game design experts, not just people who wrote a lot of AD&D modules or worked on a game you've heard of. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:49 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 15:38
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LatwPIAT posted:While many RPG publishers have flagship RPGs or exist only to manage a single IP, there's no particular need to run a supplement treadmill to stay in business. It's also possible to release a large number of standalone RPGs, with perhaps a supplement or two. This ensures there's new content to sell while also not gambling on buyers becoming and staying interested in a single property. It naturally leads itself to small, specialized, and easy-to-learn RPGs with a narrow scope. They'd have to be games based around one shots or at least very short campaigns otherwise your customers would have no reason to buy more than one product. If you want to fun a big RPG in the vein D&D, WoD, etc you need a constant stream of content.
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May 13, 2016 15:51
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Like, his statement boiled down to, essentially, "Oh, they're just giving a free badge and nothing else? I guess that's why no REAL developers are on there," while referring to a list that included Mike loving Pondsmith. In a comment that was talking to someone who was whining that the list was too "diverse." Literally: Some old gently caress: "Wow I dunno anyone on this list, must be 'too diverse' for me" Mearls: "Yeah no real developers are interested because you only get a free badge." It's a pretty amazing one-two combo of ignorance and shittiness side by side, and the comment largely just boils down to Mearls desperately trying to gatehouse the hobby.
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May 13, 2016 15:54
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ProfessorCirno posted:Like, his statement boiled down to, essentially, "Oh, they're just giving a free badge and nothing else? I guess that's why no REAL developers are on there," while referring to a list that included Mike loving Pondsmith. The full list, since that link I used before doesn't seem to want to work: quote:Emily Care Boss
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May 13, 2016 15:59
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I point out Pondsmith specifically because CD Projekt Red is going to make Cyberpunk 20xx and Pondsmith a trillion times bigger then Mearls and 5e could ever even imagine. But you know. No real developers, not like this diversity bunch.
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May 13, 2016 16:01
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After reading the profiles on the site the whole thing comes off as "I didn't see any of my friend's names on that list."
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May 13, 2016 16:05
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Who on the D&D team is notable besides Mearls and Crawford at this point? Pondsmith has already flown far higher than Mearls ever will owing to his time at Microsoft and other video game publishers. I'm really interested in what CP2077 is going to look like after CP 3.0. The latter was a bizarre misstep, but I can understand where some of his ideas were coming from.
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May 13, 2016 16:14
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ImpactVector posted:But then I saw Pundowski in the thread and not getting called out on any of his poo poo. Yuck. I'd wager that most people have him blocked for being an obnoxious rear end, as well as being an untalented hack. It's pretty difficult to call people out when you don't see their poo poo.
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May 13, 2016 16:21
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