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clockworkjoe posted:CoNE? Cecil Howe, who's itch account is Cone of Negative Energy. He's a pretty cool guy.
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Feb 4, 2019 06:57
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Arthil posted:It's not, no. There are a lot of people who almost seem to take offense to someone wanting to do something mechanically bad for story purposes. Sure but honestly it's going to get me down a little watching it play out or experiencing it firsthand because more often than not I don't see that mechanical sacrifice for story does pay out much? Idk I've gotten to try this through a few roll20 games and I'm yet to see that kind of story decision really get a payoff in D&D I don't think it can with some real work from both player and GM. I think thats what really gets people antsy about jumping in and saying something. If I'm honest I think that shouldn't have to be a choice that is possible to make at all in the framework of the game. The decision should be 'which mechanic do you pick that pushes the story forward' with all your choices being made giving you different story opportunities but thats a whole different discussion.
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Feb 4, 2019 06:58
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Kai Tave posted:I think comparing actual plays to something like deceptive and manipulative advertising is kind of a weird take as well. Maybe I'm not super up on the state of Actual Plays and how they're being pitched to people, but I don't recall APs being sold to listeners and/or viewers as "this is how your D&D game should be!" Airbrushed models aren't supposed to be deceptive. They are supposed to be attractive and appealing. They don't airbrush them with the goal of deception - they airbrush them because it makes them more appealing to the viewer. Precisely like when actual play podcasts edit stuff out. They don't edit it out to be deceptive - they edit it out because the recording will be more entertaining and appealing without it. That joke that didn't land? It's just a bit of cellulite. The bit of banter that went nowhere? A blemish. The truth is that we all occasionally miss the mark in improvisation, and we also all have some bodily imperfections. Editing any of those things out is dishonest in a certain sense, but I don't think cutting a dud joke is any less dishonest than digitally smoothing out a stretch mark. They seem pretty much perfectly analogous to me!
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Feb 4, 2019 07:45
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No one is going to sign up to play d&d with their friends and expect everyone to transform, magically, into the McElroy brothers and those that want a more story based experience will do what literally everyone does, selectively use the rules of the game to their taste, partially because of misunderstanding and partially because they just think something should be different. Some if them, like the McElroys, will graduate to indie games because they want something that facilitates that mode of play more easily. No one who goes and watches an esports game streamer gets their friends together expects to pull off pro strats with perfect accuracy. There is a natural understanding of "professional" versus "amateur" play in every aspect of human endeavor where such a delineation exists.
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Feb 4, 2019 08:07
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Jimbozig posted:They don't airbrush them with the goal of deception uhhhh e; models typically get airbrushed to unnatural perfection because the people doing the airbrushing are quite literally trying to sell you products in association with said models and there's probably way, way more ink that's been spilled on the subject of unrealistic depictions of beauty in marketing and advertising than I am qualified to offer an educated breakdown of, but I think any sort of 1-1 comparison between this and a bunch of dorks editing their D&D actual play to cut out dull jokes and wasted airtime is the definition of a reach. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 08:50
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Jimbozig posted:Airbrushed models aren't supposed to be deceptive. They are supposed to be attractive and appealing. They don't airbrush them with the goal of deception - they airbrush them because it makes them more appealing to the viewer. Precisely like when actual play podcasts edit stuff out. They don't edit it out to be deceptive - they edit it out because the recording will be more entertaining and appealing without it. Thanks for this take, it'll keep my grandma's home heated in the post-Brexit winter.
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Feb 4, 2019 09:25
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Jimbozig posted:Airbrushed models aren't supposed to be deceptive. They are supposed to be attractive and appealing. They don't airbrush them with the goal of deception - they airbrush them because it makes them more appealing to the viewer. Precisely like when actual play podcasts edit stuff out. They don't edit it out to be deceptive - they edit it out because the recording will be more entertaining and appealing without it. You realize that when people talk about airbrushing models, despite the similarity in phrase to spraying paint on a little plastic figure, they're not talking about using an airbrush to apply makeup to the actual person, right? Airbrushing isn't for removing blemishes. It's for distorting proportions and changing skin color. The editing equivalent would be dubbing over one of your players with someone that has a more ASMR voice or something.
