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Ghost Leviathan posted: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 12:47
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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 agree with the conclusion to your post but this is bullshit. Cutting out a tiny but vocal minority of regressive assholes from your target audience does not suddenly make your game less appealing to people with little or no prior experience of pen and paper RPGs, which is the only good reason for the "big tent" public-brand-recognition RPG to exist, when it and every other generic(-ish) systems are inherently less good at running any specific type of campaign than a specialised system designed to run that type of campaign. The problem remains that D&D is the Risk of P&P: it's loving garbage but it's highly visible from outside the culture, so the fact that the public-at-large thinks it's either a good gateway or (more often) the sum totality of all RPGs is a problem for this hobby. D&D doesn't even get to be the Monopoly of P&P because at least Monopoly has a thematic reason for sucking.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:48
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Warthur posted:I think there's a distinction between 4E refuseniks who were just pitching a temper tantrum over 3.5 ending and never even tried 4E and 4E refuseniks like me and my buds who gave it an honest try (both with Keep On the Shadowfell - which, admittedly, seems to be generally acknowledged to be a terrible intro - and a homebrewed campaign run by the most capable GM I know) and decided that we just weren't having fun with it. We really didn't like 3.5 either - the only way I'm willing to play 3.X D&D is as GMed games in Neverwinter Nights, because at least in that context the game engine is handling the crunch for you - and we really didn't like 4E. We didn't invest masses of energy pushing flamewars about it, though, because we saw that 4E was a decent enough game for the type of game it was trying to be - it's just that that wasn't a game we found enjoyable. Yup. And not only would trying to cater to you dilute what makes 4E good -- even if it succeeded in finding the lukewarm happy medium where it has something for everyone, the most likely result is that it would then strangle out the market share and popularity of some other game that actually focuses on what you like.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:49
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I mean yes, but my overarching point (in tabletop gaming and in gaming in general) is that the very concept of a "big tent" game is toxic to good design.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:54
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Warthur posted:Literally the entire point of the post I was quoting was agreeing with that premise; I'm not saying "big tent" is good game design, but I am saying the existence of a big tent might be beneficial to the industry as a point of entry/filter through which people can work out what their RPG preferences actually are. A market which consisted of a large number of games very targeted at particular experiences would be incredibly difficult for new gamers to get into, particularly if they are new enough to tabletop RPGs that they don't really have a strong handle on what they enjoy about the medium and what sort of experience they want to focus on in the first place. Oh, sorry, it's like 7 AM here and I've been up all night I disagree with the entry point concept, though. You don't need a universal "entry point" to start reading books or watching movies (e: or even playing video games, probably a closer analogy), and most of the things trumpeted as being that (say, Harry Potter) actually just create a population of people who engage with that particular piece of media and then stop. I don't see much to suggest games are all that different. The only people who benefit from the existence of a big tent game are its publishers. And I guess folks who play pick-up games, to a small extent. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 12:55
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Lemon-Lime posted:I agree with the conclusion to your post but this is bullshit. Cutting out a tiny but vocal minority of regressive assholes from your target audience does not suddenly make your game less appealing to people with little or no prior experience of pen and paper RPGs, which is the only good reason for the "big tent" public-brand-recognition RPG to exist, when it and every other generic(-ish) systems are inherently less good at running any specific type of campaign than a specialised system designed to run that type of campaign. OK, sure, the actual pissy grognards themselves can go jump in a lake. But if you look at the aspects of play that the pissy grognards at least claim to value (even if what they actually value is sticking in the past and never changing anything) - exploration, high lethality, big emphasis on OOC problem-solving, etc., etc. - and say "I'm not actually interested in making a game which you can have that sort of experience in", then you've kicked down an entire corner of the big tent. There are perfectly nice, non-toxic customers who like those things too. On the other hand, if you include those experiences in the big tent, then the pissy grognards try to come back in. Part of the problem with being a big tent is that you don't get to alienate toxic people by putting in rules they dislike or excluding rules that they consider essential. On the other hand, trying to detoxify your community through tweaking your game design is a terrible loving idea anyway. The existence of toxic individuals in your game's community is a community management problem, not a game design problem unless your game is actually throwing in rules like "-1 Strength and +1 Comeliness for fffffffffeeeeeeeeemaaaaaaaleeeeeeees" or daft nonsense like that.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Oh, sorry, it's like 7 AM here and I've been up all night Riddle me this: how the frig is someone who is vaguely interested in tabletop RPGs but doesn't yet have a clear, coherent idea of what they are interested in about the format supposed to figure out which highly-focused, specialised-on-one-experience RPG they're supposed to start out with, in a hypothetical RPG market where there are no big-tent games to act as points of entry? Bear in mind that if our interested individual picks the wrong game and has a miserable experience because it turns out that the game in question didn't cater to their specific flavour of fun, they probably won't ever try an RPG again.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:10
