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Lord_Hambrose posted:Is this them desperately trying to find a product someone will care about? I have played a little Smash Up, and while a fun filler game it seems hard to prop up a company with. I attended a panel with Paul Peterson on it where he said that Smash Up outsells just about every card game he's ever seen. It's AEG's Munchkin.
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Aug 28, 2017 21:55
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Kwyndig posted:I'm more impressed with how out of touch he is. He says he wants a Settlers, but Settlers sat on the shelves for years before it hit real mass market. Also his don't want list is basically everything he would remotely have experience with. I get the notion he thinks he needs, which is to build up hobbyist rep for a game and then take it mass market, rather than trying to mass market something without that word of mouth. Of course, it's the sort of Field of Dreams business strategy he's done for ages where he seems to think making a huge hit is just a ritual you can map out to appease the Market Gods. Granted, I was mostly amused by "we got 70 pitches and only took 1!... so maybe you've got a shot?" Halloween Jack posted:As a child I never would've believed that Lovecraftian...stuff would become so popular, but I also would never have believed it would become this sort of TVTropes Ranch Dressing that people would just pour on top of everything. It's got a lot of notability amongst nerds and carries no licensors, for the most part. Seeing it in Starfinger made me gag, but I guess I shouldn't even be surprised at this point.
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Aug 29, 2017 00:49
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Pathfinder had an entire adventure path and at least one module out of another one centered around Lovecraft poo poo, because as best as I can tell they realized they could just use a ton of stuff from Cthulhu d20 as open content and thus ran with it as far as they could.
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Aug 29, 2017 01:00
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Granted, I was mostly amused by "we got 70 pitches and only took 1!... so maybe you've got a shot?" I'm going to end up seeking ~125 pitches in 2017 and invest in maybe two of them. Many of the rest will find funding elsewhere, but they keep filling up my dance card because our firm and partners have a good rep.
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Aug 29, 2017 01:08
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unseenlibrarian posted:Pathfinder had an entire adventure path and at least one module out of another one centered around Lovecraft poo poo, because as best as I can tell they realized they could just use a ton of stuff from Cthulhu d20 as open content and thus ran with it as far as they could. Yeah, that's no secret, and I guess if Starfinger is just After Golarion it's pretty well canon to have Lovecraft's leftovers rolling around in the lore, but it pretty much takes me out of a setting to have Nyarlathotep show up to do a Michigan J. Frog impression*. * this does not actually happen but it may as well at this point
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Aug 29, 2017 01:09
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Given that Golarion is pretty much just a nerd theme park, animatronic Old Ones are pretty much par for the course.
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Aug 29, 2017 02:05
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Haystack posted:Given that Golarion is pretty much just a nerd theme park, animatronic Old Ones are pretty much par for the course. We're Old Ones on the Moon We're worshippers of Thoon Your mind is ours So just while the hours As we sing our cheery tune.
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Aug 29, 2017 02:17
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Subjunctive posted:I'm going to end up seeking ~125 pitches in 2017 and invest in maybe two of them. Many of the rest will find funding elsewhere, but they keep filling up my dance card because our firm and partners have a good rep. To be fair, I imagine you're also not Ryan Dancey. 
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Aug 29, 2017 02:23
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Halloween Jack posted:Nah, it was a critical and commercial success. It's places like RedLetterMedia or whatever that get people thinking that everyone hated every film. And far more of them should be one executive loving over a rival in the same corp.
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Aug 29, 2017 02:25
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Halloween Jack posted:Nah, it was a critical and commercial success. It's places like RedLetterMedia or whatever that get people thinking that everyone hated every film. Every corp should act in exactly the same way here because there is presumably some ROI in trying to gently caress over shadow-runners (because it increases the rates they charge your competition, which means you'll get run at less...) but everyone should have basically the same approach.
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Aug 29, 2017 02:32
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To be fair, I imagine you're also not Ryan Dancey. Can you take the chance?
