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The modern successor to the Anne Rice novels are the urban fantasy/paranormal romance books which are big enough to get their own section in some stores. Thing is, Anne Rice, for all her sins and faults, was writing a vampire novel with maybe some romance in (I never read them, vampires make me want to go to sleep) but a lot of the newer genre is the other way around, romance with vampires in. Or werewolves. Or whatever, some kind of alpha-stereotype nonsense. What's-her-name who does the Anita Blake books was one of the first to ride this train to success (metaphor intentional) and there are a lot of others. It's a shame that perfectly good modern fantasy by women often just gets thrown into this category and given a book with a lady in leather pants holding a crossbow on the cover, making it utterly indistinguishable from scores of romance clones. What this means for the WoD is that they're trying to appeal to entirely the wrong people, and one of the huge successes of original WoD was that it lured a lot of people into RPGs who never would have looked at them otherwise. I don't know if that could be repeated now but it seems like they're missing an opportunity.
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Jul 6, 2017 14:19
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occamsnailfile posted:The modern successor to the Anne Rice novels are the urban fantasy/paranormal romance books which are big enough to get their own section in some stores. Thing is, Anne Rice, for all her sins and faults, was writing a vampire novel with maybe some romance in (I never read them, vampires make me want to go to sleep) but a lot of the newer genre is the other way around, romance with vampires in. Or werewolves. Or whatever, some kind of alpha-stereotype nonsense. What's-her-name who does the Anita Blake books was one of the first to ride this train to success (metaphor intentional) and there are a lot of others. Yes they're seriously missing out by not tapping into the current vampiric zeitgeist in literature. Combined with some targeted advertising and they could have housewives all over the world getting together over wine to roleplay. It could be the biggest change in RPGs since TSR got the red box stocked in Toys R Us.
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Jul 6, 2017 15:02
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Kwyndig posted:Yes they're seriously missing out by not tapping into the current vampiric zeitgeist in literature. Combined with some targeted advertising and they could have housewives all over the world getting together over wine to roleplay. It could be the biggest change in RPGs since TSR got the red box stocked in Toys R Us. This would be amazing.
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Jul 6, 2017 15:17
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Kwyndig posted:Yes they're seriously missing out by not tapping into the current vampiric zeitgeist in literature. Combined with some targeted advertising and they could have housewives all over the world getting together over wine to roleplay. It could be the biggest change in RPGs since TSR got the red box stocked in Toys R Us. Wouldn't this be Monsterhearts but, I dunno, lighter?
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Jul 6, 2017 15:18
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Anne Rice kind of varies. Like her mummy book is absolutely, straight-up, a romance that also has a subplot about someone's re-animated disembodied hand swimming around the Nile. Most of her actual Vampire books on the other hand are basically the World of Darkness. Ancient evil re-awakening, curses imposed by God or something like it, archaic hierarchies who murder anyone who breaks their rules, self-loathing parasitism, the works.
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Jul 6, 2017 15:18
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Serf posted:Wouldn't this be Monsterhearts but, I dunno, lighter? That's the sort of game I'm imagining, yes. Something light and easy on the mechanics to make a good introductory game for a group of people who've likely never touched an RPG.
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Jul 6, 2017 15:37
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Brand it with 50 Shades or Nicholas Sparks and you'll drown in money.
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Jul 6, 2017 16:14
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And then a lot of refund requests, because that is not what anyone was expecting from something billed as roleplaying and 50 Shades.
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Jul 6, 2017 16:43
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Jesus Christ, guys. I didn't mean for you to take the bait and actually argue about Fallout and BvS for two pages. I will never take any "Stop dragging CineD in here!" complaints seriously ever again.Tuxedo Catfish posted:You'd think a forum so enamored of storygames and contemptuous of rules-as-physics would be able to understand these principles by analogy. Slimnoid posted:I just want a Fallout game that takes place outside of the United States. Kwyndig posted:Considering those fans are all 20 years older? I'd certainly say it doesn't play well. For the vast majority of them the edgelord thing was a phase they grew out of and got jobs and while some of them are still involved in tabletop, they're not going to look twice at nuVampire, they've got kids now. FMguru posted:Also, V:tM was very much in step with the goth-inflected alternative culture of the 1990s. But the 1990s ended, goth culture waned in influence, and people moved on to other genres (of music, fashion, identity, gaming etc). Maybe its ripe for a revival (goth seems to be a cyclical thing) but the market circumstances would certainly point to nuVampire appealing to a much smaller audience than it did in the nineties. Comrade Koba posted:There isn't. It was never huge even back in the day, no matter what the nostalgic 40-somethings claim. occamsnailfile posted:What this means for the WoD is that they're trying to appeal to entirely the wrong people, and one of the huge successes of original WoD was that it lured a lot of people into RPGs who never would have looked at them otherwise. I don't know if that could be repeated now but it seems like they're missing an opportunity. Kwyndig posted:Yes they're seriously missing out by not tapping into the current vampiric zeitgeist in literature. Combined with some targeted advertising and they could have housewives all over the world getting together over wine to roleplay. It could be the biggest change in RPGs since TSR got the red box stocked in Toys R Us. If I were going to advise the neo-VtM developers to try to latch onto the current craze in blockbuster movies, I'd tell them to take the parts of V:tM that drew the most criticism, "superheroes with fangs," and amplify it! But attempts to wed YA vampire stuff to superheroes hasn't been very successful. (Frankenstein and Mortal Instruments). I admit, it's a peculiar comparison because action-horror has fallen into a mid-budget franchise niche. Serf posted:Wouldn't this be Monsterhearts but, I dunno, lighter?