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I mean, if their particular flavour of fun isn't high-crunch combat-focused fantasy adventure where magic is it's own unique Thing and is more powerful than "mundane" actions, they're also going to have a terrible time and not try anything else. A masterable combat system, at that, which produces vastly more potent outcomes if you're aware of how it works and optimise for it than it does if you play naively. And a VERY specific fantasy milleu, as well; it's not even the adventure fantasy of children's literature because that tends to presume that the heroes come from relatable backgrounds, whereas D&D characters almost invariably come from the extinct class of wandering mercenaries that we don't talk about very much anymore, even before we get into assumptions about what fighting in that means or what the world "should" look like. If your answer is "you can ignore all those things and pretend it's different", though, then, yeah, sure, but you can also do that with any other game, too. The D&D experience is actually it's own very specific thing with few points of contact outside of D&D.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yup. And not only would trying to cater to you dilute what makes 4E good -- even if it succeeded in finding the lukewarm happy medium where it has something for everyone, the most likely result is that it would then strangle out the market share and popularity of some other game that actually focuses on what you like. I don't buy this idea that if D&D disappeared the gap will be filled by a whole swathe of brand new different games. I think most of the pie would just be eaten up by another big tent game, and because big tent design is antithetical to high-quality design it'd be same as it ever was.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:15
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spectralent posted:I mean, if their particular flavour of fun isn't high-crunch combat-focused fantasy adventure where magic is it's own unique Thing and is more powerful than "mundane" actions, they're also going to have a terrible time and not try anything else.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:19
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Warthur posted:"Games" no. "Tabletop RPGs", I would say yes. Tabletop RPGs are a much, much more narrow variant of tabletop game. You don't absolutely *need* an entry point to get people in, but it's enormously helpful to have one (and it might be beneficial to have several, though I suspect there's room for at most one big tent in any particular genre). The same way they get into anything else: by either not doing what you're describing (some people are more determined/curious than to give up on the first try, and RPGs are a bigger time/money investment than watching one episode of a TV episode, sure, but so are MMOs or playing a sport with expensive equipment), or if they do, it's no one's loss but theirs. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 13:21
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Warthur posted:I think there's a distinction between 4E refuseniks who were just pitching a temper tantrum over 3.5 ending and never even tried 4E and 4E refuseniks like me and my buds who gave it an honest try (both with Keep On the Shadowfell - which, admittedly, seems to be generally acknowledged to be a terrible intro - and a homebrewed campaign run by the most capable GM I know) and decided that we just weren't having fun with it. We really didn't like 3.5 either - the only way I'm willing to play 3.X D&D is as GMed games in Neverwinter Nights, because at least in that context the game engine is handling the crunch for you - and we really didn't like 4E. We didn't invest masses of energy pushing flamewars about it, though, because we saw that 4E was a decent enough game for the type of game it was trying to be - it's just that that wasn't a game we found enjoyable. It sounds like your problem was more that you realised that you don't really like D&D at all, and it just took realising that it wasn't the only game in town to articulate it. A category we didn't see that much of but possibly because the former category were so very, very loud, and there's a lot of people who uncritically bought all the temper tantrums at face value.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:22
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Right, but if as you say, D&D being gone would make a new Big Tent Entry Point then that's also going to be like arsenic to a type of player. There's no perfect game and everyone is going to want a slightly different style of play at best, and the only actual good way to get people in without them going "ugh, dumb" and leaving is to ask them what they're interested in playing. They're not going to know exactly what they want, but it's better than hoping most people are going to be into whatever the 400lb gorilla at the time is.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:23
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Also the real "entry point" of value is individual people who make an effort to guide and help new players. TRPGs are social games, you very much don't need people to stumble into them blind when they're going to need to connect to other players to try them in the first place.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:26
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Warthur posted:SJG lashing themselves to the mast of e23 has been so, so bad for them. I get why they'd be reluctant to come to DriveThruRPG - after all, SJG had the idea first, you can imagine a certain stubbornness setting in under such circumstances - and whenever I've talked to Phil Masters about it on RPG.net he's had this very stubborn perspective that it surely isn't much to ask people to use two different online stores for their RPG PDFs. On the one hand, you're not wrong. On the other hand, the RPG industry desperately needs a second large-scale pdf outlet. Having Drivethru as an effective monopoly isn't good for anyone.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:32
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I agree in theory, but in practice it's hard for a monopoly to really enforce its strength when its constant invisible competitor is "rampant piracy."
