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Liquid Communism posted:Ethically speaking, sure, in a way. We as a society have determined that it is unethical on some level to let people who are working starve. Therefore any business (in this case publishers) who knowingly pays less than a living wage while profiting off the work of those people is exploiting them and causing a societal problem because in order for them to not starve they are going to need societal support. Are you sure about that 
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Feb 26, 2019 04:19
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Yeah I disagree completely. Currently our society is OK with letting people starve to some degree, and to the rest of the degree, we insist that people not starve irrespective of whether or how much they are working. Moreover, we are still (most of us anyway) living in capitalist countries, in which one's work is valued by more than just how many hours of labor they put in; it is necessary for the market to find a value for that work. There are laborious endeavors a person can undertake, which have no market - nobody wants it enough to pay for it - and undertaking those endeavors does not, under our current system, entitle you to a wage, much less a living wage. If we had a UBI that'd be cool and good, but it'd still not be the market rewarding you for your work irrespective of the market's assessment of its value. This is part of why there is a certain shaky ground under the proposition that every RPG worker deserves to be paid a living wage for their work. I would prefer to say that every RPG creator who deserves to be paid at all, deserves to be paid a living wage for their work, but not all RPG work is worthwhile or has a market. Going back to what I was saying earlier about the art world, there is a certain amount of controversy about Etsy. In some sense, the site has massively democratized artwork, because it acts like a crowdsourced gallery; art buyers can find art (and craft, but let's not get into the art vs. craft debate here!) without having to pay the fees of a gallerist. However, there is so much on Etsy that many artists have found that while listing work on Etsy provides them with a huge customer base and they are able to make some money, it also sets a hard ceiling on how seriously the "serious art world" is willing to take them. This factor is significant enough that "serious artists" are advised to use a pseudonym or alternate brand for work they offer via Etsy, to separate it completely from the work they promote to galleries and shows etc. By a similar token, there are probably RPG products for which a freelancer is willing to provide content, but would or should prefer to not be identified as a contributor. Particularly if that work is clearly going to be paid at a relatively low rate, which subsequent contract offers will use as leverage to keep the rate low. If you are hoping to get paid 12 cents an hour to contribute to a prestige project with a good prospect of generating significant sales, you may be undermining your negotiation leverage by having recent credits on low-budget indie products being sold on drive thru. Even while you might be wanting to include those projects in your portfolio. Consider a pen name, or just requesting anonymity on those cheaper projects? If a publisher pushes back on anonymity, you may assume they think your name has value... it will help them sell more units... and they should pay you for that value, or else you are volunteering to erode that value.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:46
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Doesn't Etsy have a huge problem where anything popular gets taken over by Chinese sellers undercutting everyone for it?
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Feb 26, 2019 04:52
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Liquid Communism posted:Ethically speaking, sure, in a way. We as a society have determined that it is unethical on some level to let people who are working starve. Therefore any business (in this case publishers) who knowingly pays less than a living wage while profiting off the work of those people is exploiting them and causing a societal problem because in order for them to not starve they are going to need societal support. I think the bold is an important distinction that may have been assumed. A relevant one in this context where there are claims that selling your own work for less than living wages is unethical. If both cases are true, then the only way to develop in the industry in skill and reputation is to produce privately or for free unless there's some other system in place, such as a guilds, academic institutions, apprenticeship, cartel or something to limit the producers so the individual products attain enough value to reach that base coat. This used to be done by distributers and the cost of production siloing producers enough that they could attain sufficient market share to pay real wages, but with pdf releases and the internet, I'm not sure that barrier is easily reached, except for a few established productions.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:57
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One important issue that the industry needs to come to terms with is that so many 'professional' games are designed so poorly that there is not much daylight between hobbyist design and professional. No amateur computer programmer could ever have created apex legends, but many hobbyist ttrpg devs have written better content than dnd 5e.
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Feb 26, 2019 05:06
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I wanna know how well the $1000 worth of call of cthulhu props sold - fake newspaper articles are where the real money's at.
