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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
imagine a world where the D&D name was just a way to showcase different kinds of RPG design, with print-on-demand or limited runs of the "older" editions and various different takes on the broad idea of "fantasy adventure" in each one

Lightning Lord posted:

Springing off this but also putting it aside each edition of D&D is basically a completely different game with the same name more than any other RPG edition changeover (barring things like totally dead games that got revivals like Mutant Chronicles) and we'd all be better off if the whole hobby internalized this, lived it, learned it, and accepted it.

exactly!

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slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

Liquid Communism posted:

gently caress no. There's still sculpts from the 1990's that are the latest most up to date sculpt for some units, and even the 'recent' refresh on the Orks I just put together is dated 2005.

I'm confused. How do your models age out then? Or am I just not understanding the crazy that is mini games?

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

slap me and kiss me posted:

I'm confused. How do your models age out then? Or am I just not understanding the crazy that is mini games?

You just buy more minis and books of rules updates.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA
Say what you will about this Vox Day guy, he is doing a great job proving Gygaxian alignments DO have a place in the real world! Literally cackling with glee at the idea of hordes of creatures devouring people committed to the cause of social justice sounds like something you would get if you rolled a 48 on a random encounter table, and it would sound less stupid in that context.

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

slap me and kiss me posted:

I'm confused. How do your models age out then? Or am I just not understanding the crazy that is mini games?

They don't. If I could find the orks I painted up back in 1998, they'd probably still be a field-legal army (that looks like poo poo, because the old sculpts weren't great and teenage me was even worse as a painter than I am now). The rotation for minis games isn't really the minis, it's the players. People get tired of one army and buy into a different one, or apathetically wander out of the hobby and just have a couple grand in minis in boxes in a closet somewhere. Maybe if they're quitting on purpose they put it up on ebay at a huge loss.

For GW specifically, every few years a new edition of rules will come out, at $140 or so for the books you need to run a single army and generally changes the balance around to further nerf Tyranids and so you have to go buy new models to be competitive in tourneys unless you're playing space marines.

Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Apr 1, 2017

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Agronox posted:

It's amazing how well that basic design has stood up to time. If you plopped a player from 1993 down to play the game today he'd just have to learn a few keywords, get an update on stack and combat timing, and be pretty much good to go.

For the record, I quit Magic in '96 and got sucked back in in 2013-ish, and this is exactly how it worked for me.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

i never thought i'd live to see people praising set rotation as a design decision, but here we are lol

set rotation is 100% a way to push more cardboard. the only problem it "solves" is that if as a publisher / dev you are dead set on constantly adding new cards / pieces / whatever it's either set rotation, power creep, or nobody buying your new stuff.

the unspoken solution however is to just design a game to have a fixed number of pieces, then iterate on balance and interactions until it's polished to a nice shine and then you're done. it's just that this isn't exactly conducive to milking a single game for decades.

If you're designing a game that doesn't have a fixed number of pieces but instead extends into infinity without end then yeah, set rotation is actually a good idea. Magic might be a vastly better game as a self-contained LCG with a finite number of cards but it ain't, and having a single format where people with a full set of the Power Nine are playing against fresh-faced 15-year-olds who got into the game through local FNM games would be absolutely disastrous for organized competitive play. Like I assumed that I didn't actually have to elaborate on this point because the context would be evident. Obviously it's a great way to push cardboard but you can look at games like X-Wing and Netrunner which don't even have random blind-pack collectable chase elements but nonetheless continue to add more stuff and there's a strong argument to be made that the insistence on allowing literally everything from the inception of the game on up into competitive play events is only becoming increasingly unwieldy as well as in some cases hamstringing the designers from going back and revisiting older releases with the benefit of further development. Magic, cynical cash-grab or not, at least figured out how to mostly sidestep that issue decades ago, and even then they do still have unlimited "everything goes" competitive formats for people who think set rotation is for chumps.

Like yes you're right in that the problem it "solves" is entirely due to the endlessly additive nature of the game but there's a huge market for that kind of game and other games in that mold can't even get that right and run into problems because of it. The Netrunner community right now really wants a set rotation/reboot/new edition of the game to come along and unfuck a lot of things that continue to persist because of the all-in nature of the game (though to be fair you could also dodge this issue by being a golden god of game design, but sadly we live in an imperfect world).

Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 1, 2017

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck
That's horrifying. I'm glad I'm just addicted to Robert Palmerlove.

Zurui
Apr 20, 2005
Even now...



Kai Tave posted:

Like yes you're right in that the problem it "solves" is entirely due to the endlessly additive nature of the game but there's a huge market for that kind of game and other games in that mold can't even get that right and run into problems because of it. The Netrunner community right now really wants a set rotation/reboot/new edition of the game to come along and unfuck a lot of things that continue to persist because of the all-in nature of the game (though to be fair you could also dodge this issue by being a golden god of game design, but sadly we live in an imperfect world).

This is literally what killed the Star Wars miniatures game. They kept printing new stuff but toward the end sales dropped off because none of the new pieces were any good competitively. The entire paradigm for evaluating a new set was looking for pieces that fit well into one of the three competitive rock-paper-scissors faction archetypes. The creators were left with a dilemma of either creating another busted-as-gently caress archetype in an underused faction or printing minis that would make the existing poo poo even more broken. The last two sets did neither so no one bought them.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Set rotation is bad and Standard sucks, play a good format.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Netrunner isn't even exploitative aside from FFG's little "gently caress you" of requiring two core set purchases to own the max number of every card but otherwise each pack gives you a full set of a precisely defined run of cards so you know exactly what you're getting, there's literally no random chance whatsoever, no gambling, no chase aspect, but it's still a game made by imperfect humans and (speaking of things similar to D&D) some of the most busted, degenerate, janky poo poo in the game comes straight from the first core set, cards so good and degenerate that they've warped the development of the game around them in ways both big and small. Whoops.

Now yeah, you can have banlists which they kinda do with the Most Wanted List which has now entered its second phase, you can errata poo poo, that works too, but there's a point where you have to ask yourself what's better for the longevity and, frankly, consumer perception of your game...something like a set rotation, new edition, etc, or requiring competitive players to internalize a growing list of errata, banned cards, and other stuff found in some external document somewhere? "Oh, new player? Welcome to the game. Also your deck is actually illegal because of X, Y, and Z, sorry. You don't read the official website and keep up with all the rulings?"

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

The author's first mistake was being a supporter of ACKS in the first place.

Anyway isn't Vox Day (what a name) that salty Sci Fi award dude?

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

gradenko_2000 posted:

Anyway isn't Vox Day (what a name) that salty Sci Fi award dude?

Yes he's the guy who said because the Hugos weren't giving John Ringo and the Monster Hunter guy crates of awards, they had been compromised by soviets

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Yeah, Theodore Beale (Vox Day) and some other reprobates tried to use a technicality in the Hugo's nomination process to rig the awards by stirring up their followers. Turns out "no award" was a lot more popular than the nominees they rushed onto the ballot.

I believe he still stands by his characterization of an author he didn't like as a "half-black savage." Among many other crimes against the most basic decency.

Dude's a real piece of poo poo.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

gradenko_2000 posted:

The author's first mistake was being a supporter of ACKS in the first place.

Anyway isn't Vox Day (what a name) that salty Sci Fi award dude?

He is a salty Sci-Fi dude. The movement to stuff the ballot box for the Hugos because something something not enough manly rayguns and rocketships and too many minorities wasn't spearheaded by Day but he was quick to jump onto it and much like how several other thoroughly lovely activist movements in recent memory started out as something (somewhat, maybe, vaguely) less repugnant before being hollowed out and worn like a skin-suit by the hardcore assholes, the originators of the movement made the most insignificant, low-effort attempt to distance themselves from him as they could because they cared more about getting what they wanted out of the Hugos than undermining their efforts by taking an actually principled stand.

