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homullus posted:This sounds like D&D brain damage. Some people like games that are equipment or character feat/spell/ability heavy; others believe that this is what all games are supposed to be like. The reason it's called a Roleplaying Game is because there's an actual game attached to the roleplaying. I've bought products that are purely setting information before and from my experience those products are really cool but also not very useful. I'm not saying that every game has to be heavy on character options, I'm saying that if your expansion to the game has absolutely no new character options it's not adding much new content. Variations on character options are what make a setting come alive. If you're not adding those new options, you're just writing a weird almanac.
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Apr 18, 2017 21:56
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^^^Apparently I couldn't have timed this post of mine better if I tried. I'm pretty sure that it was White Wolf writers back when White Wolf was an actual company that talked about sourcebook sales and basically the gist of it was that stuff that had player-facing crunch could be counted on to sell, period. Like you still had the gradual trailoff of sales as a line went on that necessitated periodic new edition reboots, but by and large I stand by my point that most of the people interested specifically in RPG supplements as opposed to artbooks, fictional atlases, mythic travelogues, or whatever view the inclusion of crunch as a value-add and by the same token would view the omission of crunch as a detriment, even if they never actually do more than read it on the can.
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Apr 18, 2017 21:59
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Kai Tave posted:^^^Apparently I couldn't have timed this post of mine better if I tried. Several companies, when talking about the economics of sourcebook sales, have stated this. Personally I don't have an issue with it as long as the new content isn't bad, because you have to do something to get people to buy your books. It's when the new rules material is terrible that I start getting mad at companies for doing it (I'm looking at you TSR).
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Apr 18, 2017 22:14
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It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing
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Apr 18, 2017 22:23
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Eberron is great but the simplified cosmology is a travesty
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Apr 18, 2017 22:26
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Elfgames posted:It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing I'm pretty sure people were explicitly saying that 4e has the best writing in D&D on the previous page.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:25
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you can have my Elemental Plane of Snow That Is Exactly The Right Consistency For Snowballs, You Know The Kind when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers
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Apr 18, 2017 22:28
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Elfgames posted:It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing It's less about whether they can go together and more about whether hiring an outside writer or editor will make you more or less money.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:30
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All I Want is a version of D&D 4e with all the feat taxes and patches that have accumulated over time streamlined in set in something as fun as Eberron, with rules for escalating social situations into combat.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:31
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So hey, anyone know how WotC's fiction department is doing? I just realized Bob Salvatore is still writing Drizzt novels. What if Hasbro's hogging the license just so they can keep churning out books?
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Apr 18, 2017 22:36
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The problem with the every-book-must-have-crunch-in-it publishing model is that it's hard to produce a continuous stream of crunch that doesn't suffer from power creep, being straight-up broken, being redundant or unnecessary, or eventually becoming a giant unparsable mess that requires a player to sift through 30 separate books to make a character or buy equipment or choose combat maneuvers or whatever. D20 was famous for this, but see also GURPS 3E and even D&D 4E (for all its laudable focus of core classes being balanced and reskinning, 4E still had massive feat bloat).
