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Serf posted:I'm pretty confused here. If the stretch goal money wasn't being paid to the authors to produce material, where was it going? What was the point of them being stretch goals? If the person was going to work for free anyways, why add the extra money requirement? Seems like a real backwards rear end thing to do. Assuming it wasn't set aside for production costs on the hacks (and that'd be super awkward to pay for everything but the writers!), it must've been pocketed to pay for John's living expenses during the two years before the book was finalized.
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May 29, 2018 13:10
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Serf posted:I'm pretty confused here. If the stretch goal money wasn't being paid to the authors to produce material, where was it going? What was the point of them being stretch goals? If the person was going to work for free anyways, why add the extra money requirement? Seems like a real backwards rear end thing to do. Harper basically treated the stretch goals as a marketing tool and nothing else, presumably. They were an incentive to get people to give the KS campaign (and thus him, personally, since the other authors were all unpaid) more money. It's real scummy.
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May 29, 2018 13:16
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It seems like Acimovic is in there saying that the original intent was that the hacks would be like the document that long constituted Scum and Villainy: 40ish pages of modified rules, some playbooks and crew types and maybe a novel mechanic or two and not full 300+ page books that are mostly just copied over rules from Blades with their spin on it incorporated with some art. If that's true, okay cool whatever. But if they're not getting the cash, then that's not a stretch goal. That's just a hack your friends are making because they want to. Selling it to people as a stretch goal is pretty misleading.
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May 29, 2018 13:24
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Serf posted:It seems like Acimovic is in there saying that the original intent was that the hacks would be like the document that long constituted Scum and Villainy: 40ish pages of modified rules, some playbooks and crew types and maybe a novel mechanic or two and not full 300+ page books that are mostly just copied over rules from Blades with their spin on it incorporated with some art. This is what all of them (bar S&V) will be, yeah. That doesn't actually change the fact that it's 40 pages of work being done for free and locked behind giving the KS more money, which should have gone towards paying the people writing the stretch goals. S&V is only the way it is because Acimovic got Evil Hat to publish it as a full game since he owns the rights to what he wrote and the Blades core rules are in a "well if you ask me and I don't dislike you I might let you use them" licensing state. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:54 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 13:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:Harper basically treated the stretch goals as a marketing tool and nothing else, presumably. They were an incentive to get people to give the KS campaign (and thus him, personally, since the other authors were all unpaid) more money. Yeah that's... not good, if that's the case. It makes a certain amount of sense if it's money earmarked for producing, like, printed copies of those hacks, paying people to do document design, or things like that, but that doesn't sound like the case. If that money wasn't going to pay people to produce that work, and it isn't going into that work at all, then that's some dishonest poo poo right there.
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May 29, 2018 18:42
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Harrow posted:Yeah that's... not good, if that's the case. It makes a certain amount of sense if it's money earmarked for producing, like, printed copies of those hacks, paying people to do document design, or things like that, but that doesn't sound like the case. Plus it's not like he's been diligently working to get his own promised hacks out 2+ years after the fact, which makes it even worse.
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May 29, 2018 22:47
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Something Awful Forums > Games > Traditional Games > Blades in the Dark: A bunch of unpaid hacks
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May 30, 2018 02:55
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Foglet posted:I just wanted to say my expectations have recently been set by Legacy 2. That's an example of doing things right which will very likely bring me back as a return customer. While I like Blades a great lot as a product, to the extent of buying a premium hardcover, Harper has been making me less willing to commit to another crowdfunding of his.  Thanks! I kinda get the feeling John wants hobbyist levels of obligations for himself and others, but professional levels of production quality and take-home money. This goddamn industry... it's really not hard to pay people a far rate, pay people on time, and thus get a much better product and make RPG design more attractive for people who aren't independently wealthy. DigitalRaven posted:Well they can gently caress themselves with rusty spikes. Funnily enough one of my Legacy 2 stretch goal writers said they were wondering why John Harper never responded to their pitch for a BitD stretch goal, but now they realise their crucial mistake was asking what the rates were.
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May 30, 2018 11:54
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Look, if you don’t have a trust fund backing you all the way into graybeard retirement, why are you even playing RPGs?
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May 30, 2018 12:00
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Flavivirus posted:Funnily enough one of my Legacy 2 stretch goal writers said they were wondering why John Harper never responded to their pitch for a BitD stretch goal, but now they realise their crucial mistake was asking what the rates were. Okay, that's pretty dodgy.
