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Jimbozig posted:What has Alexander actually published or developed? Banks has worked on some really good stuff. Going by this, mostly a bunch of 3.X d20 poo poo nobody cares about and the Infinity RPG for Mophidus.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:06
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So Steve Jackson games is apparently trying to have a convention. Fnordcon they're calling it. I'm not particularly excited by most of it but I suppose I am slightly surprised they weren't doing something like this a long time ago. Doesn't Palladium somehow still manage to host a yearly convention of some kind? Anyway though $40 for a chance to play Munchkin is an opportunity I think I can miss.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:35
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occamsnailfile posted:So Steve Jackson games is apparently trying to have a convention. Fnordcon they're calling it. I'm not particularly excited by most of it but I suppose I am slightly surprised they weren't doing something like this a long time ago. I just wish they would promote events for any games other than Munchkin / Munchkin CCG / Munchkin In Your Vitamins at the big cons to begin with, they basically do zero promotion for anything that isn't just lite rando games like Zombie Dice or the Car Wars Card Game.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:42
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:He even addresses this, and has such a galaxy brain response:  I forgot he started on his warpath before 4e had even come out. jfc
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Jan 24, 2019 23:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Honestly I think there actually is something to the idea of "dissociated mechanics" and y'all are too quick to dismiss it just because it's being used by an idiot who uses it as a negative term. Disassociated mechanics as a term/concept is fine. Applying the term unevenly and with clear bias against a game was unhelpful at best and toxic at worst. Particularly when every editon of D&D has disassociated mechanics, but just hid some of them in behind opaque naturalistic language.
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Jan 25, 2019 00:40
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This term was "a thing" back when Kai and I were the primary mods on the RPGnet D&D subforum, so I'm just going to say that yeah, basically nobody ever used the phrase in that context except as part of a bad-faith argument and I have no regrets about just treating it as a red flag.
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Jan 25, 2019 00:59
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Justin Alexander also wrote a long blog post trying to rationalize continuing to deadname Jennell Jaquays https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38883/politics/thought-of-the-day-deadnames gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 01:38
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:He even addresses this, and has such a galaxy brain response: This is the biggest RPG-related 'sir this is a Wendy's drive thru' I've ever read.
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Jan 25, 2019 01:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:Justin Alexander also wrote a long blog post trying to rationalize continuing to deadname Jennell Jaquays I can perfectly well understand not wanting to bother editing old blog posts nobody reads anymore because of laziness or being too busy. But I can't imagine putting in the time and effort to write a big long post about how I'm refusing to do it. That's absolutely ridiculous.
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Jan 25, 2019 01:56
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Sampatrick posted:Ars Magica is a game? I thought it was a thought provoking show piece. I mean, you are not wrong.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:17
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Jimbozig posted:I can perfectly well understand not wanting to bother editing old blog posts nobody reads anymore because of laziness or being too busy. But I can't imagine putting in the time and effort to write a big long post about how I'm refusing to do it. That's absolutely ridiculous. Don't forget the part where he says he's going to continue to deadname her in future posts because "that was her name when she wrote that book."
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Jan 25, 2019 02:18
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xiw posted:The other problem with it for me is that the base D&D combat system is massively 'disassociated' - the choices you make in combat in an attack-roll-based / hp system are a mile away from the decisions you'd make in a real fight. Nobody decides 'now i will hit the ogre for 1d8 damage, i know there is absolutely no way i can kill it with this swing but i need to whittle its 4 hit dice down' since hit points are such an abstraction.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:21
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occamsnailfile posted:So Steve Jackson games is apparently trying to have a convention. Fnordcon they're calling it. I'm not particularly excited by most of it but I suppose I am slightly surprised they weren't doing something like this a long time ago. Doesn't Palladium somehow still manage to host a yearly convention of some kind? Gah, the loving fnord thing. Way to take a decades-old injoke and ram it even further into the ground than previously thought possible outside of Monty Python fandom, SJG.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:Justin Alexander also wrote a long blog post trying to rationalize continuing to deadname Jennell Jaquays It looks like he changed references to her name in the articles series itself, but decided to leave the weird post where he first declared "Actually, it is good to not do this for archival purposes!" up without an addendum noting he realized how loving lovely he was being.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:27
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Warthur posted:Gah, the loving fnord thing. Way to take a decades-old injoke and ram it even further into the ground than previously thought possible outside of Monty Python fandom, SJG. I will honor this lovely joke by pretending it doesn't exist.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:29
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Nuns with Guns posted:It looks like he changed references to her name in the articles series itself, but decided to leave the weird post where he first declared "Actually, it is good to not do this for archival purposes!" up without an addendum noting he realized how loving lovely he was being. If you read the comments, he makes the changes only because Jacquays comes and asks him to directly.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:32
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Warthur posted:Yeah, "it bugs me when I have to incorporate stuff my character wouldn't know about when I'm making decisions for them and hurts my immersion, I prefer games which do not do that" is an entirely legit position. "D&D never had prominent dissociated mechanics until 4E" is kookybananas. If you're after that sort of high-immersion game, you aren't playing D&D anyway. That's the thing though -- D&D's prominence is such that many people do play D&D for that, to one degree or another. (And moreover, get really mad when you point out how bad D&D is at doing that because now you're attacking their fun.) It's basically an object lesson in why you should tailor games to a particular audience and style of play instead of trying to capture the entire market.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:32
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whydirt posted:If you read the comments, he makes the changes only because Jacquays comes and asks him to directly. Thank you for pointing that out so that I had the chance to read this: quote:And one last quibble: It should be Jaquaysing the Dungeon. My surname has an “S” at the end of it that is voiced when saying the name. So here’s an opportunity to get both the first and the last name right in your article.