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Jan 25, 2019 13:34
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It sounds like your problem was more that you realised that you don't really like D&D at all, and it just took realising that it wasn't the only game in town to articulate it. A category we didn't see that much of but possibly because the former category were so very, very loud, and there's a lot of people who uncritically bought all the temper tantrums at face value.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Also the real "entry point" of value is individual people who make an effort to guide and help new players. TRPGs are social games, you very much don't need people to stumble into them blind when they're going to need to connect to other players to try them in the first place.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:54
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Warthur posted:Riddle me this: how the frig is someone who is vaguely interested in tabletop RPGs but doesn't yet have a clear, coherent idea of what they are interested in about the format supposed to figure out which highly-focused, specialised-on-one-experience RPG they're supposed to start out with, in a hypothetical RPG market where there are no big-tent games to act as points of entry? Bear in mind that if our interested individual picks the wrong game and has a miserable experience because it turns out that the game in question didn't cater to their specific flavour of fun, they probably won't ever try an RPG again. And how does D&D have the ability, moreover the interest, in teaching players and GMs how to articulate the aspects of tabletop RPG design/mechanics and how to seek those out in other games? All of that is done through incidental interactions on the internet or maybe a particularly invested person you encounter in an IRL game store. Tabletop RPGs are an obscure, niche thing that even a wider geek audience are only just now starting to poke around in after their favorite podcasts switched to non-D&D Actual Plays or one-shots. And D&D doesn't do anything to "solve" this problem because it's advantaged by it. It's also advantaged by the notions it trains into its audience of what to expect from tabletop RPGs and how to play/design them. It's an effective cycle of feeding itself and nothing else.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:58
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There was a brief time in the 90s when WoD was the entry point. It coincides with (my memory of) gamer demographics shifting away from exclusively bad moustaches and David Koresh glasses.
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Jan 25, 2019 14:03
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I agree in theory, but in practice it's hard for a monopoly to really enforce its strength when its constant invisible competitor is "rampant piracy." There's really only a few ways to compete with DriveThru, in my opinion: a) Tune up the underlying technology so that it's a smoother and superior experience to DriveThru. Good idea. But what stops DriveThru from updating their technology once they realise you have enough of an edge that they're taking a commercial hit. b) Take less of a cut yourself, so that customers benefit from lower prices and/or publishers get to keep more of their money. What stops DriveThru from making their own cuts? Considering the scale they are working on, they are going to be able to afford to go lower than you can when you are starting out. c) Persuade major publishers to put their stuff on your platform but not DriveThru, despite the fact that they are likely going to be leaving money on the table by doing so. Why would they do that in the absence of a) and b)? If you go this route your platform will be cluttered up with weird dinosaurs who've been stubbornly clinging to some odd grudge against DriveThru or the concept of PDF sales for years, or edgelords like James Desborough whose poo poo DriveThru refuses to sell. I have a hunch that those publishers are not going to collectively make for an attractive storefront display.