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Jul 7, 2017 00:27
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In that specific case, how do you convince the forum and tumblr role players they need rules - and paid ones, at that?
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Jul 7, 2017 00:36
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Mors Rattus posted:In that specific case, how do you convince the forum and tumblr role players they need rules - and paid ones, at that? It's the social contract that prevents your Sonic OC from being killed by another godmode Sonic OC. Erinaceus Ericius Lupus, as Hobbes would say.
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Jul 7, 2017 00:49
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Halloween Jack posted:
I was suggesting more tying it in to blockbuster novels--and they are blockbuster, by book standards--the audience is already prepped to read things and invested in their fictional universes. oWoD wasn't driven to success by the Interview with a Vampire movie, that came like three years after 1st ed V:TM. I don't know if this is workable, mind you, but there's still some brand recognition for WoD and maybe you could persuade or create crossover. It just...requires marketing money and looking outside the echo chamber of current fandom. quote:The thing with trying to sell storygames to a brand new audience is that lots and lots of people are already doing freeform roleplaying in forums and chatrooms with no rules beyond the tenuous social contract of the people involved, and have been doing this for years. I'm not sure why there hasn't been someone breaking into that market in a big way with a rules-light narrative game that's easy to play online. Partially at least, a huge number of these freeform games are using copyrighted materials that would be ludicrously expensive to actually license. You can file off serial numbers and make a really winky adaptation, but I'm not sure how effective that would be. Back to the modern vampire romances I mentioned before, it seems a shame that nobody has tried to make a licensed game directly from some of these series--but again, expense. Jim Butcher is an online roleplaying nerd already so he understood what he was selling when he gave his blessing to Dresden Fate, not all authors are quite so familiar, and their agents likewise. And of course, we've all seen plenty of badly designed licensed flops. This is why I feel like the WoD has an opening--it offers the desired themes (or it can if they can back off the 90s edgelord nonsense for ten goddamn minutes) with a broad existing framework that would let a lot of different adapted versions of copyrighted characters exist.
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Jul 7, 2017 01:39
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I remember there being discussion as far back as the Usenet days of people doing freeform RP in fan groups and how to build rulesets to appeal to them. I don't know that its impossible, but after decades of online RP, it seems like those types have worked out whatever ad hoc systems they need to handle disagreements or uncertainty in their play. In other words a ruleset, lite or not, that only serves to facilitate RP probably won't get much traction, since they can already do the games they want. It would need to be something to enhance what they're already doing; I'm not sure what that is, if they haven't grabbed it already.
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Jul 7, 2017 03:10
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Anne Rice kind of varies. Like her mummy book is absolutely, straight-up, a romance that also has a subplot about someone's re-animated disembodied hand swimming around the Nile. Most of her actual Vampire books on the other hand are basically the World of Darkness. Ancient evil re-awakening, curses imposed by God or something like it, archaic hierarchies who murder anyone who breaks their rules, self-loathing parasitism, the works. I think that's the other way around. WoD based some of the Cam vampires off of Anne Rice's characters. Interview With The Vampire was published in the 70's, after all.
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Jul 7, 2017 07:14
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Liquid Communism posted:I think that's the other way around. WoD based some of the Cam vampires off of Anne Rice's characters. Interview With The Vampire was published in the 70's, after all. Oh yeah that's totally fair, I'm just thinking in terms of similarity, not origin.
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Jul 7, 2017 07:19
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Liquid Communism posted:I think that's the other way around. WoD based some of the Cam vampires off of Anne Rice's characters. Interview With The Vampire was published in the 70's, after all. It's embarrassingly blatant in Vampire 1st Edition; it's one of the reasons it's more or less buried and forgotten.