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Feb 26, 2019 05:20
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slap me and kiss me posted:One important issue that the industry needs to come to terms with is that so many 'professional' games are designed so poorly that there is not much daylight between hobbyist design and professional. It's definitely an obstacle to the sort of curation Leperflesh is talking about when the TRPG audience has historically signaled that they don't actually care all that much about anything approaching critical examination of game design in their games. Cthulhutech is a great example of this, where even if you ignore all the skeezy poo poo and zero in on pure white room mechanics the actual system is so badly designed that you wind up with things like higher-skilled characters being more likely to critically fail skill rolls or the psychic powers which require inordinate amounts of XP to develop to any sort of useful state but then once you cross a specific breakpoint suddenly become ludicrously overtuned. Yet it's pretty hard to argue that Cthulhutech really suffered any negative effects from any of this (mechanical jankiness or skeeziness) considering it had eight glossy high production quality books published under its name and is (theoretically) getting a second edition. It really does start to raise the question of whether or not it's actually worthwhile to invest a substantial amount of time and effort in creating a really well-polished, well-designed game when instead you could just do a half-assed job with a derivative nonsense setting, gloss it up with some fancy art, and people will still buy into it anyway.
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Feb 26, 2019 05:22
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Games are a little punk rock like that. They're tools for inspiring creativity and my experiences are as driven by their failures as their successes. I'm not sure you can write a $200 game any more than you could produce a $200 movie. My high water mark of RPGs was probably Shadowrun 3rd edition and most of the reasons are probably not the fault of the developers. I had a blast with a weird traveler/rifts hybrid game I once played which mostly carried over the faults of both. This Golden Age of RPGs has mostly passed me by. I bought Feng Shui 2, Technoir and various PbtA games, but I will never play them--only read then. My best experiences lately have been DMing the unindoctrinated through straigtstick Dungeons and Dragons, even though I feel like I'm definitely over it, and the most valuable quality an RPG can have is that I don't have to explain that other RPGs exist. That game has brought the cost to a full $89 for the core books and I cannot imagine what a game would need to do to be valued more than that.
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Feb 26, 2019 06:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Doesn't Etsy have a huge problem where anything popular gets taken over by Chinese sellers undercutting everyone for it? Etsy's rule is that everything sold on the site is supposed to be handmade. It's possible that there are sellers in China undercutting American sellers on price, but they should not be, in theory, selling identical products. It is true that Etsy has become pretty huge and I would guess that the site struggles to police itself on that policy? Kai Tave posted:It's definitely an obstacle to the sort of curation Leperflesh is talking about when the TRPG audience has historically signaled that they don't actually care all that much about anything approaching critical examination of game design in their games. I suspect part of the problem there is that the curation has been similarly uncritical. Do game store owners do the job that gallery owners do? Do RPG awards do the same job as prestigious art shows? Are RPG youtube reviewers and podcasters providing the same level of critique as art journalists and critics? I think they are not, not remotely so. For good reasons, including the relative immaturity of the RPG genre compared to fine art, the relative sizes of their respective markets, and of course, the fact that games are more adjacent to hobbies and sports than they are to internationally and universally recognized peaks of human expression. But I think if we accept bad critique, lovely highly biased awards, and amateur-level reviews as the standard, then we (as consumers) can continue to expect to be disappointed by a lot of our purchases, and to see the industry's customer base as a whole continue to be uncritical in what they choose to buy. Art critics do more than just tell us what is good or bad. They teach us why. e. Also, chicken-and-egg, but: games are super, super cheap compared to fine art. The perception of risk may be lower. Although I'd say if you are gonna spend a year playing a game, the risk may be higher than buying a $1000 artwork that you wind up not liking once you get it home, or... whatever would be an equivalent experience, because that's not exactly it. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 06:47
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brb getting enough money to be a Patron of the Dice Rolling Arts.