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Jan 25, 2019 14:04
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Nuns with Guns posted:And how does D&D have the ability, moreover the interest, in teaching players and GMs how to articulate the aspects of tabletop RPG design/mechanics and how to seek those out in other games? All of that is done through incidental interactions on the internet or maybe a particularly invested person you encounter in an IRL game store. Tabletop RPGs are an obscure, niche thing that even a wider geek audience are only just now starting to poke around in after their favorite podcasts switched to non-D&D Actual Plays or one-shots. And D&D doesn't do anything to "solve" this problem because it's advantaged by it. It's also advantaged by the notions it trains into its audience of what to expect from tabletop RPGs and how to play/design them. It's an effective cycle of feeding itself and nothing else. 
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Jan 25, 2019 14:05
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Warthur posted:I don't altogether disagree but you didn't actually answer my question. You didn't answer my question, either.  But I'm guessing the answer you want is either "tabletop rpgs die lol" or someone to craft some other ungrounded hypothetical you can pick apart because at this point you might as well be playing a game of D&D with the fantasy world you've crafted.
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Jan 25, 2019 14:13
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I'm the idea that people who don't know how to properly articulate what they want out of a tabletop RPG are gonna sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons and somehow miraculously have all their questions answered, also in my reality pigs have wings and Vermin Supreme is President of the United States.
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Jan 25, 2019 14:26
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Warthur posted:OK, sure, the actual pissy grognards themselves can go jump in a lake. But if you look at the aspects of play that the pissy grognards at least claim to value (even if what they actually value is sticking in the past and never changing anything) - exploration, high lethality, big emphasis on OOC problem-solving, etc., etc. - and say "I'm not actually interested in making a game which you can have that sort of experience in", then you've kicked down an entire corner of the big tent. There are differences between the editions, sure, but if not catering to that list of preferences was actually why they didn't like 4E, those pissy grognards wouldn't have liked 3.x or 2E or 5E or Pathfinder or whatever else they hold up as ~real D&D.~ Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 14:46
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Kai Tave posted:I'm the idea that people who don't know how to properly articulate what they want out of a tabletop RPG are gonna sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons and somehow miraculously have all their questions answered, also in my reality pigs have wings and Vermin Supreme is President of the United States.
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Jan 25, 2019 14:50
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Warthur posted:Cool, I'm the idea that people who have literally never tried the hobby at all are somehow going to be able to pick out which strongly focused game experience they actually want in a confused market with no clear point of entry or lead brand. D&D is a strongly focused game
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Jan 25, 2019 14:56
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Did anyone ever articulate why the 1st party supplement treadmill that powered 2nd and 3rd ed DND went down to a trickle for 4th ed? Looking quickly over the catalogue 5th ed it seems to have continued. Did the bottom fall out of the TTRPG market that badly?
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Jan 25, 2019 14:57
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Nystral posted:Did anyone ever articulate why the 1st party supplement treadmill that powered 2nd and 3rd ed DND went down to a trickle for 4th ed? Looking quickly over the catalogue 5th ed it seems to have continued. That being said, the supplement treadmill didn't so much power 2nd as help kill it, and part of why 4th came out at all was WotC/Hasbro observing similar effects on their sales and bottom line during 3rd. The development costs are the same or greater over time for those supplements, but the sales continually get smaller because supplements tended to get more specific over time, so they were catering to smaller and smaller segments of the audience. EDIT: Though I should say that it was the 3rd party supplement treadmill that was a bigger motivation for WotC/Hasbro moving on from 3.x. The idea in 4th was somewhat fewer but more broadly appealing supplements with more content, and less segmentation along parallel product lines - hence why you only see a couple of supplements for each 4th Edition setting, and even those are tweaked so any group can pull things out of them. 5th edition is the one that is still rather out of character for its relative paucity of supplements, and that has more to do with the D&D team at WotC getting cut to the bone. 5E has reportedly sold quite well so why that happened is another issue. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jan 25, 2019 |
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Jan 25, 2019 15:08
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Nystral posted:Did anyone ever articulate why the 1st party supplement treadmill that powered 2nd and 3rd ed DND went down to a trickle for 4th ed? Looking quickly over the catalogue 5th ed it seems to have continued. it didn't slow down to a trickle during 4e. It did for 5e as a deliberate decision because the designer got it in their heads that supplement bloat was a bad thing that needed to be curbed by simply not producing as many supplements
