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Mors Rattus posted:who would the target audience of a Forgotten Realms thing over an original fantasy setting be other than 'dudes who know and care about the FR' the target audience is normies who like swords and magic and you use FR over an original setting because you can get some of those normies more interested in the FR brand and buying already existing FR products like a million drizzt books or playing the neverwinter mmo and so on
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Dec 26, 2018 19:22
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Brother Entropy posted:the target audience is normies who like swords and magic and you use FR over an original setting because you can get some of those normies more interested in the FR brand and buying already existing FR products like a million drizzt books or playing the neverwinter mmo and so on And because of FR books and video games, there's a kind of "general awareness" that consumers have. It's a recognizable property, more so than some that have gotten adapted (like Mortal Engines).
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Dec 26, 2018 19:31
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hyphz posted:Ok, it's no longer Christmas, so I can be grouchy about the industry and about a conversation I had over the holiday. Well, organized play exists, as does roll20 and fantasy grounds and the like. I'm guessing that that doesn't do it for you?
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Dec 26, 2018 20:24
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RPGs launching with support for fantasy grounds sounds like a good start to me but you can't exactly count on that.
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Dec 26, 2018 20:32
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remusclaw posted:Whenever I get ready to run a game, and I look online and someone put together a fanwork cheat sheet, maybe a page, maybe a couple of pages, and I find it covers the vast majority of the rules of the game, I think to myself, this should be something the actual game has, not something a fan had to make. It should at the very least be in the core book, even if the rules text itself needs a little more room to work out edge cases and explanations. An RPG text needs to be at least part technical manual, and if it is only part technical manual, it should be clearly separated from the fiction bits, because if it isn't, someone else is going to have to do that work to make it so. Developers are generally too invested in the work to really understand what less invested participants may require. They can't grok that someone wouldn't just know how grappling works. They've been walking through this version of their grappling process several times a week for two years at this point, and that process is really just an evolved version of what they've been playing with for 20 years. They're not able to make that fan product, because they don't know what its like to not be an old rp nerd. The same thing happens in software development, and that industry developed User Experience (UX) frameworks to combat the issue and find success. But, if anybody is using that framework, they're not communicating it. RPG pitches are always, "It's like steampunk lord of the rings on acid in space" or "this one will focus on narrative equality without crunchy arcane mechanics" or "a return to the classics you love, but with streamlined balanced rules that fit our fairy tale inspired theme"--they're never, "We worked backwards from an idealized RPG Minimum Viable Product to develop a system that performs functions x, y, and z in an efficient, well-communicated process developed through iterative and broad spectrum playtesting", and through it's probably the right answer, I probably wouldn't buy a book that said that on the back.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:25
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Haystack posted:Well, organized play exists, as does roll20 and fantasy grounds and the like. I'm guessing that that doesn't do it for you? Just existing doesn't satisfy that issue, though. Roll20, for example, has great support for Blades In The Dark, but it wasn't made by Harper or the publisher. And even that doesn't matter because there are no games of it there. On the other hand, imagine a publisher with a new game who hired a couple of GMs to run seeding games across a few timezones. That would be much closer to what's standard for many other social game types.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:40
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1st Stage Midboss posted:Jackbox is a very successful video game series that is exactly this, though? It's the best comparison to the "game as shape for social experience" format of RPGs that I can think of off the top of my head, too. The difference is that the level of investment for playing Jackbox games is "Have a phone," "Pay attention to a two minute rule explanation," and "Spend 10 minutes playing a full game to see if you like it," so you can reasonably ask literally anyone you have in your house to give it a shot. For most adults, RPG sessions are events that require up front commitments of learning a rule system and blocking off time on your calendar to get to play.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:42
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Capfalcon posted:The difference is that the level of investment for playing Jackbox games is "Have a phone," "Pay attention to a two minute rule explanation," and "Spend 10 minutes playing a full game to see if you like it," so you can reasonably ask literally anyone you have in your house to give it a shot. For most adults, RPG sessions are events that require up front commitments of learning a rule system and blocking off time on your calendar to get to play. Fiasco would be the Jackbox of tabletop RPGs, I think.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:50
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Luarien posted:Fiasco would be the Jackbox of tabletop RPGs, I think. It's the closest thing, certainly.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:06
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Fiasco does require some improv/roleplay skills, as well as more than a little genre/setting knowledge/buy-in. If you don't watch heist or Coen Brothers movies, and you're looking for the mechanics to help drive the story forwards it's probably not for you.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:13
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hyphz posted:Just existing doesn't satisfy that issue, though. Roll20, for example, has great support for Blades In The Dark, but it wasn't made by Harper or the publisher. And even that doesn't matter because there are no games of it there. Cost/benefit, most likely. Remember that most RPGs are not money-makers, especially in a cash-in-hand sense. Hiring GMs is taking very slim margins and at the very least making them slimmer, possibly even flipping them to being net losses for every book sold. It'd have to be baked into the price if you want to do it. That being said, having it be a kickstarter stretch goal could be possible, but again, it'd have to be baked into the prices.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:30
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Video game developers, have larger budgets, bigger teams, and more baseline tech know how than most rpg designers. But if you want to play a trad with built in group finders and event managers, might I suggest larping?