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Apr 18, 2017 22:38
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Elfgames posted:It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing You've completely misread my point then. I don't believe they can't go hand in hand but plenty of other people do, and so you get the backlash against D&D4E for being "too boardgamey/too much like an MMO/fireballs and swords are exactly the same and I can't roleplay and dissociated mechanics" which in turn produces Next, a triumphant return to rules that are lovely but nobody cares because the GM will fix them along with naturalistic language creating ambiguities being held up as a feature and not a bug. The roleplaying hobby, for whatever reason, does not place high value on solid, technically competent, non-obfuscatory game design and will excuse a lot of things that other tabletop game hobbyists would not. This isn't to say that other tabletop hobbies don't have their share of shallow, lovely games that everybody loves, someone is still buying all those Munchkin expansions, but in general that side of the hobby places more value on games with solid rulesets. Games Workshop may be the single biggest exception to this but there've been a lot of competitors carving away at GW's formerly dominant hold on the fantasy/sci-fi minis game market and at least part of it is people getting fed up at having to pay ultra-premium prices for games whose rules are dogshit and take forever to boot.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:41
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I like Vincent Baker's games but I feel like they generally want the GM to be much more capable of improvising at a high level of detail than I can.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:42
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FMguru posted:The problem with the every-book-must-have-crunch-in-it publishing model is that it's hard to produce a continuous stream of crunch that doesn't suffer from power creep, being straight-up broken, being redundant or unnecessary, or eventually becoming a giant unparsable mess that requires a player to sift through 30 separate books to make a character or buy equipment or choose combat maneuvers or whatever. D20 was famous for this, but see also GURPS 3E and even D&D 4E (for all its laudable focus of core classes being balanced and reskinning, 4E still had massive feat bloat). The solution is to make feats more impactful so you don't have to print so many of them and then do slight expansions of each class while occasionally adding new classes. This is more or less what WotC did before the Essentials reboot (except a lot of feats were dumb and unnecessary). There will always be new classes to add and perhaps slight additions to class' kit so you can definitely keep that going for a while until you want to start over with a new edition. You can also release campaign settings/setting expansions that have some crunch but not so crunch focused as like a Player's Handbook (also what 4e did). There are a bunch of things you can do if you keep a tight ship and make sure to always play test extensively.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:47
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Elfgames posted:It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing This goes unsaid way too much. 4e's setting and cosmology were significant improvements on what came before, and set up in a way that allowed for any specific thing someone happened to like from past editions to remain and factor into the game. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Eberron is great but the simplified cosmology is a travesty It wasn't really simplified, just organized more intuitively. Insofar as you needed one for game/story purposes you could still find an infinite expanse of perfect snow or w/e in the depths of the Elemental Chaos.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:50
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FMguru posted:The problem with the every-book-must-have-crunch-in-it publishing model is that it's hard to produce a continuous stream of crunch that doesn't suffer from power creep, being straight-up broken, being redundant or unnecessary, or eventually becoming a giant unparsable mess that requires a player to sift through 30 separate books to make a character or buy equipment or choose combat maneuvers or whatever. D20 was famous for this, but see also GURPS 3E and even D&D 4E (for all its laudable focus of core classes being balanced and reskinning, 4E still had massive feat bloat). Tabletop RPGs are a lot like television. Even if you start with a narrowly defined focus and super-tight concept, eventually you're filming Prison Break season 12: Escape from Planken Municipal Jail in Lichtenstein. The solution is to predefine your endpoint and start a new project when you get there.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:51
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Impermanent posted:All I Want is a version of D&D 4e with all the feat taxes and patches that have accumulated over time streamlined in set in something as fun as Eberron, with rules for escalating social situations into combat. I always thought that the Essentials line simplified the wrong parts of 4e. Powers are cool because they give you interesting decisions in play. Feats are boring passives or small fiddly and conditional bonuses that aren't worth the mental overhead to track. I'd love to see a 4e comparable ruleset that has implicit magic item and feat bonuses rolled into baseline character progression without having to jury rig the calculations.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:57
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The dirty secret of 4e is that your numbers going up over time is purely illusory once the math fixes are in. It's easier to just not do the gradual number advancement, because the goalposts are moving just as fast. Just gain new powers.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:00
