|
There's probably contractors and stuff. If they aren't going full treadmill and aren't making a new edition there's not much point to more staff.
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 01:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 19:11 |
|
|
Kurieg posted:Apparently Paradox is sending C&Ds to oWoD/CofD Fansites. I was thinking just last week when statting up a Changeling that with the Paradox takeover, Subnet would get taken down any day now. It had huge direct quotations, which I'm fairly sure is a big no-no copyright wise. Printing just the game mechanics themselves would have been fine, but book text is not okay.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 02:45
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:According to BGG, Greg Bilsland is leaving WOTC? Leaving willingly is a decidedly bad sign. Typically the D&D team shrinks when people get laid off.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 02:53
|
|
|
Is it just mearls and "guy who has jury duty" now?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 04:47
|
|
|
I thought jury duty guy was freelance.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 05:10
|
|
|
As far as I know, Jeremy Crawford is still full time.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 05:13
|
|
|
Maybe he'll go work for a better company. Or make his own RPG! If he developed the second monster vault, I like that guy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 05:49
|
|
|
S.J. posted:Maybe he'll go work for a better company. Or make his own RPG! If he developed the second monster vault, I like that guy. He was a developer on Threats from the Nentir Vale, but not a designer.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 06:49
|
|
|
S.J. posted:Maybe he'll go work for a better company. Or make his own RPG! If he developed the second monster vault, I like that guy. quote:He also started and completed a Master's Degree recently, so I think he's been looking to other horizons for a while now. Looks like he's moving on to greener (  ) pastures.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 13:58
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, there's no way to explain this but bluntly. Though in attempting to source that claim I found that the Wikipedia page for Origins basically never comes up in a search ever unless you specifically type Origins Game Fair. Popularity! Alien Rope Burn posted:Also this year's Origins website looks only one step removed from the days of free website adholes and their mascot is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Also Classic Origins 101: They posted on May 31 on their Facebook page to hurry, because early bird badge pricing ended after June 1. Then this exchange happened on June 1: Attendee: "they are already up to onsite price? I thought ending June 1 meant this was the last day, not that May 31 was the last day." Origins: "The early bird price was good through May 31." Attendee: [quoting the post the comment was on] "'After June 1, the cost for a badge will change to onsite pricing ($65).' But thanks for...clarification?"
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 17:15
|
|
|
Slimnoid posted:Looks like he's moving on to greener ( Getting paid > tabletop RPGs
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:43
|
|
|
S.J. posted:Getting paid > tabletop RPGs Bingo. Anyone who wants to make some for real serious money gets out of the RPG industry as soon as possible, or moves on to more lucrative portions of the tabletop hobby like miniatures and board games. Those that stick around do so out of love, or because they don't have the skills necessary to cut it anywhere else.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 01:36
|
|
|
Stupid question but why are board games more profit compared to RPGs? I would think with more physical media the profit margins would be not that amazing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 03:16
|
|
|
In addition to TW, other games BFG, Vermintide, Blood Bowl 2, and Freeblade all happened this year. Freeblade is probably the weakest of those titles, and it's still a pretty fun rail shooter.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 03:53
|
|
|
Aaod posted:Stupid question but why are board games more profit compared to RPGs? I would think with more physical media the profit margins would be not that amazing. More people play them, they play lots of different ones, you sell them for more and they can't really be pirated.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 03:54
|
|
|
Aaod posted:Stupid question but why are board games more profit compared to RPGs? I would think with more physical media the profit margins would be not that amazing. Board gaming has always been more socially acceptable to do with friends, family, and strangers than tabletop roleplaying, so more exposure and more buyers. Settlers of Catan and other indie board games have made a big splash in recent years by proving that you can play something that's actually fun at a family get-together instead of 2 hours of Monopoly. It's also way easier to find fun board games with simple rules than ttrpgs. There's a growing demand for board games right now and thanks to Kickstarter it's easier than ever to launch a new game and get it sold everywhere outside of big box stores
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:01
|
|
|
Aaod posted:Stupid question but why are board games more profit compared to RPGs? I would think with more physical media the profit margins would be not that amazing. You're going to sell a fuckload more copies, RPGs are for loving nerds
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:14
|
|
|
The time investment for even the most insane board games is also still a drop in the bucket compared to the time investment for your average RPG.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:16
|
|
|
What Nuns said - my brother got really into boardgames since last year, we played through two games of Ticket to Ride Scandinavia and that card-based fairy-tale storytelling game Once Upon a Time, but he still balks at the idea of playing RPGs as still a bit too freeform and loosey-goosey.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:20
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:The time investment for even the most insane board games is also still a drop in the bucket compared to the time investment for your average RPG. The Campaign for North Africa would like a word with you, but otherwise yes, all of the reasons here are kind of a big deal. Board games are currently going through a golden age, they aren't considered as nerdy as TRPGs are for some reason even though plenty of board games are plenty nerdy, they have vastly lower barriers to entry than most RPGs do, the greater economy of scale frequently means that for the price of a single hardback RPG core rulebook you get a board game full of very attractive and eye-catching components (Mysterium is a good example of this), and board games are by and large an easier sell to a broader variety of people in a broader array of social contexts.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:32
|
|
|
Board games are often loving gorgeous, and people can appreciate the aesthetics of nice colors, thick cardboard, and weighty wooden components moreso than paint-by-numbers fantasy art which you aren't even looking at while playing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:36
|
|
|
Yeah, I meant "boardgames excepting wargames".