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Dec 26, 2018 22:31
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Privateer Press has a program to drum up support for their games (the freebooters I think). Would that model be viable for RPGs?
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Dec 26, 2018 22:32
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8one6 posted:Privateer Press has a program to drum up support for their games (the freebooters I think). Would that model be viable for RPGs? They don't anymore. They scrapped the programme.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:35
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Goodman games has a road crew program to promote their games. You sign up, run events and can get swag for doing so. The more events you run the better the swag gets. It’s basic stuff for the most part, pens, notebooks, dice and the like. http://goodman-games.com/goodman-games-world-tour-2017-2/
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Dec 26, 2018 22:39
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Thundercloud posted:They don't anymore. They scrapped the programme. IIRC those kind of programmes are illegal because they're functionally work but don't pay people, so a ton of people closed theirs around that time.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:45
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Many companies have had "demo crew" programs, where you get maybe a free book or two but mostly worthless poo poo like shirts and pins in exchange for advertising their games and running demos. It has a lot more to do with fanbase investment than whether or not the company can drum up some screen printed tees, though obviously they have to be at least a little encouraging and organized about it. Those types of things will probably always exist to one degree or another, but I think their heyday (mid-90's to mid-00's) is probably not coming back any time soon.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:51
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The Lore Bear posted:Cost/benefit, most likely. Remember that most RPGs are not money-makers, especially in a cash-in-hand sense. Hiring GMs is taking very slim margins and at the very least making them slimmer, possibly even flipping them to being net losses for every book sold. It'd have to be baked into the price if you want to do it. quote:Video game developers, have larger budgets, bigger teams, and more baseline tech know how than most rpg designers. But if you want to play a trad with built in group finders and event managers, might I suggest larping? For high end games yes, for indies no. But then again, indies in video games have a LOT more active support to work with platforms to get games played, which is why I referred to DTRPG before. I also never understood the stretch goal thing where it's like "$100, the author will run a game for your group online". if it involved meeting up in person then I can see a high premium, but for online I would think that running a couple of games ought to be a standard part of the marketing process. (I'd like to say "and surely you like running it because you wrote it" but I've had enough experience that isn't true..)
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Dec 26, 2018 23:18
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Glazius posted:You can engage the rules in good faith but still gently caress up, though. If you helicopter a random crippling mutation table in from some other post-apoc RPG and expect it to work in Apocalypse World, is it your fault or Apocalypse World's when it doesn't? Or, I guess, your group's reading comprehension is sufficiently sloppy that it's not reasonably possible to actually communicate the spirit of the game to you, but there's a point where game designers can't be held responsible for readers not actually parsing and comprehending what's on the dang page.