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Feb 26, 2019 06:51
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Arivia posted:Are you sure about that Yeah, although the debate about what makes the 'Deserving Poor' and to what extent part of our population wants to punish people for the failures of late-stage capitalism varies by political ethos. piL posted:I think the bold is an important distinction that may have been assumed. A relevant one in this context where there are claims that selling your own work for less than living wages is unethical. If both cases are true, then the only way to develop in the industry in skill and reputation is to produce privately or for free unless there's some other system in place, such as a guilds, academic institutions, apprenticeship, cartel or something to limit the producers so the individual products attain enough value to reach that base coat. This used to be done by distributers and the cost of production siloing producers enough that they could attain sufficient market share to pay real wages, but with pdf releases and the internet, I'm not sure that barrier is easily reached, except for a few established productions. Yeah, that's why I put it in there. In theory people would vote with their wallets, but at the end of the day RPGs are a luxury good, so it's easier to stop buying them than pay what they actually cost to make for most people. Leperflesh posted:Etsy's rule is that everything sold on the site is supposed to be handmade. It's possible that there are sellers in China undercutting American sellers on price, but they should not be, in theory, selling identical products. Replaces 'struggles' with 'doesn't bother'. There are a ton of, for example, Games Workshop recasters who sell through Etsy, as well as easy to find examples of identical mass produced products marketed through multiple storefronts. They police it about as well as Amazon polices the Chinese knockoff flood that has made browsing for anything but specific branded items useless, and even then risky because they are bad about binning 'identical' skus together and that has let bad actors get knockoffs shipped as legit product. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 07:35
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So... curation does have the practical affect of improving the quality of a given medium by making it more quality-stratified, in that while curators don't always judge things on merit they at least purport to, and curation does have the practical affect of improving the market for creators by allowing them to present their work to customers in an appropriate environment, and both of those things ultimately do have a positive flow-on impact on customers, curation doesn't exist for either of those reasons, it exists because it directly serves the needs of customers. That is to say, curation is work, and good curation is hard work, and it's only going to be possible at a given standard if people are paying for it. In money, in attention, in appreciation (both of those things bascially translate to "in advertising dollars"). The value the curator provides to the customer is they save the customer time and reduce the customer's perception of risk. So art gallery owners can make a living (and afford to pay rent on an entire galley) off curation because art curation is highly valued by customers. The gallery owner's cut is effectively money the customer is paying to the gallery owner for the service of curation. Movie reviewers can make a living because they're paid by newspapers and such; they earn their salary by doing the service of movie curation well enough that the newspaper/website/whatever gets readers in significant enough numbers that they continue employing the movie reviewer - effectively, the time and attention the customers are paying for the service of curation. With that in mind: why don't RPG customers value curation as much as art customers or movie customers? Well, part of it might be the difference in price; as you said. But a movie ticket is often like $10, and movie reviewers still get paid. There must be other reasons. Part of it is the other service of curation - saving the customer time. Nobody could even come close to checking out all the art ever made in order to find the best one to buy. Curation is essential to the process of purchasing art if the customer wants to both believe that they've bought something good and spend less than a decade buying each artwork. The process of purchasing RPGs, though? There just *aren't that many* RPGs. And there are even less, say, Warhammer 40k RPGs; few enough that even without any curation whatsoever I could feel like I'm making an informed decision when choosing one. Let alone all those people who buy their first ever RPG because it's D&D and they aren't even aware that other fantasy games could exist. But I think a lot of it also comes from the fact that people buy RPGs not as entertainment or as art but as a sort of... private conspicuous consumption? They don't buy RPGs to use them, per se, they buy them to own with the intention of one day using. I've had the Dresden Files RPG sitting on my shelf for five years. I've never even cracked it open. I bought it because I like Fate Core and I like the source material and... well, and that's it. I didn't check to see if it was a good game. I mean, sure, if I know a game is bad I don't get much pleasure out of owning it, but until I find out by playing it, a bad game is sitting there on my shelf like a leatherbound Funko Pop, providing exactly the same sense of identity and satisfaction as a good game I haven't played. I think this, more than price, is really why there's so little perception of risk and consequently demand for curation in the TTRPG space.
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Feb 26, 2019 07:54
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My understanding re: Etsy is that they also have a significant problem with designers for large brands (Zara is one I remember seeing) just browsing through the site and ripping off anything that they like.