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.
The originators of the awards thing were jocularly regressive, VD&co are basically just stormfront. There's overlap. It's not total, but it's the 'ethics in games journalism' of SFF, except there actually are ethical concerns in games journalism, unaddressed as they went as part of their being used as a fig leaf.

neongrey fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Apr 1, 2017

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

Kai Tave posted:

He is a salty Sci-Fi dude. The movement to stuff the ballot box for the Hugos because something something not enough manly rayguns and rocketships and too many minorities wasn't spearheaded by Day but he was quick to jump onto it and much like how several other thoroughly lovely activist movements in recent memory started out as something (somewhat, maybe, vaguely) less repugnant before being hollowed out and worn like a skin-suit by the hardcore assholes, the originators of the movement made the most insignificant, low-effort attempt to distance themselves from him as they could because they cared more about getting what they wanted out of the Hugos than undermining their efforts by taking an actually principled stand.

He is the salty Sci-Fi dude. The only author ever to be expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (their professional organization) for posting the following of fellow SFWA author N. K. Jemisin from the shared SFWA authorial twitter :

"…it is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not."

Jemsin is, as you probably assumed, a black woman. Vox also has a charming habit of calling John Scalzi a rapist at every opportunity.

His whole screed is here, if for some reason you really feel the need to read a couple thousand words of an openly racist, misogynist, libertarian rambling about bullshit.

Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Apr 1, 2017

Zurui
Apr 20, 2005
Even now...



Liquid Communism posted:

He is the salty Sci-Fi dude. The only author ever to be expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (their professional organization) for posting the following of fellow SFWA author N. K. Jemisin from the shared SFWA authorial twitter :

"…it is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not."

Jemsin is, as you probably assumed, a black woman. Vox also has a charming habit of calling John Scalzi a rapist at every opportunity.

:stare:

...

:catstare:

...

:fuckoff:

gently caress that ACKS guy though. "Yeah, I mean, he paid for it. The ~free market~ has spoken."

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
Side note: "We are not equally homo sapiens" does not entirely mean what you may think it means, Ted Beale is convinced that white Europeans are better because they have hybrid vigor from superior neanderthal DNA. That's right. Being MORE SAPIENS is bad, in Ted Beale world!

He is a literal caveman supremacist, because there's no scientific factoid white racists will not cling to in an effort to prove their nonexistent superiority.

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

Zurui posted:

:stare:

...

:catstare:

...

:fuckoff:

gently caress that ACKS guy though. "Yeah, I mean, he paid for it. The ~free market~ has spoken."

The even more hilarious part is that rape accusation is purestrain autistic gold. It's all based on this satirical blogpost written to criticize archconservative social positions.

Vox justifies this in his inimitable style:

quote:

Wait, he claims his confession is satire? Well, that might fool anyone unfamiliar with the concept of blown cover as cover. But even if we were to take him at his word to not take him at his word, where is the satire? Satire is supposed to be ironic, but where is the irony? What is being exaggerated? Given that a) one-third of all forcible rapists are black, and, b) blacks heavily support the Democratic party while whites are fairly evenly split, the statistics indicate that it is very nearly twice as likely a rapist would be inclined to write a fan letter to a Democratic politician rather than to a conservative Republican politician.

Associated idiots have even gone so far as to self-publish a since-removed book on Amazon entitled "John Scalzi Is A Rapist : Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His Gentle Touch" under the guise of 'just asking questions' and 'I can't prove he's not a rapist...'

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Kai Tave posted:

Netrunner isn't even exploitative aside from FFG's little "gently caress you" of requiring two core set purchases to own the max number of every card but otherwise each pack gives you a full set of a precisely defined run of cards so you know exactly what you're getting, there's literally no random chance whatsoever, no gambling, no chase aspect, but it's still a game made by imperfect humans and (speaking of things similar to D&D) some of the most busted, degenerate, janky poo poo in the game comes straight from the first core set, cards so good and degenerate that they've warped the development of the game around them in ways both big and small.
As an aside, I actually burned out on the Data Pack treadmill super fast because I felt like I was buying a pack a month for maybe two or three cards out of 20. Some of the rest were playable if I ever felt like constructing some other deck, but often there would also be a poo poo-ton of chaff as well. And the print runs on packs are tiny enough that old staples were hard to find.