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Your numbers going up is good because it means you're that much stronger than things lower level than you and so on. I'd have liked to see accuracy and defenses grow less sharply with level but it's still good to be able to look at a high-paragon 4E character and see that they could singlehandedly depopulate an entire kobold warren or whatever.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:12
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Impermanent posted:All I Want is a version of D&D 4e with all the feat taxes and patches that have accumulated over time streamlined in set in something as fun as Eberron, with rules for escalating social situations into combat. whydirt posted:I always thought that the Essentials line simplified the wrong parts of 4e. Powers are cool because they give you interesting decisions in play. Feats are boring passives or small fiddly and conditional bonuses that aren't worth the mental overhead to track. I am going to keep linking this thing I did until I get feedback on it, goddamnit.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:36
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Kai Tave posted:You've completely misread my point then. I don't believe they can't go hand in hand but plenty of other people do, and so you get the backlash against D&D4E for being "too boardgamey/too much like an MMO/fireballs and swords are exactly the same and I can't roleplay and dissociated mechanics" which in turn produces Next, a triumphant return to rules that are lovely but nobody cares because the GM will fix them along with naturalistic language creating ambiguities being held up as a feature and not a bug. The roleplaying hobby, for whatever reason, does not place high value on solid, technically competent, non-obfuscatory game design and will excuse a lot of things that other tabletop game hobbyists would not. This isn't to say that other tabletop hobbies don't have their share of shallow, lovely games that everybody loves, someone is still buying all those Munchkin expansions, but in general that side of the hobby places more value on games with solid rulesets. Games Workshop may be the single biggest exception to this but there've been a lot of competitors carving away at GW's formerly dominant hold on the fantasy/sci-fi minis game market and at least part of it is people getting fed up at having to pay ultra-premium prices for games whose rules are dogshit and take forever to boot. The problem i see with this is that the "roleplaying hobby" isn't the same as the "D&D" hobby there are way more people who just play D&D and don't care about tabletop games as a whole but pleople who actually care about tabletop roleplaying as a hobby are way more likely to care about rules design.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:47
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Mechanics-free source books just scream "90's excess" to me. Earthdawn had several (and more that had like 2 pages of mechanics for 90 pages of setting lore). Turns out a mechanics-free sourcebook is just an expensive, low-quality short story collection. Better to just buy a crappy tie-in novel; it will still be bad, but it will cost a third as much.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:48
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dwarf74 posted:Mechanics-free source books just scream "90's excess" to me. see that's the problem an actual good mechanics free source book would best be written way differently than a story it should be a plot element how it fits into the base setting and ways to integrate it into your own campaign as well as a good chunk of plot hooks and unexplained bits.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:I am going to keep linking this thing I did until I get feedback on it, goddamnit. Reddit stopped loading on my phone ages ago and tbh I prefer it that way. Got any other linkage?
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Apr 18, 2017 23:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I am going to keep linking this thing I did until I get feedback on it, goddamnit. does the math work? If yes good if no bad. also i think removing feats would remove a few more +X's to hit and damage than your accounting for right? Elfgames fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 18, 2017 23:59
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PJOmega posted:Reddit stopped loading on my phone ages ago and tbh I prefer it that way. Got any other linkage? I don't think I ever rewrote this anywhere else, so this will have to do for now.     
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Apr 19, 2017 00:03
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The internet's reaction to all your work summed up in one perfect question:some dude posted:Just a random question, but why go through all this trouble, and why not just play 5E?
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Apr 19, 2017 00:05
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Frankly, because 5e doesn't have marks, healing surges, Tide of Iron, double-digit HP counts at level 1, and monster math that works.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:13
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slap me and kiss me posted:The internet's reaction to all your work summed up in one perfect question: Because everything else about 4e is better. People can have nuanced views on things.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:Frankly, because 5e doesn't have marks, healing surges, Tide of Iron, double-digit HP counts at level 1, and monster math that works. Sampatrick posted:Because everything else about 4e is better. People can have nuanced views on things. I don't think I was clear enough. I'm not belittling gradenko's work, I'm belittling the internet.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:20
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Siivola posted:So hey, anyone know how WotC's fiction department is doing? I just realized Bob Salvatore is still writing Drizzt novels. I wouldn't be surprised. From what I've been told, back when it was TSR, the traditional publishing arm dwarfed the games development arm.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:25