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Feb 26, 2019 07:55
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a computing pun posted:So art gallery owners can make a living (and afford to pay rent on an entire galley) off curation because art curation is highly valued by customers. The gallery owner's cut is effectively money the customer is paying to the gallery owner for the service of curation. Movie reviewers can make a living because they're paid by newspapers and such; they earn their salary by doing the service of movie curation well enough that the newspaper/website/whatever gets readers in significant enough numbers that they continue employing the movie reviewer - effectively, the time and attention the customers are paying for the service of curation. As I mentioned: total size of the market. Movies only cost $10 or so per ticket, but, tens or hundreds of millions of tickets are sold, so the curator only needs to capture a tiny fraction of that to earn a good wage. Even "indie" films have Sundance etc. and a limited run, plus DVD sales, can return a profit sufficient to pay for production costs that run in at least the hundreds of thousands of dollars. For a blockbuster film, the budgets and profits of one film dwarf the entire global sales of all RPGs put together. But the other aspect is that movie reviews are themselves a popular product, which can be monetized. That can scale down to potentially find paid work for a small number of RPG reviewers... and that is the case now, with a few youtube channels, blogs, podcasts, etc. that are popular enough to earn some money, although I don't know of anyone making a living entirely on doing it. quote:Part of it is the other service of curation - saving the customer time. Nobody could even come close to checking out all the art ever made in order to find the best one to buy. Curation is essential to the process of purchasing art if the customer wants to both believe that they've bought something good and spend less than a decade buying each artwork. The process of purchasing RPGs, though? There just *aren't that many* RPGs. And there are even less, say, Warhammer 40k RPGs; few enough that even without any curation whatsoever I could feel like I'm making an informed decision when choosing one. Let alone all those people who buy their first ever RPG because it's D&D and they aren't even aware that other fantasy games could exist. Yup, that's definitely a big factor. I don't think RPG curation would ever really resemble art curation. quote:But I think a lot of it also comes from the fact that people buy RPGs not as entertainment or as art but as a sort of... private conspicuous consumption? They don't buy RPGs to use them, per se, they buy them to own with the intention of one day using. Yeah this aspect is actually more like the consumption of artwork. Some artwork (leaning into the "craft" side of things) like handmade ceramic ware is utilitarian enough to get "used" (and even "used up" - pottery that is in regular use gets broken regularly), but a lot of it exists to sit on a shelf gathering dust. Or worse, get stuck in a drawer, never even displayed. But you're right that from a curatorial standpoint, if customers don't care about the quality of a product because they will never actually encounter that quality by using it, curation is useless to them. I do think content creators are not very excited about making a living selling RPGs that will never be played, though. One of the qualitative goals of the industry should be to make games that people not only want to play, and which are well-made, but which actually get played, and that speaks to other troubled aspects of hobbies: my wife calls it GAS, which stands for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, the tendency to spend more time shopping for stuff to support your hobby than you spend actually doing the hobby. I don't think my thoughts about curation address this issue at all. Pricing does, though. There may be a follow-on value to generally pricing RPGs much much higher, if it prompts people to only buy what they'll actually use.
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Feb 26, 2019 08:14
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I think part of the difficulty there is also that it is very difficult to make objective statements on the quality of RPGs beyond those that are clearly terrible.
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Feb 26, 2019 08:18
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Liquid Communism posted:I think part of the difficulty there is also that it is very difficult to make objective statements on the quality of RPGs beyond those that are clearly terrible. It's a mistake to assume that artistic criticism must be objective to be valuable, and most truly objective artistic criticism would just be repeating obvious facts like "this book has X pages for an expected playtime of Y hours, which is a good/bad average value for time compared to other books". Actually, this is an endless problem in the gaming community in general, where the equivalent of grognards.txt types get inordinately angry if a reviewer talks about the social context of a game's narrative or doesn't give a rating on a 10-point scale.
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Feb 26, 2019 08:22
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Yeah, fair point. The reaction to media is always subjective. I was more thinking towards mechanics, which plays right into the blind spot you mentioned.