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Jan 25, 2019 15:08
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oh that's a great thread name
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Jan 25, 2019 15:08
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4e had a fairly strong supplement treadmill if you consider Dragon Magazine and the D&D Insider subscription as a thing. 5e is when the treadmill skidded to a stop and the customer rammed their groin into the front bar.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:09
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Warthur posted:Cool, I'm the idea that people who have literally never tried the hobby at all are somehow going to be able to pick out which strongly focused game experience they actually want in a confused market with no clear point of entry or lead brand. I'm sorry you have to be such a patently stupid idea.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:14
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Warthur posted:Cool, I'm the idea that people who have literally never tried the hobby at all are somehow going to be able to pick out which strongly focused game experience they actually want in a confused market with no clear point of entry or lead brand. Famously gameplay-agnostic game, D&D. You think D&D is capable of handling a broad range of games and can have different parts of the game emphasised to cater to a lot of different gameplay styles because for all of those times you weren't playing D&D. D&D has rules and a flow of play and they're very specific.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:24
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Just as an experiment I went to Google and typed in "roleplaying games for newbies," I didn't even specify tabletop versus computer, just to see what would come up. Literally the first thing is a list that doesn't even include Dungeons & Dragons but instead has Fiasco, Cortex, Fate, 13th Age, Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, Dread, and Golden Sky Stories. The next link after that is an article entitled "Roleplaying Games For Beginners That Aren't Dungeons & Dragons" comprised of Baron Munchausen, Fiasco, Goblin Quest, Lady Blackbird, and Fate. The idea that someone even vaguely interested in RPGs with access to the internet in the year 2019 cannot very, very easily discover other RPGs besides Dungeons & Dragons in a matter of moments, as well as copious amounts of information to help inform them of what these sorts of games are like and what sorts of experiences they aim to produce both thematically and in terms of mechanical gameplay, is completely absurd. It's no longer 1996 and you're not limited to what you can find on the shelf at the lovely game store next to the Little Ceasar's. Even people who've never played an RPG before know how social media works.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:26
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Kurieg posted:4e had a fairly strong supplement treadmill if you consider Dragon Magazine and the D&D Insider subscription as a thing. Man, the Insider character creator was so much fun to screw around with.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:35
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It is, however, true that many people are initially directed to a game they may well run into approximately as healthily as a rabbit into a semi simply because it's got the most shelf-space dedicated to it, and a big surrounding culture that passively promotes it, from Stranger Things to Critical Role (to the point where a lot of people refer to tabletop gaming as "playing D&D").
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Jan 25, 2019 15:54
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Kai Tave posted:The idea that someone even vaguely interested in RPGs with access to the internet in the year 2019 cannot very, very easily discover other RPGs besides Dungeons & Dragons in a matter of moments, as well as copious amounts of information to help inform them of what these sorts of games are like and what sorts of experiences they aim to produce both thematically and in terms of mechanical gameplay, is completely absurd. I think it's important to note that the only reason this is the case is because people have deliberately gone out of their way to write articles like that over the last few years, after realising how bad it was that D&D was often seen as the entry point.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:57
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Lemon-Lime posted:I think it's important to note that the only reason this is the case is because people have deliberately gone out of their way to write articles like that over the last few years, after realising how bad it was that D&D was often seen as the entry point. No doubt in my mind at all, I agree, but it's still kind of dumb to act like this is all hidden information. I can believe that D&D's network externalities are a big part of its enduring success as a game while also believing that other games aren't actually languishing in obscurity where only the most dedicated of elfgame savants can find them. People routinely listen to podcasts where nerd celebrities play games that aren't D&D. Twitter, Kickstarter, Facebook, Reddit, even someone who is merely casually online instead of Extremely Online can very easily wind up exposed to a plethora of games and discussion thereof. And at any rate, the more fundamental point of contention is that D&D does nothing to educate players on what it is they want out of a game even if they do decide to start with it.
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Jan 25, 2019 16:14
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spectralent posted:Famously gameplay-agnostic game, D&D.
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Jan 25, 2019 16:53
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