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Elfgames posted:The problem i see with this is that the "roleplaying hobby" isn't the same as the "D&D" hobby there are way more people who just play D&D and don't care about tabletop games as a whole but pleople who actually care about tabletop roleplaying as a hobby are way more likely to care about rules design. Nah, even people who aren't wedded to D&D aren't necessarily going to be all-in on rigorous game design and clarity of technical writing. It's not like D&D has a monopoly on that poo poo, White Wolf published a gazillion books full of fluff backed up by rules of dubious merit. Early White Wolf designers didn't even understand the basic math behind their own resolution system to the point that when Greg Stolze asked them a question about what the difference in odds was between raising/lowering dice in the pool and raising/lowering the TN of the difficulty check was all he got in return was blank looks and shrugs, and while you could argue that this is simply a product of the time and modern day hobbyists care more about that I'll point to the latest edition of Exalted, a hugely hyped crowdfunding darling, which still suffers from naturalistic language-itis and unclear rule interactions in a game chock fuckin full of crunchy powers, and this is something they've had multiple editions to get right but there you go. RPGs rarely get marketed principally on the strength of their mechanics and tech writing because for the most part the hobby doesn't care as much about that or, at best, has resigned itself to the fact that they aren't going to get it and have to do the work themselves. slap me and kiss me posted:The internet's reaction to all your work summed up in one perfect question: The better question would be why go to all that trouble when you could just not play 5E. Taking a thoroughly lovely game and trying to unshit it is about as productive as putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:27
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I really want a game that is to Exalted what 4E is to D&D
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Apr 19, 2017 00:28
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The traditional publishing arm has a potential for much higher profits. You only have to pay three people to make a novel, not counting the cost of printing, and licensed work you can avoid most if not all royalties.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I really want a game that is to Exalted what 4E is to D&D That's already Exalted 3E, which is to say it's the barest beginnings of an overture to playability that's still weighed down by massive amounts of accountancy and lovely legacy mechanics that will surely get walked back into pure regressive territory next time around.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:31
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slap me and kiss me posted:I don't think I was clear enough. I'm not belittling gradenko's work, I'm belittling the internet. Ah, my apologies. Kai Tave posted:The better question would be why go to all that trouble when you could just not play 5E. Taking a thoroughly lovely game and trying to unshit it is about as productive as putting lipstick on the proverbial pig. I wasn't trying to "fix 5e by making 4e more like 5e", despite the title. I was trying to improve 4e by adopting this one "math trick" of handing out all of the "number treadmill" bonuses for free, and condensing it into a single addend.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:34
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Ferrinus posted:That's already Exalted 3E, which is to say it's the barest beginnings of an overture to playability that's still weighed down by massive amounts of accountancy and lovely legacy mechanics that will surely get walked back into pure regressive territory next time around. 4e is a legitimately good game. There are things it could do better, but saying it's the barest beginning of playability is absurd. There are very few RPGs on the market that have math as tight as 4e, especially if you're looking at what the math looks like in the Monster Vault.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:Ah, my apologies. No sweat! I think that what you're doing is super valuable, and it's a drat shame that WOTC didn't pursue this sort of approach for 5e rather than what we got.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:36
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Kwyndig posted:There's your crux. A general 'technical writing' freelance posting will offer around $40 an hour to start, but it really depends on what your specialty is, that's for like writing manuals for tractors or similar. I think I can provide another data point. My editing work on board-game rulebooks often amounts to technical writing. One internal metric I use is my edit count divided by the original word count, and a typical board-game rulebook hits 50% or more. Some games require four, five, six passes, hitting really close to 100% or more than 100%. I worked on one not too long ago that doubled in word count because it was just so underdeveloped. Right now I charge $40 per hour, which is definitely lower than I could charge in other fields. This hourly rate can work out to anywhere between a couple hundred (for well-written, smaller rulebooks) to one or two thousand (for poorly written, larger rulebooks). This level of editing is, unfortunately, prohibitively expensive for larger RPGs, even though they're a bit easier because they're not solid blocks of rules. A large RPG (75-100k words) with mediocre writing would probably reach mid-four figures or more if I went in planning to do technical-level editing. That's not a particularly enticing ask for anyone but big names or people really committed to quality, so I usually have to set a per-word rate and triage well. I can't really "do it all" like I can with board games.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:38
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What board games have you worked on? Or would that come dangerously close to doxx territory since your name is presumably in the manual?
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