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Feb 4, 2019 09:55
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I do think that the Adventure Zone, as an example, is pertinent: you do hear about players turning up expecting something that polished (or new GMs not realizing that they aren't going to have such immediate and competent engagement from the players). I don't think this is a net negative but I do think people who only know RPGs from that and pop-cultural depictions of D&D are like anyone jumping into a hobby - liable to get discouraged by normal obstacles. So I would personally appreciate if APs were direct about how they're like reality TV, an edited and carefully presented version of real events. But that doesn't mean APs are a net negative for the hobby (some are, I'm sure).
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Feb 4, 2019 09:59
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DalaranJ posted:Cecil Howe, who's itch account is Cone of Negative Energy. He's a pretty cool guy. I feel like there's a lot of lost potential in that username not being "CoNE of Negative Energy".
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Feb 4, 2019 10:18
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kingcom posted:DriveThruRPG is loving hot garbage and is a hellish marketplace of maximised undercutting microtransaction style. I remember the warlord that was discussed and released had people refusing to look at it and pay for something like that even when the asking price was like $2. That is not a marketplace anyone can survive in and is basically a condemnation of anyone who holds any value of their work. It is a proudly dumb statement come that site and the users of that site that games and systems inherently hold no value. So yeah if they can find an alternative, I hope they do so. A bit back I was ranting (I think elsewhere on this thread) about how SJG wasted way too many years trying to make Warehouse 23 a thing rather than biting the bullet and going to where the customers are - which for RPG PDFs, currently, is DriveThruRPG. But if there's a better brand of customers elsewhere, who are already used to using a particular site and would be amenable to buying things through it, I think it also makes sense to go to where those customers are. And if you've done an indie storygame tie-in to your indie bedroom developer videogame (or vice versa), then there's a logical synergy there. It's much easier to convince people to buy the storygame if it's on the same platform as the videogame, rather than getting them to go sign up to some different platform that they may have never used before to get the tie-in. EDIT: Main gap would be PoD - sure, you can set up your PoDs on Lulu, but that requires people to go to a whole other site whereas DriveThru has that integration which is really useful. On the other hand, there's at least a section of indie storygames which are designed more for tablet/screen reading than for hardcopy anyhow.
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Feb 4, 2019 11:48
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I'm like 90 percent certain that SJG stuff showing up on drivethru had less to do with "Finally go where the customers are and more "Well, the guy who founded drivethru that Jackson had a beef with is dead, I guess we can bury the hatchet with the corpse"
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Feb 4, 2019 12:06
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Edit: I was mistaken and bad at Google.
Zurui fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 12:11
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No, Apocalypse World is up on DTRPG. I feel like this conversation is conflating the problems of DTRPG with the broader problem that the RPG customer base doesn't seem willing to countenance reasonable prices.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:33
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remusclaw posted:While it is clear that you can't expect the same experience playing that you get from a podcast, there really isn't any way we are going to get podcasters en mass to put that in a disclaimer at the beginning of their shows saying so. The new player coming into the hobby because of podcasts is going to quickly find out that the people they are playing with are generally not actors any more than they are, and are going to have to adjust their expectations a little bit. The players being professional actors is only a small issue compared to the ones that have come up since, which is the players being pre-briefed as to the session’s story beats and playing to that goal, and even worse the session being edited to hide downtime or obliterate awkward moments. I don’t know if CR does that (god knows how long the unedited sessions are if they do) but theironjef clearly said that some do. The problem is that the new players brought in by this are going to be coming in preloaded with some of the most toxic fallacies around, like “a good GM can fix it” and “story just happens”. While actual RPGs spent ~10 years addressing those and still didn’t quite get them. Theory may be kind of empty but its observations are still valid.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:41
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That Old Tree posted:No, Apocalypse World is up on DTRPG. This is a huge problem with basically any niche creative industry, because cheap mass manufacture and exploitative global labour practices lead people to put wildly lower than appropriate value on individual labour, a problem which is redoubled because people are willing to work for cheap or free because they enjoy the work. All of this conspires to make it very, very hard to actually sell creative products for what they actually cost to make. Whether this applies to this specific industry is questionable, as Sturgeon's Law is pretty rife in RPG products generally, but it is what it is.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:41
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Probably doesn't help that RPGs actually being readily sold as PDFs has such a fraught and unstable history, as does basically the entire business model (this is the hobby famous for dusty stores that still display faded decade-old supplements at sticker price) where everything was brutally overpriced if you couldn't find elusive physical copies or was availaible for free (the SRD is probably still D&D's worst enemy) and as a result for most people it was either spending way too much money on books you then treat as holy relics, or that Soda Stream you convince yourself you need to use to get your money's worth, or casual piracy. Basically as a result, a lot of people have no concept of what a reasonable price is for RPGs bought online.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:45
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I just love that after countless decades of people theorycrafting ideas to get new people into the RPG hobby, usually involving the One Perfect Licensed RPG which will be sure to have everyone kicking down the door aaaaaaany day now, someone finally figured out a way to actually bring new people into the hobby and the immediate response is "but what if, in fact, this is problematic?"