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 06:41
|
|
|
On the other hand boardgames are a lot more work because you actually have the make all the rules, instead of answering every loophole with "Ask the DM lol".
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 09:53
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:On the other hand boardgames are a lot more work because you actually have the make all the rules, instead of answering every loophole with "Ask the DM lol". That's why boardgames are so much better designed than RPGs on the average.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 10:00
|
|
|
I mean to be fair Exploding Kittens made like eight million dollars, and there are plenty of other board games out there which are as vapid and bad as the shoddiest RPGs. TIME Stories for example is considered by many to be a hot new board game but it's actually really bad, it's like a poorly-written Choose Your Own Adventure you pay $60 to play once, actions often have pointless consequences, the actual gameplay is nothing, it's a Bad Game. There's just as much room in designer board gaming for glossy games with plenty of pretty art and hype behind them that turn out to be garbage under the hood as there is in the RPG hobby.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 10:04
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:That's why boardgames are so much better designed than RPGs on the average. That's more of an institutional thing where RPG-players have been taught by decades of poor design that poor design is the norm and even desirable. There's lots of poor design in the boardgaming industry too; Munchkin has rules that are at times painfully vague or unworkable (when can you interrupt someone to play a card? Does getting stomped flat kill your character, or is it just a flavourful way of saying you lose your hat?) and Once Upon A Time has amazingly poor rules (it's a game where you win by emptying you hand, and you can empty your hand in your first round if you can just make up a fast travelogue-style shaggy dog story that namedrops every card in your hand, but trying to win in the most efficient way is frowned upon...).
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 10:55
|
|
|
Okay, fair cop - I was perhaps feeling a little too vindictive.LatwPIAT posted:Once Upon A Time has amazingly poor rules (it's a game where you win by emptying you hand, and you can empty your hand in your first round if you can just make up a fast travelogue-style shaggy dog story that namedrops every card in your hand, but trying to win in the most efficient way is frowned upon...). That actually happened to us. Everyone played conservatively just putting down 1 to 2 cards to incrementally advance the story, but after 2 hours we still weren't done so we were just urging the next player to pull whatever BS out of their rear end to make even the most plausibly believable story linked to the card just to end it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 11:02
|
|
|
FFG makes really nice boardgames with excellent artwork and high-quality components and they sell really well. And every time my group buys one we have to go to BoardgameGeek and download and print out the multi-page errata document and highest-rated collection of fan rulings because their rulebooks are such rear end. The official FFG errata/FAQ document for Arkham Horror is a 43 page PDF.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 14:16
|
|
|
Board games also often only require two players, and some only one. Even ttrpgs that aren't mechanically balanced to require more players often seem to ignore one-on-one gaming as a thing, for whatever reason.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 14:59
|
|
|
FMguru posted:FFG makes really nice boardgames with excellent artwork and high-quality components and they sell really well. To be fair even getting the errata for Arkham Horror won't fix those lovely rules FFG have got better recently though to be fair, even if their games are usually the epitome of "just throw it in there".
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 16:29
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Okay, fair cop - I was perhaps feeling a little too vindictive. Conservatively? You're allowed to put down a card a sentence. Not that I like the game, but "a character was emotion. They decided to visit the local location" is a valid play.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 17:32
|
|
|
FMguru posted:FFG makes really nice boardgames with excellent artwork and high-quality components and they sell really well. FFG isn't anywhere that bad for some time now, and Arkham Horror is one of the worst examples you could use because that game is poo poo piled on top of poo poo for a long time now. It's almost the board game version of D&D supplement bloat. And it will stay that way for mostly the same reasons that people keep buying 3.5 bloat even today. And a lot of games that end up requiring FAQ/errata actually, ya'know, have them. For the most part you don't see board game designers answering issues with the equivalent of 'lol I dunno just have fun okay' S.J. fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jun 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 06:35
|
|
|
On the one hand I don't think it's fallacious to say that boardgaming (or tabletop non RPG gaming since "boardgaming" usually includes card games like Dominion) as a hobby is less averse to subjecting games to mechanical analysis and less receptive to handwavey nebulous rules since there's no ingrained assumption that one player acting as referee/GM will be dedicating their effort to patching glaring holes and omissions and that this is right and good. There's a certain expectation that a board game needs to work right out of the box and that if there's a critical flaw that becomes apparent in play the attitude of most board game enthusiasts isn't going to be "oh boy this is a great chance for me to houserule something" as much as "wow this is loving broken." On the other hand there are still plenty of games that I would say have "bad design" the same way that RPGs can be said to have bad design and for many of the same reasons that fans of poorly designed RPGs will find ways to dismiss and brush off these