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Aug 29, 2017 02:45
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Kurieg posted:We're Old Ones on the Moon 
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Aug 29, 2017 02:56
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's got a lot of notability amongst nerds and carries no licensors, for the most part.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:20
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Kurieg posted:We're Old Ones on the Moon
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Aug 29, 2017 03:22
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The general gist with Johnson betrayals that I've always gone with is that only incredibly stupid and arrogant Johnsons try it. The idea is that, by backstabbing the team, they pocket however much the team was going to be paid (which is why you always get an advance on it). Of course, failure leads to immediate death by Shadowrunners, and even if you succeed, other teams are going to catch wind and not work with you. Remember, the team ideally doesn't know or find out who Mr Johnson is. Your fixer on the other hand DOES have the job of picking and choosing jobs and making sure the team doesn't get backstabbed precisely like this. Even if Mr Johnson gets away with it, that fixer is going to spread word, and suddenly Mr Johnson isn't very useful to his own company. What this translates down to is, as a GM, if you want the team to get backstabbed, make sure there's a good reason that a) it happens in the first place, and b) nobody, including the fixer who's job it is to vet this poo poo in advance, could see it coming. It's one of the reasons why "Mr Johnson betrays you for the cash" in of itself is so boring. It SHOULD be a big deal, but it becomes cliche, and it's a cliche that damages the game itself just by existing.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Nah, it was a critical and commercial success. It's places like RedLetterMedia or whatever that get people thinking that everyone hated every film. Yeah, and then 5e adds GOD. quote:The Grid Overwatch Division of the Corporate Court Matrix Authority is responsible for hands-on policing of the international Matrix. Individual officers of GOD, called G-Men, are highly-skilled deckers drawn from the ranks of the AAA Corporate Court members. GOD's primary function is to investigate matrix crimes that impact multiple megacorporations, including claims of intercorporate sabotage. They are reported to have a great deal of autonomy and often patrol public nodes when not investigating a specific crime. This is who they have staffing the Matrix based panopticon. A force of elites drawn from all the AAA corps, and specifically targeted at The poo poo Runners Do.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:52
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Ugh. I was younger and less brilliant then, but one thing I really disliked about 4e was that it seems shadowruns should be impossible, without a million plus in financing, if ordinary security procedures are followed. Like, every car on the road can be tracked everywhere it goes.
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Aug 29, 2017 04:13
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Funny enough, one of the few things they did right with 5e is HOW they handled GOD. Basically, when you're being mostly legal, you're fine. Once you start hacking, however, you essentially get a timer. The timer's going down regardless, and the more openly illegal poo poo you do, the faster it goes down. I mean, up, since it's additive, not subtractive, but you get the idea. When it hits it's threshold, you have now caught GOD's attention, and it's a Bad Thing that means, amongst other stuff, it's time to stop hacking and get the gently caress out of wherever you are. It works because it's not just a single binary roll - it's a constant tension that goes up as time goes by. It also rewards at least trying to plan some of the poo poo out, because there's no way to stop that timer outside of completely leaving the network entirely and starting over again, so once you actually start Doing Illegal Stuff, it's loving go time. It helps ensure the decker is actually playing alongside the others, too - you can't just "do the hack" the night before and your character is sleeping in while the others do their thing in meat space. And because it's an actual timer, not a single binary state, you'll never have the problem of Doing A Hack once, and then getting caught immediately and that's that. It should be noted that this timer is independent of whatever's going down in the actual run in meat-space. Your team being physically caught doesn't effect the timer. It's essentially a countdown on how long until that panopticon actually picks you up. You could Be Real lovely At Hacking and get caught in the server, duke it out with some IC while frantically finishing your download, and still get out before GOD gets involved. It works as and only as a tension timer. Which is why it works! And of course, if you disconnect entirely before the timer hits, GOD never even knew you were there. The point is, it takes actual time for them to actually notice this illegal poo poo in the entirety of the Matrix. It's not immediate, and if you're fast, good, and a little lucky, it'll never catch you. Just like your teammates in their various illegal actions.
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Aug 29, 2017 04:13
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While over-reliance on the "Mr. Johnson fucks over the PCs" trope is stupid, the fact that it exists isn't necessarily an issue; the PCs' careers should be abnormal based solely on the fact that they're PCs, so of course they're going to get backstabbing Mr. Johnsons; a long series of perfectly ordinary and sensible runs gets boring, because it's... ordinary. Having said that, I've always been of the opinion that the first several runs any players receives should have nothing to do with corp-on-corp shenanigans and should be mostly what I consider the most likely scenario for a crew of low-level, no-reputation, straight-out-of-chargen shadowrunners to get hired - namely, Middle Manager A has been embezzling or otherwise doing shady poo poo, and his bosses are about to find out, so he hires the equivalent of disposable street thugs to cause a ruckus and, if he's lucky, kill/discredit/kidnap the security chief that's nosing around his private accounts. PCs should need a rep before they get hired to steal the competitor's prototype or blow up a manufacturing facility or some poo poo, because any corp that wants that stuff done isn't going to cheap out by hiring riff-raff. They'll look for low bids, obviously, but if there's a chance it will actually affect the bottom line of the megacorp, even by an iota, they'll want results.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:29
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Halloween Jack posted:As a child I never would've believed that Lovecraftian...stuff would become so popular, but I also would never have believed it would become this sort of TVTropes Ranch Dressing that people would just pour on top of everything. Lovecraft had been popular among sections of 'purist' literature buffs and horror writers shortly after he died, eventually it bled out in mainstream nerd and horror culture.Add to that the influx of 'normies' diving into escapist nerd culture for escapist purposes after the economy crashed and then Trump get elected it shouldn't be surprising. See Liberals on Twitter comparing everything to Harry Potter. TvTropes pedantic nitpicking is actually insanely mainstream because it's all the fun of discovering things and analyzing them but without the downside of understanding deeper issues or themes (or these themes being simplistic).