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Jul 7, 2017 10:45
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Fiasco + Monsterhearts
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Jul 7, 2017 11:08
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Desiden posted:I remember there being discussion as far back as the Usenet days of people doing freeform RP in fan groups and how to build rulesets to appeal to them. I don't know that its impossible, but after decades of online RP, it seems like those types have worked out whatever ad hoc systems they need to handle disagreements or uncertainty in their play. In other words a ruleset, lite or not, that only serves to facilitate RP probably won't get much traction, since they can already do the games they want. It would need to be something to enhance what they're already doing; I'm not sure what that is, if they haven't grabbed it already. They really, really haven't worked out a system to resolve disagreements. It's mostly just a combination of peer pressure, seniority, and screaming to decide things.
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Jul 7, 2017 11:26
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Serf posted:Fiasco + Monsterhearts I need this game.
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Jul 7, 2017 11:54
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Mors Rattus posted:In that specific case, how do you convince the forum and tumblr role players they need rules - and paid ones, at that? What I've found draws these kinds of role players further into the RPG industry is not a given set of rules, it's an event. Make a LARP set in their fandom, give it extremely loose rules, don't charge too, too much and you'll get tons of first time players coming out, not because they care about the system, but because they care about the event.
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Jul 7, 2017 14:14
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Meinberg posted:What I've found draws these kinds of role players further into the RPG industry is not a given set of rules, it's an event. Make a LARP set in their fandom, give it extremely loose rules, don't charge too, too much and you'll get tons of first time players coming out, not because they care about the system, but because they care about the event. Requires them to be geographically concentrated, when online RP is mostly people who are geographically dispersed. I'm not gonna say LARP is dead, because apparently it isn't; but I don't think any plan to convert online RPers to in-person RPers en masse is viable.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:44
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Maybe try an online event like an ARG?
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Jul 7, 2017 21:53
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Leperflesh posted:Requires them to be geographically concentrated, when online RP is mostly people who are geographically dispersed. Anecdotally, whenever I attempted to introduce people I met in an online RP environment to LARPs, it was inevitably a miserable failure - because there are reasons why a lot of these people are more comfortable RPing online. That's not a knock on them - I met my wife on an online RPing community, for crying out loud - just a recognition of the different playstyles. It's a lot easier for someone who is dealing with social anxiety, or is disabled, or is just plain busy to deal with the (typically) slower pace of online play; online play also allows for a much easier time exploring a character's inner life in a way that face-to-face RPing doesn't (in that if I want to say 'my character is thinking X' in a LARP I have to find some way to communicate that, whereas online I can just type it and be done). The two playstyles are not interchangeable by any stretch of the imagination, and treating them like they are or even should be is an exercise in futility. (I agree with Leperflesh, basically, in case that was unclear)
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Jul 8, 2017 03:46
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So the ENnies are up (here), and there's a conspicuous lack of 5e and Pathfinder. Or more specifically, Paizo and WotC. (I think a few third party items were up, and one PF token set.) Did they finally catch on that it's a scam?
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Jul 9, 2017 06:14
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moths posted:So the ENnies are up (here), and there's a conspicuous lack of 5e and Pathfinder. Or more specifically, Paizo and WotC. (I think a few third party items were up, and one PF token set.)
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Jul 9, 2017 06:49
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Yrah, WoTC isn't publishing much, and Pathfinder is finally running out of things to sloppily convert from 3.5.
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Jul 9, 2017 18:27
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I'm excited for Starfinder for one reason: sci-fi themed maps and pawns.
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Jul 9, 2017 19:47
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Gobbeldygook posted:it was just 5e versions of classic dungeons. This entirely explains why it was nominated for an ennie.
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Jul 9, 2017 19:56
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Surprised Veins of the Earth didn't show up in more categories, some of the best RPG writing of the year to me. edit: I needed more coffee. It's there a bunch. BinaryDoubts fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jul 9, 2017 |
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Jul 9, 2017 22:00
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Still laughing at Blood in the Chocolate getting nominated for best adventure despite it being an arbitrary gently caress-you fest full the most predictable fetish material possible in a Willy Wonka adventure and the ability to randomly walk in on an ooma-looma gang rape.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:10
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I love that Midnight Syndicate is getting their latest cd nominated for an ENnie. They do good work. (Also Plus One Forward is a neat podcast if you like PbtA games.)