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Feb 4, 2019 12:45
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hyphz posted:The problem is that the new players brought in by this are going to be coming in preloaded with some of the most toxic fallacies around, like “a good GM can fix it” This is really more a problem with TRPGs in general rather than something that you might pick up exclusively through watching (edited) APs, especially since the flagship TRPG actively endorses this viewpoint (which is bad).
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Feb 4, 2019 12:46
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unseenlibrarian posted:I'm like 90 percent certain that SJG stuff showing up on drivethru had less to do with "Finally go where the customers are and more "Well, the guy who founded drivethru that Jackson had a beef with is dead, I guess we can bury the hatchet with the corpse"
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Feb 4, 2019 12:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Basically as a result, a lot of people have no concept of what a reasonable price is for RPGs bought online. A reasonable price is what people are willing to pay.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:55
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Upon reflection, I'm looking forward to whatever the OSR is going to be in 20 years when it's made by people whose games revolve around disaster gay tiefling drama instead of 1970s wargames.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:59
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potatocubed posted:Upon reflection, I'm looking forward to whatever the OSR is going to be in 20 years when it's made by people whose games revolve around disaster gay tiefling drama instead of 1970s wargames. Honestly same.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:00
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hyphz posted:The players being professional actors is only a small issue compared to the ones that have come up since, which is the players being pre-briefed as to the session’s story beats and playing to that goal, and even worse the session being edited to hide downtime or obliterate awkward moments. I don’t know if CR does that (god knows how long the unedited sessions are if they do) but theironjef clearly said that some do. The "problem" of an influx of fresh and enthusiastic players who're all super keen on dynamic and exciting and cool RPG sessions is absolutely ours to "fix" rather than some kind of crime being committed by Critical Role though. An influx of people wanting high-quality games with solid story beats and less time spent jacking around with boring stuff and half the group loving around on their phones is exactly what we need. This is an opportunity to learn things. Maybe players in your bog standard D&D game should get some kind of idea of the session structure timeline so you don't walk away with an anticlimatic end of the session. Maybe game features that lead to player downtime and disengagement need to be chopped. The industry should be treating this as a gift from heaven.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:01
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thespaceinvader posted:This is a huge problem with basically any niche creative industry, because cheap mass manufacture and exploitative global labour practices lead people to put wildly lower than appropriate value on individual labour, a problem which is redoubled because people are willing to work for cheap or free because they enjoy the work. All of this conspires to make it very, very hard to actually sell creative products for what they actually cost to make. Over the years, people's expectations on production values have shot up enormously. Now people expect your game to be a hardcover, with full-colour illustrations, and your layout had better be slightly more ambitious than "just put it in two columns all the way through and have done with it". All of that jacks manufacturing costs up, substantial amounts of it adds time to the process as well. (How many Kickstarters have you backed which got delayed in layout Hell? How many of them would have got stuck there if they went for a basic black and white interior, two-column layout)? It'd be one thing if this pressure were only felt at the top of the industry, but it seems to be increasingly expected of you regardless of what level you are at. And whilst it's undeniably nice to have all these pretty books, a) I bet we all have books in our collections where we wish they just went for a clear black and white two-column approach because it's more readable and easier to find things that way than it is with the colour backgrounds and attempt at a fancy layout that they went for, and b) that's going to exacerbate the cost issues a lot, especially when people aren't willing to up their estimation of what an RPG product costs. I'm sure a lot of publishers are really caught in this catch-22 where if they go with a clear, basic, no-frills layout they can produce their book on-budget but not sell it, but if they go with a fancy layout their book will go over budget and, whilst it'll sell, the customers won't buy it at a price which will actually turn a decent profit. It's no wonder Kickstarter's propping up the industry now under such circumstances. Apply this to the PDF market and it doesn't help much. At best, you've saved yourself the cost of colour printing and hardcover production... but you still need to pay your artist and your layout person before your product gets out there. If you go for a fancy layout and art, people will whine at you and post bad reviews about making it harder to home print the book. If you go with a basic one, people will turn their nose up at the PDF preview and will print a bunch of copies of the book off for your friends. Warthur fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 13:10