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May 30, 2018 18:38
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Flavivirus posted:
People making money in this industry seems basically impossible as a full time job. I know Robin Laws has said on his podcast that even he, one of the most established and prolific RPG writers, that he was only able to make a career out of it because of Canadian Health Care.
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May 30, 2018 21:45
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I reckon the reason Harper didn't discuss rates for stretch goal work was because no one was getting paid for it because of some rear end-backwards agreement that they all seem to have been okay with three years ago.
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May 30, 2018 21:47
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https://twitter.com/strasa/status/1002063528230965248 Backer download is up at http://bladesinthedark.com DemonMage fucked around with this message at 07:13 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 07:01
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I think they may have turned up the difficulty level a bit too high on BoB. I am all for difficulty but it really does seem as if a failure spiral is an almost inevitability with this sort of set up. I mean perhaps I am much more used to playing games where failure isn't quite so punishing.
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May 31, 2018 07:42
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DemonMage posted:https://twitter.com/strasa/status/1002063528230965248 That's very much the Black Company love letter I was expecting.
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May 31, 2018 08:03
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mllaneza posted:That's very much the Black Company love letter I was expecting. It's Black Company mashed with Malazan Book of the Fallen (which is itself about 40% Black Company homage) mashed with a tiny bit of the zombie stuff from Game of Thrones. The actual flow of the game isn't too clear to me yet because the beta doc isn't organised super well and it needs a few pages of "here's what you're doing, here's what order you do it in, here's how it's different from Blades" explanation text, but I like the setting and tone/flavour a fair bit.
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May 31, 2018 22:37
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I don't know how I feel about the focus on a rotating group of semi disposable characters over the standard one per player. This is basically the perfect framework for setting up an xcom game. Failure spiral and all.
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Jun 1, 2018 22:20
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Demon_Corsair posted:I don't know how I feel about the focus on a rotating group of semi disposable characters over the standard one per player. This is pretty close to what I wanted to do to make a Darkest Dungeon-themed RPG--fast character creation and high lethality so it's not a huge deal when one of your characters dies horribly or suffers some sort of mental break. Plus having a rotating group of characters means you have someone to play if your other character needs to heal up after a particularly nasty run. Something I liked about my little prototype was an "earn your backstory" system that I might employ if I ever run Band of Blades. You'd start out with a super broad-strokes background ("scholar," "explorer," "mercenary") and every time a character gains a level, their player tells a story about their background related to whatever skill they just learned. So you don't have to think much about a character when you create them, but the longer you play them, the more fleshed out they become and the more you might become attached to them. Something very XCOM, too--it always hurts the worst when a veteran soldier who's earned a nickname goes down.
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Jun 5, 2018 18:39
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Does frequent character death result in a fresh playbook every time, or are there recommendations for how to track/award XP for starting characters at “higher levels”?
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Jun 5, 2018 22:56
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BetterWeirdthanDead posted:Does frequent character death result in a fresh playbook every time, or are there recommendations for how to track/award XP for starting characters at “higher levels”? I assume the GM is just supposed to keep some more rookies "on hand" to throw into the meat grinder. Saying that I am fairly sure that even rookies would be fairly good soldiers by this point. My main GM is going to be out of town for a month or so later on in the year, so I might run a quick game of this.
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Jun 6, 2018 00:20
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Bluecoats Session 0 is up, and they're going to start streaming it soon properly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jRCwN-JPTk The stuff you can see on here is pretty interesting. It seems like Bluecoats is more about short campaigns about solving a single big problem. They only have 9 actions, with an advancement option to pick up ratings from the Scoundrel books if they want. Here are some screenshots from the stream that are blurry but readable. Obviously this is still in alpha, so none of it is concrete yet.  Action ratings with the empty spots for Scoundrel actions.  Abilities from the Inspector playbook  The Bluecoat playbook's abilities  The abilities from the crew type for this AP, the Mandate. The word is that this hack is pretty different from the base game and is still a little ways out, but it looks like it has some neat ideas to me.
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Jun 6, 2018 01:22
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All I see is that the inspector playbook enables me to play as Phoenix Wright. And that's rad.
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Jun 6, 2018 13:12
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Iceclaw posted:All I see is that the inspector playbook enables me to play as Phoenix Wright. And that's rad. I'm sorry, it's pretty obvious that Nick's a Bluecoat.
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Jun 6, 2018 13:37
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That Inspector playbook sounds extremely fun and cool
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Jun 6, 2018 14:09
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According to G+, Scum and Villainy files will be getting an update on the 29th when pre-orders for the book go live.