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Dec 26, 2018 23:56
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hyphz posted:I also never understood the stretch goal thing where it's like "$100, the author will run a game for your group online". if it involved meeting up in person then I can see a high premium, but for online I would think that running a couple of games ought to be a standard part of the marketing process. (I'd like to say "and surely you like running it because you wrote it" but I've had enough experience that isn't true..) Presumably the author has run a bunch of games in the process of playtesting the rules. It also takes time and effort to run a game as a bonus for backers, something that not every creator will be able to do automatically. I feel like your comparison to video games don't work - they're fairly different things and yeah a multiplayer video game has to have support for finding other people online to play with. A tabletop RPG doesn't, because that's not a requirement for it to be able to work. You just go to your friends and say "Hey, there's this really cool game I wanna try running. You guys interested?" There are a lot of places where you can do online or play-by-post gaming and find people interested in whatever system you want to run if you can't do that or your friends aren't interested. If you want creators of tabletop rpgs to have a system to ensure that happens, that's going to increase the cost of the game.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:08
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Yes, even indie developers have more of a budget than most RPG designers. The margins on RPG is so massively, terrifyingly thin to the point that even the biggest companies are offering little more than hobby-level wages to the majority of their workers. Also, most indie video game developers aren’t making multi-player games, and there’s a lot more functional language and technology for encoding multiplayer elements into a video game thanks to the long history of the medium’s interaction with the internet. The methodologies for group finder is known to video game developers, while tabletop designers just haven’t found the right sorts of connective tissue. Also, maintaining services for an online video game are much, much, much cheaper than the sort of ongoing support and event coordination that would be required for a tabletop game, that merely making the argument starts to seem disingenuous. These are not comparable technologies.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:20
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I don't see how facilitating online play is something a video game needs to work but not a tabletop game. Both of them let you organize your friends to play without any assistance, and both are a lot easier if it's provided. It's just a convention that video games do it by default and video game players are used to demanding it. Without the baggage of demanding it be in the particular platform, roll20 support is a reasonable thing to ask an RPG dev for in 2018.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:23
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Honestly, the best "multiplayer support" a trad game can have is teaching you how to teach it to other people. So many games ship without even a thought of how they are going to garner players. Honestly, one of the biggest successes of PbtA as an RPG tech is that nearly all of them learned from Papa Baker and codified group character/setting creation and session structure. Fiasco is also really good at this and that's one of the huge reasons for its success.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:42
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Luarien posted:And because of FR books and video games, there's a kind of "general awareness" that consumers have. It's a recognizable property, more so than some that have gotten adapted (like Mortal Engines). Mortal Engines is really really good YA SFF though and deserves all kinds of adaptations on a moral level. I haven't seen the movie though so, well, fingers crossed I guess (also it appears to be bombing financially so there goes that).
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Dec 27, 2018 01:27
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Joe Slowboat posted:Mortal Engines is really really good YA SFF though and deserves all kinds of adaptations on a moral level. According to my father and brother, it is extremely pretty but is super rushed and poorly directed.
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Dec 27, 2018 01:40
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Joe Slowboat posted:Mortal Engines is really really good YA SFF though and deserves all kinds of adaptations on a moral level. It's a fairly bad adapatation but it somehow manages to be an even worse movie. Standing purely on its own demerits, it is awful. Every potentially dramatic moment falls flat because of the awful pacing; every character moment comes off as cheesy or awkward and every tense or exciting moment is weakened or destroyed by the lack of any narrative weight. ever since I read the books as a literal teenager I have wanted to play an RPG in the setting though.
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Dec 27, 2018 03:26
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Heliotrope posted:I feel like your comparison to video games don't work - they're fairly different things and yeah a multiplayer video game has to have support for finding other people online to play with. A tabletop RPG doesn't, because that's not a requirement for it to be able to work. You just go to your friends and say "Hey, there's this really cool game I wanna try running. You guys interested?" There are a lot of places where you can do online or play-by-post gaming and find people interested in whatever system you want to run if you can't do that or your friends aren't interested. If you want creators of tabletop rpgs to have a system to ensure that happens, that's going to increase the cost of the game. Well that would probably be OK because the cost of RPGs, at least PDFs, is likely already being pushed down by the adverse selection caused by having a low chance of actually playing any bought game. I mean, heck, if Invisible Sun had invested that $200 in actually organizing play of directed campaigns (as opposed to just handing them out) it'd be much closer to worth it. (Although it would also have to not have a terrible system and an IC currency that involves exchanging a bag of glass spheres for a McDonalds)
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Dec 27, 2018 03:41
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Xelkelvos posted:There's a bunch of fantasy dramas now in China that have been getting licensed by Prime and Netflix so I can assume there's a not insignificant audience for that sort of audience in China. Doesn't hurt there's a considerable history of Chinese pirates. They actually got a minor appearance in the third PotC movie. Not sure if they're romanticised to the same extent, but still. Mors Rattus posted:It's more that Chinese firms have recently begin investing in Western movies as loss leaders for some kind of weird money laundering/tax scheme. China's got a ton of new money that wants to get money out of China by any means necessary since you can't buy land there and their economy is kind of a giant bubble. (it has grown massively but has been incredibly overstated by both Chinese and Western sources. Basically Japan all over again)
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Dec 27, 2018 05:00
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Warthur posted:Why would you even be doing that though? Either the text of the game somehow gives the impression that that would be a good idea (in which case it fails on the "adequately communicates the spirit of the game" front), or the group understands the spirit of the game but is deliberately shoving something in which doesn't fit (in which case they aren't actually engaging in good faith), or the group genuinely believes that table fits the intent and spirit of Apocalypse World (in which case, in the absence of any obvious reason why it wouldn't work, I wouldn't call it a "gently caress up" so much as "an experiment worth trying", and an experiment which might even be successful at that). Right, and if that experiment doesn't work out, it doesn't mean Apocalypse World is a bad system for not suggesting a perfect infinity of potential upgrades to all possible readers. It provides a rules grammar and guidance for working with it, but outside of that, you are responsible for the changes you make.