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Totally. Colour printing is bloody expensive, but when I pop over to e23 to look for a specific old GURPS tome, I'm bluntly reminded that printing is only part of the cost of production.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:45
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hyphz posted:The players being professional actors is only a small issue compared to the ones that have come up since, which is the players being pre-briefed as to the session’s story beats and playing to that goal, and even worse the session being edited to hide downtime or obliterate awkward moments. I don’t know if CR does that (god knows how long the unedited sessions are if they do) but theironjef clearly said that some do. Players already get those fallacies after coming in. The problems of "a good gm can fix it" and "story happens" were problems in the player base for so long that they have been codified as the the groggiest of grogg opinions. New players might bring in old problems, but they bring them in from totally different perspectives as to what a good GM is, and what a good story is, and I happen to agree with them as to those even if I understand that expectations may not meet the fantasy of edited media. Kai Tave posted:I just love that after countless decades of people theorycrafting ideas to get new people into the RPG hobby, usually involving the One Perfect Licensed RPG which will be sure to have everyone kicking down the door aaaaaaany day now, someone finally figured out a way to actually bring new people into the hobby and the immediate response is "but what if, in fact, this is problematic?" Exactly. New players is great. New perspectives and ideas is great. There has always been gatekeeping in the hobby trying to discourage the wrong sort of people and there have been harassment campaigns aimed at people pushing and enjoying the wrong sort of game. While all this happens the same shitheads were bemoaning the lack of new players while simultaneously doing their level best to keep people out. potatocubed posted:Upon reflection, I'm looking forward to whatever the OSR is going to be in 20 years when it's made by people whose games revolve around disaster gay tiefling drama instead of 1970s wargames. It is going to amazing. Fantasy Heartbreakers that actually break your heart. These people may come in thinking D&D is the thing, but if experience with it doesn't push them away from the hobby, these are not the sort who want what D&D promises on the tin. I certainly expect them to be more ready converts to games that suit their expectation than the "Will only play 3.5 D&D" crowd is.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:A reasonable price is what people are willing to pay. Bullshit. A reasonable price is, at minimum, the cost to produce the item. Almost nobody in the industry accurately bills their labor, as is common in other creative fields. Between the authors, designers, artists, editors, and layout folks all underbilling their labor, the 'reasonable price' for most indy RPGs is 2-3x what they're being marketed at.
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Feb 4, 2019 13:55
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Liquid Communism posted:Bullshit. It may be that people are not willing or able to pay a reasonable price, at which point the creator needs to decide whether they're willing and able to accept an unreasonable price, or not make the creation. Basically every creative industry preys on this willingness.
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Feb 4, 2019 14:06
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Rent-a-Bot posted:Honestly I just wish there were more APs took a bit of an instructional tack and off showed off lesser-known systems, though this is probably more my own selfishness of wanting to see the flow of a game before I buy it. Not to play pitchman for it too much, but Saving Throw Show on Twitch has only one D&D group, but they also run rotating stuff (like Shadowrun or Masks) have a regular Savage Worlds East Texas University game (which they just started up after Deadlands) and do a Sunday night show based off that Lasers & Feelings one-sheet game. There also seem to be a lot of Vampire 5E games popping up, and while that's very much not my very edition I've watched some fun games of it. There's another Twitch channel (and I think they also do YouTube) called Happy Jack's and they're also all about different systems. Even have a Tenra Bansho one-shot of all things.
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Feb 4, 2019 14:07
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thespaceinvader posted:It may be that people are not willing or able to pay a reasonable price, at which point the creator needs to decide whether they're willing and able to accept an unreasonable price, or not make the creation. Yup, and on the self-worth of the creators. There are so many people out there perfectly willing to negotiate against themselves because they don't feel their work is 'good enough' to be professional.