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Feb 26, 2019 08:28
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Liquid Communism posted:I think part of the difficulty there is also that it is very difficult to make objective statements on the quality of RPGs beyond those that are clearly terrible. This is also true of all other forms of art. Curation requires the development of structures of thought and conversation about theme, tone, aesthetic, intention, affect, etc. A critic can talk about the obvious and subtle influences, the skill of execution, aspects of originality, interplay between related pieces, and so on. A critic can sometimes conclude that something is "clearly terrible" or (far more rarely) "clearly amazing" but most of the time, critical analysis is not about "good" vs. "bad." And customers who are educated by repeated exposure to critique and analysis obtain the language and tools to improve their own discrimination as to what appeals or does not appeal to them, and why. We actually do this all the time in this forum. Every time someone wanders into the chat thread and asks (say) "what's a good space game" and someone else says "well, do you like lots of crunch, are you thinking about space opera, do you like combat-heavy, would you be interested in a diceless game," "how do you feel about gay aliens," "do you like magic and demons," "grimdark, or even more grim and dark" and so on, we are not dividing things along good vs. bad, we're exposing that person to the themes and mechanics that differentiate various styles of game. Ultimately what we want is very good games, and that may ultimately require qualitative judgements, but qualitative isn't identical to objective. A consensus view that a particular game is flawed because of X, Y, and Z could be based entirely on subjective criteria, but still inform people as to the quality of the game. Compare to a Yelp page for a restaurant: there may be objective criteria (there were cockroaches, this place is unsanitary) but more likely lots of subjective criteria (these udon noodles are cooked exactly right, the salmon was well-seasoned, the server was polite and well informed).
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Feb 26, 2019 08:29
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Liquid Communism posted:I think part of the difficulty there is also that it is very difficult to make objective statements on the quality of RPGs beyond those that are clearly terrible. Even the most basic of curation/critique would be better than what generally goes around which is nothing, just pointing out "these rules are bad and don't work well, here's a breakdown of why" would be more than most games ever get until well after they've been out for so long that it hardly even matters, trying to go "hey Cthulhutech/Shadowrun 5E/Numenera/etc is flawed in some significant ways" just gets you a bunch of commiserating nods from people who already bought the game or shrugs from people so far into sunk cost that they simply don't care either way.
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Feb 26, 2019 08:43
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What I'm beginning to get out of this conversation is as follows: - RPGs are, in many respects, too rudimentary a medium to support a class of people who make a living purely off RPG design. Most people are either doing it as a side hustle (the majority of freelancers), or have a stake in the actual publication side of things (Monte Cook, Rich Dansky) so they're getting a cut of the overall profits rather than solely being paid for text produced, or are getting a wage which takes into account other work in terms of line development and management (Mike Mearls), or some combination of the above (Greg Stolze). Those few folk who actually do make a living solely by writing RPG material are rare enough that they're basically a few exceptional individuals rather than an actual profession as such. - The freelancer market is exploitative in two ways, only one of which we have been directly talking about. It's exploitative in that it does not pay freelancers a decent rate for their work, and it's also exploitative in that it pretends to freelancers that this is a professional environment which can support a whole class of RPG writers, and that pretending that "RPG freelance writer" is a sensible career choice is horrible advice which will most likely cause hardship and misery to the majority of people who follow it. - Hobbyists, simultaneously, are a) scabs, who are loving things up for prospective professionals by not earning a professional rate; b) smart cookies who didn't fall for the industry's trick, who we could probably learn something from, and c) intrinsic and inescapable features of a medium with as strong a DIY ethos as RPGs, so it's far more likely that the publishers will go away (because it's no longer viable to treat RPGs like a business) than it is that the hobbyists will go away. Hobbyists would probably be better allies to professionals if they were educated as to why it's a bad thing to accept that side hustle writing content for that professional publisher, but then again it's the publisher who are assholes here for not paying a fair wage to begin with.
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Feb 26, 2019 09:17
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Liquid Communism posted:I think part of the difficulty there is also that it is very difficult to make objective statements on the quality of RPGs beyond those that are clearly terrible. It is completely possible to make objective statements about how well or badly designed a game is, which is one important metric by which you can judge the quality of an RPG.