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Jan 25, 2019 02:41
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Warthur posted:Gah, the loving fnord thing. Way to take a decades-old injoke and ram it even further into the ground than previously thought possible outside of Monty Python fandom, SJG. Does SJG even support their various Illuminati games anymore? Let me guess: Munchkin Illuminati?
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Jan 25, 2019 03:08
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Just table after table of GURPS games, with some Car Wars on the side.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:11
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Warthur posted:Gah, the loving fnord thing. Way to take a decades-old injoke and ram it even further into the ground than previously thought possible outside of Monty Python fandom, SJG. Given the state of Cthulhu and the fact that the Principia Discordia is purposefully in the public domain, it's perhaps merciful that's all we've gotten.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:19
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Just table after table of GURPS games, with some Car Wars on the side. TBF Gurps can support that many games!
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Jan 25, 2019 03:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:TBF Gurps can support that many games! But can the GURPS-playing groups? There can't be that many of them.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:39
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It's also not like SJG has much else to draw on in terms of a brand identity. Like, Wizards has twenty-sided dice, iconic D&D stuff like beholders, MtG imagery like the colour pie, their actual corporate Wizards logo and theme, all the grandfathered Hasbro iconography, etc etc. SJG has: an eye in a pyramid logo. Pyramid Magazine. Warehouse 23. Illuminati! The word "fnord". People mistakenly thinking they published Fighting Fantasy books back in the 80s. All but the last one of these are extended Robert Anton Wilson injokes and whether SJG likes it or not they're stuck with it because they've gone so deep into being "the Illuminati-themed game company" that they have no way out. oh and I guess they've got Munchkin too.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:47
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Justin Alexander's "disassociated mechanics" crap pissed me off as much as anyone, and still does. As far as I know he has never apologized or given any indication that he knows he was being a jerk. I'm not worried about him screwing up Atlas' RPGs, because at some point in his life he went from "the core concept of GUMSHOE is stupid" to "here's how I spent 90+ hours of my life running a Trail of Cthulhu campaign." I dunno what happened. Doesn't make up for anything, and in particular the dead naming stuff is ugly. But he is capable of writing competent, useful gaming material.
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Jan 25, 2019 03:55
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a computing pun posted:It's also not like SJG has much else to draw on in terms of a brand identity. Like, Wizards has twenty-sided dice, iconic D&D stuff like beholders, MtG imagery like the colour pie, their actual corporate Wizards logo and theme, all the grandfathered Hasbro iconography, etc etc. Time to go hard on a new edition of In Nomine, clearly.
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Jan 25, 2019 07:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Given the state of Cthulhu and the fact that the Principia Discordia is purposefully in the public domain, it's perhaps merciful that's all we've gotten. The PD is also intentionally incoherent enough that there's nothing much to make a game out of. It's zen koans for hippie burnouts. 