Compared to Magic it's way cheaper and not an actual scam (stop printing all the tournament staples in mythic you shits) but I kinda find Magic way easier to approach right now. Just want to play? Prerelease is next month, crack some packs and make a deck. Want to own an actual deck (and are rich as poo poo)? Just buy those cards second hand. Need to introduce someone to the game? Magic Duels is free on Steam.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Liquid Communism posted:

The even more hilarious part is that rape accusation is purestrain autistic gold.

I have an actual diagnose for an autism spectrum disorder and could you please not. :shobon:

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Siivola posted:

As an aside, I actually burned out on the Data Pack treadmill super fast because I felt like I was buying a pack a month for maybe two or three cards out of 20. Some of the rest were playable if I ever felt like constructing some other deck, but often there would also be a poo poo-ton of chaff as well. And the print runs on packs are tiny enough that old staples were hard to find.

Compared to Magic it's way cheaper and not an actual scam (stop printing all the tournament staples in mythic you shits) but I kinda find Magic way easier to approach right now. Just want to play? Prerelease is next month, crack some packs and make a deck. Want to own an actual deck (and are rich as poo poo)? Just buy those cards second hand. Need to introduce someone to the game? Magic Duels is free on Steam.

Fantasy Flight seems to be looking to try branching out a bit with an upcoming Netrunner set that lets you and a friend play out a persistent campaign similar to something like their Arkham Horror LCG, but it's not really as self-contained as I'd like as you still need a Netrunner core set on top of the Terminal Directive box. I agree that the entry point into Netrunner is a bit imposing, and also that there's a lot of chaff to sift through to get to the wheat which is always kind of a problem with games that shower you with gobs of options and pump out new releases as breathlessly as FFG loves to. Obviously as Tuxedo Catfish has elucidated earlier it would be better from a "designing a really tight, polished game" for them to slow down, release fewer sets with far more work and care and attention, but that wouldn't make FFG the same sort of money they no doubt get with the datapack plus big-box model.

paradoxGentleman
Dec 10, 2013

wheres the jester, I could do with some pointless nonsense right about now


My browser reacts like opening this will literally unload crates of viruses into my PC, what gives?

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

I feel like "well they shouldn't make an LCG in the first place" is sort of unsatisfying. It's not entirely wrong (I mean, I prefer my comic books collected in trade paperbacks) but at the same time I feel like the massive revenue a treadmill like that generates is actually good for the product as well (let's be honest, I don't buy enough TPBs to sustain an industry).

I've been reading Mark Rosewater (lead designer on Magic) lately and I'm sort of starting to buy into his idea that Magic's not just one game. Every new set's a big piece in the Standard rotation, but it's also a self-contained Limited environment, and there's all kinds of random made-up formats you can play with those cards like Commander. It's super weird how they've actually managed to pull that off, but I guess if you're big enough, a fractured playerbase is still a healthy market.


edit: Okay so by a complete coincidence I ended up reading about the problems the comics industry has been having, and I think I managed to pick a really bad, no good comparison: https://spacetwinks.itch.io/the-problems-with-comics

Siivola fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Apr 1, 2017

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Weren't we just talking about Macris being a crumbum? I mean, I'm sorry it took them longer than many to find out, but it hasn't been a secret for years now. At the very least, arguing that including somebody like Vox Day's paid input in your product is somehow a stand for free speech is so intellectually rancid as to defy belief.

Scyther
Dec 29, 2010

Siivola posted:

edit: Okay so by a complete coincidence I ended up reading about the problems the comics industry has been having, and I think I managed to pick a really bad, no good comparison: https://spacetwinks.itch.io/the-problems-with-comics

This was a really interesting read, thanks for posting it.

Lord_Hambrose
Nov 21, 2008

*a foul hooting fills the air*



One thing I am excited about is the L5R ccg being resurrected at Fantasy Flight as an LCG. I played that game off and on for years, and I really have enjoyed what FFG has been doing with Netrunner.

That being said, I could never really bring myself to get too heavily into Netrunner. I started out too late and to be competitive it would have cost such a big amount of money. That also includes somehow knowing what all the available cards could do. I got into Doomtown when that restarted but the suits added an interesting but over complicated axis to deck construction.

fozzy fosbourne
Apr 21, 2010

Why wasn't there a 4th edition PC game?