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Feb 4, 2019 14:10
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If a team spends a thousand hours working on a lovely system, it doesn't make the end product more inherently valuable than a great game that different creators managed to kick out in less time, though. Ultimately anything is only "worth" what people will pay. I agree that creative staff is underpaid in the industry, but doubling MSRP isn't going to translate into better wages - it'll just kill sales and drive up piracy.
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Feb 4, 2019 14:14
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Isn't hyphz entire bit that he plays with a notoriously terrible TTRPG group?
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Feb 4, 2019 14:30
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Isn't hyphz entire bit that he plays with a notoriously terrible TTRPG group?
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Feb 4, 2019 14:51
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Warthur posted:Until we get any of them posting corroborating information here I'm not going to rule out the problem being with hyphz instead of the group.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:02
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Yeah, I for one am trying to figure out how much it's worth selling a 14-page Exalted supplement with original art for on the Storyteller's Vault. I don't really have any hope of making back the couple of hundred dollars I'm spending on art within several years; I mostly just wanted to make something that was obviously better than what anybody else had. (It turns out I maybe didn't need to bother; there are only 14 Exalted pieces on the Vault so it's going to be hard not to hit the top ten.) Right now I'm thinking $10? I don't really mind charging what I think a thing is worth to prove a point, and it really is quite a useful mini-supplement, but it would be nice if people actually did buy it.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:03
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i remember hearing the hype for critical role a while back so i started from the beginning and, uhhh afaict they stream the whole game, with no real editing? like they take breaks to go piss or whatever, but i don't think that counts. what are we supposed to be thinking they edit out? and as for it being scripted or something, they had a player on during those early days who was clearly having a mental breakdown or something and was pissing off the rest of the players which seems like something you'd remove or minimize if you wanted to. overall critical role doesn't seem comparable to something that is polished and heavily edited like the adventure zone because they livestream it and then throw those videos on youtube with minimal editing. i feel like they get a lot of credit due to their skill at improv and chemistry as a group, but i don't think they're deceiving anyone
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Feb 4, 2019 15:03
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Serf posted:i remember hearing the hype for critical role a while back so i started from the beginning and, uhhh afaict they stream the whole game, with no real editing? like they take breaks to go piss or whatever, but i don't think that counts. what are we supposed to be thinking they edit out? and as for it being scripted or something, they had a player on during those early days who was clearly having a mental breakdown or something and was pissing off the rest of the players which seems like something you'd remove or minimize if you wanted to. overall critical role doesn't seem comparable to something that is polished and heavily edited like the adventure zone because they livestream it and then throw those videos on youtube with minimal editing. i feel like they get a lot of credit due to their skill at improv and chemistry as a group, but i don't think they're deceiving anyone Yeah, that confused me as well. While I don't doubt there's probably editing on podcast APs, streaming APs are pretty much what you see is what you get. I mean, if they wanted to edit Critical Role there's a whole bunch of stuff from Orion Acaba's character that just bogged everything down. Every time he went shopping, for example.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:06
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moths posted:If a team spends a thousand hours working on a lovely system, it doesn't make the end product more inherently valuable than a great game that different creators managed to kick out in less time, though. And thus the problem with the system. Crab buckets all the way down.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:08
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Tendales posted:You realize that when people talk about airbrushing models, despite the similarity in phrase to spraying paint on a little plastic figure, they're not talking about using an airbrush to apply makeup to the actual person, right? And you know that when they edit a podcast they are not going back in time and altering what was said, right? I loving know what airbrushing is. This isn't a hot take - I'm literally comparing the digital editing and post-production of images of humans to the digital editing and post-production of audio recordings of humans. They absolutely do use airbrushing to erase things like stretch marks and cellulite. And yes, some but certainly not all ads are airbrushed to make the model leaner. Just like some but certainly not all actual play podcasts are edited to make the story leaner. It's not a criticism of AP podcasts. It's really very simple: if you can understand why some people find editing images dishonest then you can understand why some people find editing audio dishonest. Certainly both can be used dishonestly! And certainly in the quest for aesthetic perfection, people editing podcasts and photos of models alike will remove some of the more human imperfections, and that removal makes the product more appealing to most viewers/listeners while bothering the part of the audience who wanted to see/hear those human flaws.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:14
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The gently caress is wrong with you?
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Feb 4, 2019 15:31
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