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Jan 25, 2019 07:36
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Thanlis posted:Justin Alexander's "disassociated mechanics" crap pissed me off as much as anyone, and still does. As far as I know he has never apologized or given any indication that he knows he was being a jerk. He's a complete loving tool but I'm not particularly worried about him running roughshod over Robin Laws and Greg Stoltze and ruining their games
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Jan 25, 2019 08:00
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a computing pun posted:It's also not like SJG has much else to draw on in terms of a brand identity. Car Wars and GURPS were both really big during their heyday; both of them were enough to support house magazines (for ten years, in Car Wars' case). Illuminati has often been perennial (hence why it keeps getting republished). But all of those brands have gotten limited or no promotion for decades now and have dealt with no small share of mismanagement. The twin blows of the CCG boom and the d20 boom more or less oriented the company towards its cash cow and it's only very recently we've seen them lean towards revivals of their older games thanks to the opportunities of crowdfunding. Liquid Communism posted:The PD is also intentionally incoherent enough that there's nothing much to make a game out of. It's zen koans for hippie burnouts. Don't tempt me. Actually my dream has always been to do a Subgenius mythology-based game but there are some pretty major issues with its old-school edgelording that are hard to address now, and also the general degeneration of the Subgenius Church towards the crummier end of kookdom over the past decade or so.
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Jan 25, 2019 08:11
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In these days of print on demand everything, it feels like SJ Games should make a line of a bajillion tiny all-in-one GURPS-based games that just remix stripped-down bits of the core rules and setting text copy and pasted out of different parts of the endless supplement treadmill. "Pirates of Saturn (powered by GURPS)", "Capes for Hire (powered by GURPS)", "Raiders of the Lost Arcology (powered by GURPS)", etc, each as a 30-page softcover or something. With PoD there'd be basically zero ongoing cost and it would reinforce brand identity as "the game you use when you want to mash up two different genres".
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Jan 25, 2019 09:20
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Dawgstar posted:Time to go hard on a new edition of In Nomine, clearly. oh HELL yes
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Jan 25, 2019 09:48
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Roadie posted:In these days of print on demand everything, it feels like SJ Games should make a line of a bajillion tiny all-in-one GURPS-based games that just remix stripped-down bits of the core rules and setting text copy and pasted out of different parts of the endless supplement treadmill. "Pirates of Saturn (powered by GURPS)", "Capes for Hire (powered by GURPS)", "Raiders of the Lost Arcology (powered by GURPS)", etc, each as a 30-page softcover or something. With PoD there'd be basically zero ongoing cost and it would reinforce brand identity as "the game you use when you want to mash up two different genres". On the other hand, they could slap together Munchkin: Plants, Rocks, and Trees and shove it out the door for a quick buck, and one of these options takes vastly less effort than the other, so.
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Jan 25, 2019 11:13
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Munchkin for the Fifth Edition of the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game
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Jan 25, 2019 11:24
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Liquid Communism posted:The PD is also intentionally incoherent enough that there's nothing much to make a game out of. It's zen koans for hippie burnouts. Technically it's zen koans for beatnik burnouts and got picked up by hippies.
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Jan 25, 2019 11:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:That's the thing though -- D&D's prominence is such that many people do play D&D for that, to one degree or another. (And moreover, get really mad when you point out how bad D&D is at doing that because now you're attacking their fun.) There's a role in the market for a "big tent" game like D&D - it has more name recognition than any other game can reasonably expect to produce in any sort of short-to-medium-term timespan (unless you're talking a Star Wars RPG or something else based off a famous licence), it's a gateway drug, and it's broad enough that it's a workable compromise choice. Even if a particular D&D campaign doesn't focus exclusively on your flavour of fun, it's likely possible to work some of your flavour of fun into it. (This can lead to the "20 minutes of fun in 3 hours" syndrome, but only if you're enough of a fussy grump that you are a) unable to derive joy out of anything other than one specific flavour of fun and b) unable to derive joy out of other people's enjoyment of their fun.) I think it is a net benefit to the market to have a "big tent" game for people to default to, rather than an ocean of very targeted games, not least because people can use the "big tent" game to work out what it is they actually enjoy about RPGs before they start exploring stuff which is more specific. On the other hand, I agree that if you aren't making the "big tent" game, the last thing you should be doing is trying to produce another big tent game, especially if it's in the same niche. The only people who've come remotely close to success, so far as I can tell, are GDW back at the commercial peak of Traveller (when it was effectively the "big tent" of SF RPGs whilst D&D was the big tent of fantasy) and Paizo, and Pathfinder happened due to a wild confluence of different factors which no publisher could ever hope to replicate. The basic problem, as I see it: if your game is specialising in a particular flavour of fun, it's easier to answer the question "Why play this instead of staying in the big tent?" - if you've done your job right, your game delivers your flavour of fun better than D&D does and has better quality rules. It's