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Weren't we just talking about Macris being a crumbum? I mean, I'm sorry it took them longer than many to find out, but it hasn't been a secret for years now. At the very least, arguing that including somebody like Vox Day's paid input in your product is somehow a stand for free speech is so intellectually rancid as to defy belief.

Might've been in the chat thread? But yeah he's an awful person



Zurui posted:

:stare:

...

:catstare:

...

:fuckoff:

gently caress that ACKS guy though. "Yeah, I mean, he paid for it. The ~free market~ has spoken."

On the upside, Vox's weak attempts to ruin the Hugo Awards drew the all-seeing butt of Chuck Tingle into the fray and led to a lot of fun and notability for him.

fozzy fosbourne posted:

Why wasn't there a 4th edition PC game?

They sold the game license to atari who did nothing but squat on the rights through 98% of 4e lol

e- here's a good article on the fiasco http://kotaku.com/5428864/hasbro-sues-atari-over-dd-license-atari-responds

Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Apr 1, 2017

Comrade Koba
Jul 2, 2007

fozzy fosbourne posted:

Why wasn't there a 4th edition PC game?

There was, sorta.

It's a pretty heavily modified 4E, but it's there (and F2P).

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

LatwPIAT posted:

I have an actual diagnose for an autism spectrum disorder and could you please not. :shobon:

Sorry, don't mean to be offensive, but it was the best term that fit for aggressively taking something completely literally and out of context. I'll watch my language better in the future.

Rosalie_A
Oct 30, 2011

Liquid Communism posted:

the best term that fit for aggressively taking something completely literally and out of context.

"Idiotic close-minded rear end in a top hat" never goes out of style.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.
I know I'm coming back to this a bit late, but I wanted to revise a particular point I made before. Specifically, about D&D not making enough for Hasbro to bother with.

I way oversimplified that argument. Also, it gets repeated a lot generally in a way that I don't think accurately reflects what's happening. The thing is, D&D does make enough money for Hasbro to bother with. It just doesn't do it consistently, and its the way the sales cycle works for D&D that turns Hasbro/WotC off.

Also when I say the D&D team is talking to Hasbro, I don't mean the board or CEO or anything. I'm saying it as shorthand for them talking to a WotC exec and/or a Hasbro brand manager, who are talking to their superiors, on up the corporate chain. But the policy for what is acceptable is being set at the higher level. So it's not a Hasbro Senior VP or whatever deciding "get rid of D&D." Instead, that VP is telling their direct reports what ratio of investment to return on a product line is acceptable and in what circumstances, and that filters down.

In any case, while RPGs are a relatively small market, they still generates enough money to be worth chasing, and D&D is effectively bigger than the market. There's a lot of players who buy only D&D and don't even look at other RPGs, but anyone who plays other RPGs knows about - and often also buys - D&D. So when a new D&D edition launches, it absolutely does make enough money to be worth Hasbro/WotC's time. Especially given it's an independent secondary product of a subsidiary that has a well established money maker.

Unfortunately those sales begin a long downward trend after the core book release. Every splat book costs about the same to make, but trends downward in sales. Even that would be okay - the sales figures for the first few years are still good enough to be worth it. The trouble is that this cycle lasts something like six to eight years. Because of how the market and product work, you can't toss out a new edition at the around the three year mark to restart the sales cycle, which from a business perspective would be the ideal thing. You've got to wait out the next few years, and only then can you reset.

It's that long downslope that turns WotC/Hasbro off. It's not a long tail either - you're still spending just as much on development in the midst of it. Maybe more if you're gearing up for the next edition. Meanwhile the investment/return ratio has been outside what WotC/Hasbro deems acceptable for a long time. The 5E pitch had to solve that issue.

The solution Mearls et al went with was to argue they could start at a much high point, so that even the end of the slope would be at an acceptable sales number. Unsurprisingly given who was involved, this solution is basically "the same but more so." The obvious problem is you have to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars in terms of initial sales figures for it to have a chance of working. In a vacuum, the 4E + 3.x + more argument makes sense, but in practice? I'm not surprised it worked in a pitch meeting, though.