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Aug 29, 2017 05:47
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:While over-reliance on the "Mr. Johnson fucks over the PCs" trope is stupid, the fact that it exists isn't necessarily an issue; the PCs' careers should be abnormal based solely on the fact that they're PCs, so of course they're going to get backstabbing Mr. Johnsons; a long series of perfectly ordinary and sensible runs gets boring, because it's... ordinary. Scaling's a huge problem in Shadowrun. The rules as written want a team of experts, each with hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth of training, cyber, tech, or magic to take on runs at 3k a pop. The books' payout values are just about enough to keep the PCs in lifestyle and consumable gear, God help you if your Decker loses his deck, or someone takes serious enough damage to need a cyber replacement.
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Aug 29, 2017 06:41
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NutritiousSnack posted:Lovecraft had been popular among sections of 'purist' literature buffs and horror writers shortly after he died, eventually it bled out in mainstream nerd and horror culture.Add to that the influx of 'normies' diving into escapist nerd culture for escapist purposes after the economy crashed and then Trump get elected it shouldn't be surprising. See Liberals on Twitter comparing everything to Harry Potter. TvTropes pedantic nitpicking is actually insanely mainstream because it's all the fun of discovering things and analyzing them but without the downside of understanding deeper issues or themes (or these themes being simplistic). Robert E Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were pen pals, and Howard's work is heavily influenced by Lovecraft. To the extent that like half of the Conan stories have elder gods and unfathomable things from the outer reaches etc. in them. So, Lovecraft has been part of a certain strain of low fantasy since before he died. Conan is a separate lineage from Tolkien, of course, and Tolkien (and Vance) probably more heavily influenced early editions of D&D than Howard or Lovecraft did, but for example Deities and Demigods included Cthulhu mythos stuff. Basically: Lovecraft has been an influence on fantasy writing since the 1930s and fantasy gaming since the 1970s.
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Aug 29, 2017 07:15
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Liquid Communism posted:Scaling's a huge problem in Shadowrun. The rules as written want a team of experts, each with hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth of training, cyber, tech, or magic to take on runs at 3k a pop. The books' payout values are just about enough to keep the PCs in lifestyle and consumable gear, God help you if your Decker loses his deck, or someone takes serious enough damage to need a cyber replacement. I feel like this is a problem with a lot of RPG systems, the rewards for the risks seem so trivial. It's basically barely above standard in-universe wages.
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Aug 29, 2017 07:22
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Liquid Communism posted:Scaling's a huge problem in Shadowrun. The rules as written want a team of experts, each with hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth of training, cyber, tech, or magic to take on runs at 3k a pop. The books' payout values are just about enough to keep the PCs in lifestyle and consumable gear, God help you if your Decker loses his deck, or someone takes serious enough damage to need a cyber replacement.
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Aug 29, 2017 13:19
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Zereth posted:I believe just stealing cars and selling them to chop shops is way, way more profitable than the suggested shadowrun payouts. Like not even expensive luxury cars. It makes me think that maybe there's two different games in Shadowrun -- the high-end chrome-plated heist game, all assault rifles and slick plans and Force 6 elementals, and the low-end game of desperate scum with guns and the bare minimum of infosec trying to get themselves on the ladder and ending up in way over their heads. I don't think Shadowrun is really the game for the latter option, though. It's more Blades in the Dark or maybe the Sprawl.
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Aug 29, 2017 14:15
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Street level Shadowrun sounds like such a better way to explore the setting. Fiasco with the potential to go Lord of the Rings levels of wrong.