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Dec 27, 2018 05:46
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Ghost Leviathan posted:China's got a ton of new money that wants to get money out of China by any means necessary since you can't buy land there and their economy is kind of a giant bubble. (it has grown massively but has been incredibly overstated by both Chinese and Western sources. Basically Japan all over again) Are they still building essentially empty cities?
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Dec 27, 2018 07:06
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spectralent posted:IIRC those kind of programmes are illegal because they're functionally work but don't pay people, so a ton of people closed theirs around that time. It closed for the exact same reason the Outriders program GW had did a long time ago: eventually the IRS starts getting at you about taxes. Everyone who starts these programs knows they'll have to close eventually if they get big enough. The employee thing was related to a WotC lawsuit and their judges, which hadn't had a decision at the time.
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Dec 27, 2018 07:39
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hyphz posted:Well that would probably be OK because the cost of RPGs, at least PDFs, is likely already being pushed down by the adverse selection caused by having a low chance of actually playing any bought game. I mean, heck, if Invisible Sun had invested that $200 in actually organizing play of directed campaigns (as opposed to just handing them out) it'd be much closer to worth it. Adding “economics” to the whiteboard labeled “Things Hyphz Can’t Do”. Like do any of that math. Any of it.
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Dec 27, 2018 08:01
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S.J. posted:It closed for the exact same reason the Outriders program GW had did a long time ago: eventually the IRS starts getting at you about taxes. Everyone who starts these programs knows they'll have to close eventually if they get big enough. The employee thing was related to a WotC lawsuit and their judges, which hadn't had a decision at the time. Wait, what? I'm not sure I follow. Is there some mechanism by which Outrider style things are tax evasion or something?
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Dec 27, 2018 08:38
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Caedar posted:Yikes. All rulebooks are, at least partially, technical manuals. Not to say that they can't be other things too, but ignoring the fact that they're quite literally books of rules is being willfully ignorant. And you can do a lot to shape how the game plays and even how people look at the setting by framing the rules in the right way. Exalted 2e Infernals is my favorite example of this, with a ton of powers that lay out simple mechanics in a few sentences that then drastically push you into playing your character in different ways (in this case, always lying in social situations even when you have no reason to do so, keeping comprehensive lists of people you have grudges against, using wacky easy-to-escape deathtraps instead of just killing people, and various other obviously counterproductive villainous cliches).
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Dec 27, 2018 09:11
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Dawgstar posted:Are they still building essentially empty cities? Most of the so-called "ghost cities" aren't anywhere close to being empty, although very few of them have come anywhere close to the level of anticipated occupancy that they were built to accommodate. For example, Kangbashi District in the city of Ordos was built with the intent of relocating between half a million and a million people there from desertified rural Mongolia, but "only" around 200,000 people live there today. That's nowhere near the estimated number, but is only small by the standards of Chinese megacities.
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Dec 27, 2018 09:20
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Having half your houses unoccupied is still on par with failed American suburbs in terms of unnerving lack of habitation.
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Dec 27, 2018 09:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:Having half your houses unoccupied is still on par with failed American suburbs in terms of unnerving lack of habitation. Or Toronto apartments.
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Dec 27, 2018 09:59
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Dawgstar posted:Are they still building essentially empty cities? Reminds me of Dahir Insaat.
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Dec 27, 2018 10:17
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Glazius posted:Right, and if that experiment doesn't work out, it doesn't mean Apocalypse World is a bad system for not suggesting a perfect infinity of potential upgrades to all possible readers. It provides a rules grammar and guidance for working with it, but outside of that, you are responsible for the changes you make.
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Dec 27, 2018 11:30
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Brother Entropy posted:the target audience is normies who like swords and magic and you use FR over an original setting because you can get some of those normies more interested in the FR brand and buying already existing FR products like a million drizzt books or playing the neverwinter mmo and so on This doesn't solve the problem of Drizzt and FR drow being unadaptable without fully rewriting their appearance and lore from the ground up Joe Slowboat posted:Mortal Engines is really really good YA SFF though and deserves all kinds of adaptations on a moral level. Mortal Engines is by the woman that plagiarized published books for her Draco Malfoy fanfic, right? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 27, 2018 13:52
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