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Jun 21, 2018 21:47
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Apologies for the double post, but the update on Scum and Villainy is live. We got arts, bookmarks, the whole shebang. It looks pretty good too. I'm still not sure we need to have every rule from Blades replicated in full with sci-fi flavor, but its good if you don't want to refer to two books or if you just want S&V by itself.
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Jun 29, 2018 16:49
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Serf posted:Apologies for the double post, but the update on Scum and Villainy is live. We got arts, bookmarks, the whole shebang. It looks pretty good too. I'm still not sure we need to have every rule from Blades replicated in full with sci-fi flavor, but its good if you don't want to refer to two books or if you just want S&V by itself.
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Jul 12, 2018 15:23
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quote:Greetings Scoundrels, Also yeah, we do need to have the rules reprinted. For the cross-referencing issue as well as the fact that there's gonna be people who haven't ever played Blades who find and buy/play these games. And that's totally fine and should be supported. Not to mention that some of them can make tweaks to those rules. Also another hack: In Which We Live and Breath a heavily Shadowrun influenced game. Looks good so far and is in active development by Ashton McAllan. DemonMage fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Jul 15, 2018 |
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Jul 15, 2018 14:28
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 Ah, yes, just what a Forged in the Dark game needs. Random attribute generation.  e: Yeah, this system snaps in half the moment you engage with special actions. So, say you're one of the lucky ones who ends up with 5 dots in a category. Body, for example. That gives you five capabilities. Maybe weapons, hypersense, locomotion... hell, whatever you want past that. Now, any time one of those many capabilities comes into play, you add your Capabilities rating to the roll. Put four dots in there, maybe one in Scrap. Every time you Scrap? Five dice. Every time you Scramble, a skill you have no rating in? Four dice. Hell, with all your capabilities, it's harder to think of a roll that you can't bring that into than ones you can. Tricky fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 06:18
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Yeah those are totally fair criticisms, I hadn't really gotten a chance to finish reading it. On the bright side, it's in active development and you can hit her up on Twitter or whatever and point those things out if you care enough! I'm a sucker for Shadowrun related stuff, so I'd love to see it succeed eventually.
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Jul 16, 2018 14:43
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Shadowrun hacks for Blades count: 3
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Jul 16, 2018 14:46
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Serf posted:Shadowrun hacks for Blades count: 3 There'll probably be more. There's as many interpretations of Shadowrun as there are players of Shadowrun.
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Jul 16, 2018 15:43
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Which of the shadowrun hacks is most playable?
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Jul 17, 2018 13:35
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Angrymog posted:Which of the shadowrun hacks is most playable? I like Karma in the Dark mostly because it has a good presentation and a really interesting spin on both Blades and Shadowrun, where your money is replaced by your karma and there is a defined end-of-game trigger where each player gets to commit a metacurrency towards changing the world. Then you're encouraged to make new characters of either the same crew (which is now a legacy organization) or a new crew. Its weird and interesting but also still pretty rough. There's also Runners in the Shadows which cleaves a bit closer to both base Blades and Shadowrun assumptions. It also has a pretty decent look to it, but it is broken up into a bunch of Google Drive docs, which hampers reading a bit. It does make a decent attempt to preserve the gear porn from Shadowrun, which is nice.
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Jul 17, 2018 13:46
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Is there a good, relatively modern-day (say, 1920s onwards) hack for Blades? I was thinking something that could approximate heist movies.
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Aug 10, 2018 22:28
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Greedish posted:Is there a good, relatively modern-day (say, 1920s onwards) hack for Blades? I was thinking something that could approximate heist movies. Blades in the Dark base game? Just say the telephone exists and ignore the setting. I run Blades in the Dark set in a 40k Hive City so just call the items different stuff if they don't exist in the 20's and ignore that ghosts are why deaths raise your heat. Blades in the Dark rules.
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Aug 10, 2018 23:01
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Greedish posted:Is there a good, relatively modern-day (say, 1920s onwards) hack for Blades? I was thinking something that could approximate heist movies. Copperhead county is set in modern day but you can scale it back.
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Aug 11, 2018 17:45
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Greedish posted:Is there a good, relatively modern-day (say, 1920s onwards) hack for Blades? I was thinking something that could approximate heist movies. Here's one that is 1920s with supernatural elements: https://plus.google.com/+AllieBustion/posts/iFhc7rR9LCV?sfc=true
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Aug 12, 2018 23:45
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Dogs in the Bark is a pretty sweet hack.
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Aug 29, 2018 01:55
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They should add Beasts of Burden to the Touchstones in the intro (even though the crew also has cats).
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Aug 29, 2018 20:15
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