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Feb 26, 2019 09:45
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Warthur posted:What I'm beginning to get out of this conversation is as follows: I mean it's fair to say that any 'highly specific freelance writing profession' isn't super viable as a career choice. Freelancing usually requires diversity but selling that to young writers who often only envision their career through the lens of their specific passion is terribly difficult. I would never attempt to unsell anyone on freelancing. You can do okay if you're good at it. But I could no more make a living as a 'freelance game writer' than I could as 'freelance magazine drink critic'. It's a gig and you should write gigs you like but you need options to survive. Does the RPG community especially harbor the illusion that one can survive as an 'RPG writer'? I guess it does, perperuated by an industry that needs it to survive, but also by a community that lionizes it's members and sarcafices themselves on the altar of their favorite company, crawling over glass for a shot at getting published in Shadowrun: Running Harder or whatever. For a class of people, ironically probably not professional writers, that's the dream, that's the whole of it, and I don't know how you reconcile that with the needs of professional writers.
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Feb 26, 2019 09:54
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Leperflesh posted:This is also true of all other forms of art. Curation requires the development of structures of thought and conversation about theme, tone, aesthetic, intention, affect, etc. A critic can talk about the obvious and subtle influences, the skill of execution, aspects of originality, interplay between related pieces, and so on. A critic can sometimes conclude that something is "clearly terrible" or (far more rarely) "clearly amazing" but most of the time, critical analysis is not about "good" vs. "bad." And customers who are educated by repeated exposure to critique and analysis obtain the language and tools to improve their own discrimination as to what appeals or does not appeal to them, and why. Yeah, that's fair, the crowd here is closer to a critical view than a consumer view as we're vastly more invested in the RPG market than any but the most hardcore of consumers, and in fact moreso than a fair portion of 'professional' reviewers. I mean I don't know that any of my friends who have been into RPGs could name a dozen tabletop games, much less express meaningfully why they are different in setting or mechanics.
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Feb 26, 2019 10:50
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Mendrian posted:I mean it's fair to say that any 'highly specific freelance writing profession' isn't super viable as a career choice. Freelancing usually requires diversity but selling that to young writers who often only envision their career through the lens of their specific passion is terribly difficult. I would never attempt to unsell anyone on freelancing. You can do okay if you're good at it. But I could no more make a living as a 'freelance game writer' than I could as 'freelance magazine drink critic'. It's a gig and you should write gigs you like but you need options to survive.
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Feb 26, 2019 11:36
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One additional note about curation... It takes a while. How long do I have to stare at a painting to decide if it's good? An hour? How long do I have to watch a movie to decide if it's good? Two hours? How long do I have to be exposed to an RPG book to decide if it's good? For a new system and setting book, I don't think I could speak to it without at least ten hours. And I can't do it by myself, either. I've got to rope my friends in to playing this new hotness as well.
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Feb 26, 2019 14:01
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CitizenKeen posted:How long do I have to be exposed to an RPG book to decide if it's good? For a new system and setting book, I don't think I could speak to it without at least ten hours. And I can't do it by myself, either. I've got to rope my friends in to playing this new hotness as well. You can spot nearly every obvious issues with any RPG by just reading the book, as long as you are someone who has played a lot of games and read even more. It's still several hours, but you don't need to rope any friends in to play (but discussing your findings with other people who are also well-read will help pick out a wider range of issues). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 14:10
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I wonder how much Rule Zero comes in with respect to curation/low standards. RPG fans are used to the idea of disregarding or houseruling the bits of games they don't like, to the point where it's integral to the format. Any time you run a traditional-format RPG - 1 GM, several players, more or less usual division of game responsibilities and powers between them - you are effectively performing a bit of creative adaptation for the sake of implementing the game for your table. Even if you go strictly RAW, and the writing style of the book is so gloriously unambiguous that everyone agrees on what RAW is, you're still having to adapt and change and add to the game whenever you throw in a situation that the core rulebook didn't expect, or whenever you throw in content that wasn't pregenned. As such, the bar for system quality ends up low. Obvious issues with a game jump out at the text and never make it to the table - either the group houserules them away or, if there's enough obvious problems with a system, they never play it in the first place. Less obvious issues only come out during play - and when it comes to issues which only become apparent in extended play it can be tricky for a group to assess whether that's actually a problem with the system in question, or whether it's functioning as intended and those intentions are incompatible with how they wanted this campaign to go. And the longer a campaign goes, the more it defaults less to whatever the designer envisaged and more to the group's collectively arrived-at interpretation of the game itself. Like the idea upthread that RPG texts might be better thought of as craft materials than the finished products of crafts. Viewed from that lens the role of a good RPG writer is less to produce ironclad, foolproof game mechanisms and more to provide material which can provide a reasonable enough jumping-off point for a non-dysfunctional home group to take in their own direction.