flaws, those same boardgames can and do attract plenty of favorable reviews and praise. Dead of Winter has garnered all sorts of critical acclaim for being "the one good zombie boardgame" but it has a number of issues that the regulars of the Board Game thread will be happy to expound upon at length. Xia: Legends of a Drift System leans heavily on dice rolls for a lot of mechanics which causes huge swings in variance and rolls of a natural 20 give you a victory point regardless of context and the way you resolve rules disputes according to the rulebook (not making this up) is to roll off to see who gets their way, which you can also score VP on if you hit a nat 20. Cards Against Humanity is one of the most popular tabletop games on the market right now and it's claim to fame is "tell ironic racist jokes with your friends, two midgets felching a donkey while I have surprise sex with your mom's big black dick lol." Boardgaming as a hobby is just as prone to a lot of the same pitfalls as you'd fine in the TRPG hobby, standards of quality may be somewhat higher but how much higher can vary considerably...Sentinels of the Multiverse isn't just an extremely boring game, for instance, but it has some of the worst art I've ever seen outside of Deviantart and yet it has a hojillion expansions, people evidently find it enjoyable enough to continue funding it despite it being both dull and ugly. Also Munchkin exists. And yes, FFG has gotten considerably better since the days of yore but they still, like many boardgame publishers, have extremely unintuitive and unhelpful rulebook layouts which necessitate far more flipping back-and-forth than should be necessary in a technical document. Their attempts at splitting things into a "quickplay intro rulebook" and a comprehensive rulebook only exacerbate this issue. tl;dr it's not really a case that boardgames are all shining golden gods of immaculate design while RPGs are so dumb and goddamn crazy, however it is fair to say that simply due to the nature of boardgames in general there's far less placed upon the shoulders of the fans to pick up the designers' slack and critical analysis of boardgames isn't considered the province of powergamers or storygamist swine pushing a homofascist agenda to steal your precious bodily fluids.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 08:28
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:all sorts of critical acclaim for being "the one good zombie boardgame" I thought that was City of Horror?
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 09:23
|
|
|
thefakenews posted:I thought that was City of Horror? Realtalk, City of Horror has a current rating of 6.8 and overall ranking of 931 on Boardgamegeek while Dead of Winter has an 8.0 rating and is ranked overall at 24. It was nominated for an Origins award for Best Board Game in 2015 and won the 2014 Golden Geek awards for Most Innovative and Most Thematic game. Now BGG may not be the be-all end-all of board game standards just like Rotten Tomatoes isn't the irrefutable source for movie quality, but it seems pretty clear that a whole lot of people think Dead of Winter is super awesome and good when by and large it seems like a fairly lackluster game prone to the same sense of random "oh I guess the game just ended because someone suddenly won" as games like Betrayal at the House on the Hill. The way a lot of people talked it up, and still do talk it up, made it sound like it was the zombie survival horror game everyone had been waiting for but in terms of execution I'd say it falls squarely in the Numenera camp, to make a cross-hobby comparison.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 09:39
|
|
|
Dead of Winter was also really hard to find in its first print run, so I assume a lot of reviews are also brags about how totally awesome this exclusive thing I own is.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 11:22
|
|
|
Dead of Winter's publisher, Plaid Hat Games is also something of an "indie darling that can do no wrong" in the eyes of the board gaming community, in spite of an extremely mixed track record.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 12:49
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Realtalk, City of Horror has a current rating of 6.8 and overall ranking of 931 on Boardgamegeek while Dead of Winter has an 8.0 rating and is ranked overall at 24. It was nominated for an Origins award for Best Board Game in 2015 and won the 2014 Golden Geek awards for Most Innovative and Most Thematic game. Now BGG may not be the be-all end-all of board game standards just like Rotten Tomatoes isn't the irrefutable source for movie quality, but it seems pretty clear that a whole lot of people think Dead of Winter is super awesome and good when by and large it seems like a fairly lackluster game prone to the same sense of random "oh I guess the game just ended because someone suddenly won" as games like Betrayal at the House on the Hill. The way a lot of people talked it up, and still do talk it up, made it sound like it was the zombie survival horror game everyone had been waiting for but in terms of execution I'd say it falls squarely in the Numenera camp, to make a cross-hobby comparison. I was mostly just making a joke about the fact that I read a number of reviews of City of Horror that also claimed it was the only board game (at the time) that got zombies right.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 14:55
|
|
|
thefakenews posted:I was mostly just making a joke about the fact that I read a number of reviews of City of Horror that also claimed it was the only board game (at the time) that got zombies right. This is a partial list of all the best games I've played that do zombies right: 1. (tie) Agricola 1. (tie) Archipelago 1. (tie) Keyflower 1. (tie) Falling Sky 1. (tie) Dungeon Lords 1. (tie) Dungeon Petz 1. (tie) Mage Knight 1. (tie) Twilight Struggle 1. (tie) Caverna 1. (tie) Le Havre 1. (tie) Puerto Rico 1. (tie) Love Letter 1. (tie) Skull 1. (tie) Codenames 1. (tie) 7 Wonders 1. (tie) Caylus 1. (tie) Dominion
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 15:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 19:11 |
|
|
I'm pretty sure Mage Knight has zombies in it, though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 15:44
|
|