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Jul 9, 2017 22:19
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I'm a bit surprised at the love for Veins of the Earth here, but I'm still reading through the bestiary, so maybe it gets better later. I mean, you have atomic bees next to a gigaferret (those are the actual names in the book), both worth the same XP, but every atomic beesting is a save or die, while the gigaferret is just a bigass ferret. It's the kind of old school design that gets poo poo on a lot here in this forum. It needed more proofreading - I found a couple of spelling/grammar errors. Some of the monsters seem to be based on people who disagree with the writer online (e.g. the knotsmen who literally tie themselves into knots to avoid admitting their faults, or the canonites of the civilopede who will never admit to anything less than perfect certainty). The ideas are very hit and miss - I like the idea of basing monsters on real animals and science, but the level of science you get is like someone who read the table of contents on a textbook. For instance, I do like the idea of making a monster based on Caddisfly larvae, but the dozens of legendary swords is over the top. I unreservedly love the meta-villainy of the anglerlich. The civilopede is fun - and the idea of a being that is able to objectively determine great art is one I've seen come up a few times lately in fantasy media. I'm liking the book enough to keep going, so I don't want anyone to think I'm taking a huge poo poo on it or anything. I'm just surprised it's getting love here. Oh, and I found after getting it, while reading through the acknowledgements, that Zak S is credited for "editing, inspiration, and support." I don't know if he got paid for it. So if his involvement is a deal-breaker for you (as I know it is for some of you), now you are warned and can stay away.
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Jul 9, 2017 22:35
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Tales From the Loop deserves all the art awards and Faith: A Garden in Hell is gorgeous.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:11
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Jimbozig posted:I'm a bit surprised at the love for Veins of the Earth here, but I'm still reading through the bestiary, so maybe it gets better later. I think the bestiary is the weakest part of the book. That said, my standout thought about Veins was when it dawned on me that, I had just read about a setting that was a days march underground. It has dozens of monsters that are almost certain to kill party members. And all the people that live there are too alien to be playable as characters (arguably, I guess, but there certainly isn't any advice for it.). Edit: Bestiary? More like worstiary. 
DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 00:53
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Liquid Communism posted:Yrah, WoTC isn't publishing much, and Pathfinder is finally running out of things to sloppily convert from 3.5.
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Jul 10, 2017 04:04
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Halloween Jack posted:Hey, that's unfair. Paizo has gone all the way back to AD&D2e to blatantly rip off previously published D&D stuff. wait what is this in reference to
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Jul 10, 2017 04:08
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Jimbozig posted:I'm a bit surprised at the love for Veins of the Earth here, but I'm still reading through the bestiary, so maybe it gets better later. Haha what. Jimbozig posted:Oh, and I found after getting it, while reading through the acknowledgements, that Zak S is credited for "editing, inspiration, and support." I don't know if he got paid for it. So if his involvement is a deal-breaker for you (as I know it is for some of you), now you are warned and can stay away. Found your problem.
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Jul 10, 2017 04:21
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Jimbozig posted:Some of the monsters seem to be based on people who disagree with the writer online (e.g. the knotsmen who literally tie themselves into knots to avoid admitting their faults, or the canonites of the civilopede who will never admit to anything less than perfect certainty). I know there's an adventure out there that features two "Troll Lords" alone in a room, piling up garbage, and saying that they're rebuilding the wizard Zagyg's castle. Yeesh. gradenko_2000 posted:wait what is this in reference to Interviewer: How will Golarion's multiverse be unique? Stewart: It won't. We're going to rip off Planescape as hard as we can. Interviewer: I'll bet I can fit both of your balls in my mouth. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 05:13
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Jimbozig posted:I'm a bit surprised at the love for Veins of the Earth here, but I'm still reading through the bestiary, so maybe it gets better later. I don't think anyone's going to argue that the names for these things are often goofy, and they're almost universally lethal as hell. But for me, it's the concepts that are so compelling. Take the atomic bee: it's a fist-sized bee with a carapace made of something like uranium, that pollinates orchards of radioactive metal flowers cultivated by a race of rare-earth-and-plasma Archeans who exist in geologic time and think of humans as "something between hive member and a meme-transmitter," unable to comprehend how anything could live and die so fast and maintain a culture. The beehives are basically nuclear reactors, and their honey is precious beyond the dreams of kings. Their sting blows you out of existence so fast that it turns you into an agonized radioactive ghost outside of space and time. The name is dumb. Atomic bees are loving cool. The gigaferret is literally just a giant man-eating ferret, which is a lot more grounded than the deep weirdness of stuff like the Archaeans, Atomic Bees, Radiolarians, and so on. And that's good, because having some things that are more mundane makes the crazy poo poo stand out more strongly. In the ferret's case, it's something mundane that can also emphasize how disadvantaged humans are in an underground environment, where not being able to cling to walls, see in the dark, or move like it was boneless through tiny crawlspaces is a serious detriment to your survival. Again, dumb name, but in the context of the setting it's a neat concept.
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Jul 10, 2017 07:40
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Okay but what do you actually do with all that?
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Jul 10, 2017 08:27
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