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Feb 26, 2019 14:55
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slap me and kiss me posted:One important issue that the industry needs to come to terms with is that so many 'professional' games are designed so poorly that there is not much daylight between hobbyist design and professional. Not Apex Legends, but the battle royale genre was created by an independent developer as a mod for Arma 3 (Brendan Greene, aka Playerunknown, thus the PUBG name) The distinction is more to do with media assets and infrastructure than design, though. Professional video games don’t intrinsically have better design that indies, except by their tendency to copy or absorb the successful indie designs. Both DotA and Counterstrike started indie.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:07
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Lemon-Lime posted:You can spot nearly every obvious issues with any RPG by just reading the book, as long as you are someone who has played a lot of games and read even more. It's still several hours, but you don't need to rope any friends in to play (but discussing your findings with other people who are also well-read will help pick out a wider range of issues). There's at least a few things I can notice when reading a book that'll make me check out immediately: linear chargen quadratic XP, very obviously borked action economies (stat that governs actions per turn), is D20 system unless I'm in a very kitch mood, monsters built as PCs in complex chargen games, linear chargen quadratic XP... Honestly, I've mostly stopped acquiring RPGs without a very solid recommend just because the mechanical bar is so low and I'm so tired of dealing with it. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 15:10
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Lemon-Lime posted:You can spot nearly every obvious issues with any RPG by just reading the book, as long as you are someone who has played a lot of games and read even more. It's still several hours, but you don't need to rope any friends in to play (but discussing your findings with other people who are also well-read will help pick out a wider range of issues). Yeah, I think that's only true if the game is similar to the games that come before it. Sure, you can probably get a sense of Shadow of the Demon Lord without playing it if you've played a lot of other d20 OSR-adjacent games. But, say, Blades? Even if you've played oodles of Powered by the Apocalypse, the "feel" of the game isn't immediately obvious. You have to play it to see how it hums. Besides, I'm not looking for the obvious issues. I'm looking for curation. I'm looking for someone to help guide me between the great and the "pretty solid if you're into that kinda thing." I wouldn't trust a board game reviewer who hadn't played a game they were reviewing. And I wouldn't trust and RPG reviewer who hadn't played the game. When an RPG reviewer posts a "review" that's just them reading through the book and commenting on that, I consider that the board game equivalent of a "box opening", it's a review of the book, not the game.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:33
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CitizenKeen posted:But, say, Blades? Even if you've played oodles of Powered by the Apocalypse, the "feel" of the game isn't immediately obvious. You have to play it to see how it hums. The problem with that is that any RPG can be made or broken by the group, so one group’s experience can be radically different from another. The book is the only constant. Plus, “you can’t really get the feel from the book” is in some ways a failure. It means that the group have to decide to play a game without a clear idea of what the experience will be. That may well be a dealbreaker when there are more guaranteed options available.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:50
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Mendrian posted:I mean it's fair to say that any 'highly specific freelance writing profession' isn't super viable as a career choice. Freelancing usually requires diversity but selling that to young writers who often only envision their career through the lens of their specific passion is terribly difficult. I would never attempt to unsell anyone on freelancing. You can do okay if you're good at it. But I could no more make a living as a 'freelance game writer' than I could as 'freelance magazine drink critic'. It's a gig and you should write gigs you like but you need options to survive. Once upon a time, i.e. the 80s and 90s, it certainly seemed like one could be a "RPG writer" as a profession, which I suspect still deforms expectations even today. At that point in time you had enough full time staff to actually justify an office space (and warehousing, given the time), at least for the bigger companies like TSR, White Wolf, Palladium, etc. There was also that brief window in there were especially popular RPG full timers, like Justin Achilles, could have something of a celebrity status. Even 20 years later and with a lot more public knowledge about how much money RPGs actually make, how much full time staff a company can support, and so forth, I think you still have people who associate RPG production with a more traditional small business model. In a lot of the ongoing shitshow of bad actors in the industry, I've seen plenty of confusion about who's actually "on staff" for a company, versus a freelancer doing work for them, and where that relationship lies. The idea that most RPGs are functionally one man shops still doesn't seem to have fully permeated the consumer base. And that, in turn, I think drives part of the notion that putting up with a lot of bs and low paid work can eventually net you a full time RPG dream job.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:53