It's not the only potential solution. One alternative is to revamp the game model enough that you can shorten the major release cycle to roughly ever four years. But that would take a pretty significant rethink about how D&D works on a very basic level, which certainly wasn't in the offing with Mearls' team, and to be fair would be a tall order for any developer. Another would be to find way to stabilize sales. Essentially, to make a shallower downslope, where by the time you're ready for the next edition, you're still above the acceptable mark. Potentially a subscription centric model might have worked for this. I honestly expected this to be the way WotC/Hasbro was going near the end of 4th, but oh well.



Fake edit: As an aside, 3.5 and Essentials are in large part an attempt to get a three year reset. 3.5 mostly in terms of presentation and marketing, and Essentials just flat out.

3.5 had other reasons for existing - 3E pretty badly needed a revision and consolidation of errata at that point. Presenting it as a core book re-release and version upgrade was a clever bit of marketing to go after new edition sales numbers without actually doing a full on new edition. In fact, I would say it was a smart and very successful way to handle it.

Essentials, on the other hand, had no real reason to exist except as a attempt to induce that reset. 4E didn't need that same revision/errata update - in part because lessons learned during 3.x lead to a tighter initial rule set, and even more because the way the edition worked allowed them to drop those revisions in a more piecemeal fashion. There just wasn't the same backlog of updates to collate into a single product. So Essentials really ended up being just more splat books with fancier marketing.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

I feel like "splats with fancier marketing" is selling Essentials a bit short. From what I heard, Monster Vault and the Rules Compendium were legitimately good, relevant products. The intro stuff was cool enough that I ended up buying into the game then, entirely oblivious to how iffy the new content actually was. I legit can't understand how 4E managed to die basically right after.

I'm still real mad they stopped making that stuff. The form factor of the books and boxed sets was loving perfect and deserved to become a trendsetter. :sigh:

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
The self-effacing nature of 3.5 in preview material really worked for marketing at the time, I think. "Okay, we screwed this up, but we're going to do better with it." kinda works surprisingly well as an angle for that sort of thing with dedicated players, especially since the changes were generally fairly solid - there's nothing on the level of some of the Pathfinder changes that make me facepalm (even those are mild, but I still do facepalm).

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Comrade Koba posted:

There was, sorta.

It's a pretty heavily modified 4E, but it's there (and F2P).

I've played this, it's hard to overstate how much it sucks rear end. I've played Korean F2P games with better design.

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I've played this, it's hard to overstate how much it sucks rear end. I've played Korean F2P games with better design.

cryptic has been hollowed out into chasing the same market as korean f2p grindfests so it's really no surprise.

Comrade Koba
Jul 2, 2007

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I've played this, it's hard to overstate how much it sucks rear end. I've played Korean F2P games with better design.

Meh, I didn't think it was that bad. It's more of a hack'n'slash action joint than a classic MMO, but it had/has its moments. The crafting felt pretty innovative at the time, and the associated browser dungeoncrawling minigame was fun to play around with.

Then again, I mostly played with goons which has a tendency to make even the worst games at least bearable.

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Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Siivola posted:

I feel like "splats with fancier marketing" is selling Essentials a bit short. From what I heard, Monster Vault and the Rules Compendium were legitimately good, relevant products. The intro stuff was cool enough that I ended up buying into the game then, entirely oblivious to how iffy the new content actually was. I legit can't understand how 4E managed to die basically right after.

I'm still real mad they stopped making that stuff. The form factor of the books and boxed sets was loving perfect and deserved to become a trendsetter. :sigh:
My bad, I didn't mean it as a shot at quality.
The RC and Monster Vault were still great products. Most of the DM oriented Essentials releases are of very high quality, in fact, in contrast the PC material which was very mixed bag.

It's a presentation thing. There was really nothing in the Essentials books that justified it as a 3.5 style re-boot except as a marketing decision. They didn't really have anything that made them essentially (ha) different from the original line.

As a comparison, it's pretty easy to see the division between 3E and 3.5 just by looking at the rule material. In 4E, the division is clearly artificial. There's differences, sure, but you without prior knowledge you wouldn't be able to pick out the break point. On the player side, PHB3 is just as big a rethink of how classes could work. On the DM side, there isn't anything to point to at all.

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