much, much harder to create a game which has superior rules from the perspective of being a "big tent" RPG, because whilst games aimed at a particular style can optimise their rules for a particular style, big tent RPGs have to cater to a whole swathe of different flavours of fun - including flavours which, chances are, you personally think are completely stupid and have no personal affinity for, which is going to make it drat hard for you to actually design for that style. (People who have contempt for punk rock aren't going to produce a good punk album, by way of analogy.) And even if you did make a "big tent" RPG whose rules were superior to D&D's on all fronts regardless of intended playstyle - a tremendously difficult task because some things which are "better" for one playstyle are going to piss in the cornflakes of other playstyles - you have the fact that big tents sustain themselves less on quality of rules and more on quantity of players, getting played simply because there's always people around who are willing to play it. That's why the 4E edition war was so damaging and why Pathfinder got the traction it did - enough people got pissy and refused to touch 4E that it couldn't act as a big tent anymore. Sure, some of them were pissy grognards, but some of them (and I'd hope to include myself here) took the more reasonable stance of "OK, I see what specific thing 4E is trying to be and I get that, but this isn't my flavour of fun so I'll go play something which is more to my tastes". And even if you say "I don't care about including pissy grognards"... as soon as you decide you're no longer interested in an existing segment of the market, you've pretty much given up on the idea of producing a big tent game. tl;dr - D&D is the way it is because it's reached a size where high-quality, cutting-edge game design becomes less important than maintaining the big tent.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:26
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Thanlis posted:I'm not worried about him screwing up Atlas' RPGs, because at some point in his life he went from "the core concept of GUMSHOE is stupid" to "here's how I spent 90+ hours of my life running a Trail of Cthulhu campaign." I dunno what happened. Doesn't make up for anything, and in particular the dead naming stuff is ugly. But he is capable of writing competent, useful gaming material. Ars Magica I think Cam had a bit more of a hand in, and goodness knows historical gaming has all sorts of potential to be highly regressive if people choose to be assholes about it. On the other hand, it's also a dormant game. If they did do a sixth edition or rekindle the line or whatever, I may worry, but it greatly depends on their strategy for that.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:33
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Problem is a ton of the complaints about 4e were things that are objectively way worse in 3.5, and/or in many cases completely fabricated, like 'all classes are the same' or 'you're not allowed to roleplay'. A lot of people when actually looking at the game and seeing how it's played realised that their assumptions about it were completely wrong. A friend of mine turned around on 4e from watching Let's Play D&D.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Actually my dream has always been to do a Subgenius mythology-based game but there are some pretty major issues with its old-school edgelording that are hard to address now, and also the general degeneration of the Subgenius Church towards the crummier end of kookdom over the past decade or so. Roadie posted:In these days of print on demand everything, it feels like SJ Games should make a line of a bajillion tiny all-in-one GURPS-based games that just remix stripped-down bits of the core rules and setting text copy and pasted out of different parts of the endless supplement treadmill. "Pirates of Saturn (powered by GURPS)", "Capes for Hire (powered by GURPS)", "Raiders of the Lost Arcology (powered by GURPS)", etc, each as a 30-page softcover or something. With PoD there'd be basically zero ongoing cost and it would reinforce brand identity as "the game you use when you want to mash up two different genres". But really, they're operating on the perspective that the customers should be coming to them, SJG, to buy their poo poo, when they're in a market where they as a company need to go and have a visible presence in the places where the customers actually are, and as far as PDF and POD poo poo goes the customers are at DriveThru. There's also the way that GURPS seems to have been hijacked entirely by those who really liked high levels of crunch, and the major releases for it seem to pander to that crunch, whereas back in the glory days of 3rd edition (which feels like GURPS' peak in terms of reach and visibility) you didn't go to GURPS for a thick, expensive, glossy, colour book full of crunch - you went to it for cheap and cheerful supplements which covered a particular genre or setting, and unpacked them with a sufficient level of insight that the books were drat useful even if you didn't use them with GURPS itself. 4th Edition seems to have more or less dropped that idea entirely, and they've been sat on their 3rd edition back catalogue of supplements for too long. They finally seem to have gotten their end in gear in terms of providing PDF/POD offerings of them and coming to DriveThru, but imagine all the momentum (and revenue) they've passed up because they got stubborn.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:43
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right. The problem isn't necessarily that Disassociated Mechanics or Combat as Sport aren't a thing, it's that they were already-existing facets of game design that were inflated into glaring flaws as boogeymen designed to make 4e sound worse than it was
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Jan 25, 2019 12:43
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Warthur posted:And even if you say "I don't care about including pissy grognards"... as soon as you decide you're no longer interested in an existing segment of the market, you've pretty much given up on the idea of producing a big tent game. I mean yes, but that's basically what I'm saying in the first place: that the very concept of a "big tent" game is toxic to good design.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:45
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