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Aug 29, 2017 15:00
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NutritiousSnack posted:Lovecraft had been popular among sections of 'purist' literature buffs and horror writers shortly after he died, eventually it bled out in mainstream nerd and horror culture.Add to that the influx of 'normies' diving into escapist nerd culture for escapist purposes after the economy crashed and then Trump get elected it shouldn't be surprising. See Liberals on Twitter comparing everything to Harry Potter. TvTropes pedantic nitpicking is actually insanely mainstream because it's all the fun of discovering things and analyzing them but without the downside of understanding deeper issues or themes (or these themes being simplistic).
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Aug 29, 2017 15:30
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unseenlibrarian posted:Pathfinder had an entire adventure path and at least one module out of another one centered around Lovecraft poo poo, because as best as I can tell they realized they could just use a ton of stuff from Cthulhu d20 as open content and thus ran with it as far as they could. CoC d20 wasn't open content. Paizo did a bunch of Cthulhu stuff for PF because a) they wanted to and b) they knew that poo poo would sell. Likewise, everyone expected Starfinder to just be a Pathfinder-compatible update of d20 Modern/Future, but there's essentially zero content from d20 Modern in the Starfinder core rulebook, and along the same line, the upcoming SF bestiary looks like it'll be a mix of new monsters and existing Pathfinder ones rather than a straight update of d20 material. If Paizo was insistent on stripmining Wizards' open content, they'd have pulled a lot more stuff for PF/SF from d20 Modern and Unearthed Arcana and the non-core material that was included in the 3.x SRD.
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Aug 29, 2017 22:05
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gtrmp posted:CoC d20 wasn't open content. Paizo did a bunch of Cthulhu stuff for PF because a) they wanted to and b) they knew that poo poo would sell. Likewise, everyone expected Starfinder to just be a Pathfinder-compatible update of d20 Modern/Future, but there's essentially zero content from d20 Modern in the Starfinder core rulebook, and along the same line, the upcoming SF bestiary looks like it'll be a mix of new monsters and existing Pathfinder ones rather than a straight update of d20 material. If Paizo was insistent on stripmining Wizards' open content, they'd have pulled a lot more stuff for PF/SF from d20 Modern and Unearthed Arcana and the non-core material that was included in the 3.x SRD. advanced players guide and the gamemastery guide already stripmined unearthed arcana
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Aug 29, 2017 23:15
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gtrmp posted:CoC d20 wasn't open content. Paizo did a bunch of Cthulhu stuff for PF because a) they wanted to and b) they knew that poo poo would sell. Likewise, everyone expected Starfinder to just be a Pathfinder-compatible update of d20 Modern/Future, but there's essentially zero content from d20 Modern in the Starfinder core rulebook, and along the same line, the upcoming SF bestiary looks like it'll be a mix of new monsters and existing Pathfinder ones rather than a straight update of d20 material. If Paizo was insistent on stripmining Wizards' open content, they'd have pulled a lot more stuff for PF/SF from d20 Modern and Unearthed Arcana and the non-core material that was included in the 3.x SRD. Unfortunately, there's a lot of content from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook instead.
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Aug 30, 2017 01:03
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LuiCypher posted:Unfortunately, there's a lot of content from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook instead. 
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Aug 30, 2017 01:43
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Cease to Hope posted:advanced players guide and the gamemastery guide already stripmined unearthed arcana Ultimate Combat and Pathfinder Unchained, too.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:22
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paizo, to their credit, realized that there wasn't very much of value in d20 modern. it just wasn't a very good game.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:31
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Cease to Hope posted:paizo, to their credit, realized that there wasn't very much of value in d20 modern. it just wasn't a very good game. That one kobold commando image is worth more than anything Paizo has ever done or will ever do
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Aug 30, 2017 02:37
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Darwinism posted:That one kobold commando image is worth more than anything Paizo has ever done or will ever do  Truth.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:41
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:
who illustrated that, I don't recognize the signature
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Aug 30, 2017 02:49
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potatocubed posted:It makes me think that maybe there's two different games in Shadowrun -- the high-end chrome-plated heist game, all assault rifles and slick plans and Force 6 elementals, and the low-end game of desperate scum with guns and the bare minimum of infosec trying to get themselves on the ladder and ending up in way over their heads. Sprawl's economy is dumb too. You can wager all your starting money and potentially triple up; do it for three missions and you're rich.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:50
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Cease to Hope posted:who illustrated that, I don't recognize the signature From the initials, probably Darrell Riche.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:54
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:
Oh neat. His name is Meepo.
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Aug 30, 2017 03:13
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Kibner posted:Oh neat. His name is Meepo. And don't you forget it.
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Aug 30, 2017 04:24
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