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hyphz posted:The problem with that is that any RPG can be made or broken by the group, so one group’s experience can be radically different from another. The book is the only constant. To which I say "pish posh". Both those arguments can be made about board games, and yet there seems to be a strong element of curation there (e.g., when Tabletop or SUSD do a review and then the game sells out everywhere). I have a copy of Root. I haven't played it. But I have the pieces and the rules, "the only constant". And yet, your group's experience with it would be radically different from mine. And there are definitely board games that read as dry and awful and simple yet when they hit the table there's an unquantifiable magic that happens (see, like, every review of Happy Salmon). There are tons of board games out there that are amazing, come across as bad, and curation has shown us that they're awesome if you give them a chance. Now, I'm willing to accept that there's something special about RPGs versus board games. But my impression remains that any RPG reviewer that hasn't played the game they're reviewing isn't really reviewing a game, they're just reviewing a book. And there's value in "RPGs as texts we take inspiration from" as opposed to "RPGs as games we play", so there's value in those book-reviews, but I wouldn't rely on them for my purchase decisions.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:02
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Books and comics (especially whole series and long comic runs) can take hours over months to read through, and generally you'll have an idea of the quality of the content if you're partway through the first one before you start investing more time and money in the rest. Pen and paper RPGs are like that in a lot of ways, but yeah there is also the aspect of how well a game plays, and for many people the best way to learn a game is engaging with the mechanics in real play. There's a reason that people critique some game lines for churning out good bathroom reading that has no worthwhile gameable content in it. It winds back to the discussion on how tabletop rulebooks should be constructed and what their purpose is. You're dealing with an medium that overlaps with a half-dozen others but doesn't have any comfortable 1:1 analogs to compare to, a fanbase that's content with DIY fixes on flawed products or too new and excited to have much critical engagement, and the major stakeholders in the medium generally don't see a reason to educate or push for more balanced/streamlined mechanics out of fear of alienating fans/fragmenting the userbase/drawing a spotlight on their own flawed products and prompting new players to search for better experiences elsewhere.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:02
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Warthur posted:I wonder how much Rule Zero comes in with respect to curation/low standards. There's also the problem of how nerds treat criticism of a thing they like as an attack on themselves personally. Or how a depressing amount of nerds can't understand that you can like something and be critical of it at the same time.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:09
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hyphz posted:Plus, “you can’t really get the feel from the book” is in some ways a failure. It means that the group have to decide to play a game without a clear idea of what the experience will be. That may well be a dealbreaker when there are more guaranteed options available. This isn't really the case in a complex rules set, though. There are still people who think every 4e class plays the same, for example. Often nuance that got overlooked on a read through makes a huge difference in practice, and when there are more rules interactions than one person can easily track, evaluation requires an actual test-drive. That said, when the rules aren't a complex system (ie: they don't interact or overlap) it's a lot easier to get the gist of things.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:09
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's also the problem of how nerds treat criticism of a thing they like as an attack on themselves personally. Or how a depressing amount of nerds can't understand that you can like something and be critical of it at the same time. This is why we get a laugh out of the occasional folks asking for or promising to make a copy of our show but for "good or more popular games."
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Feb 26, 2019 16:46
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CitizenKeen posted:Yeah, I think that's only true if the game is similar to the games that come before it. No, you can 100% spot glaring issues in systems you've never seen before or that are very different from existing systems. All it requires is for the reader to have read widely, instead of just having read 50 different d20 games. Having extensive experience with a lot of different RPG systems does genuinely give you good grounds to understand how other RPG systems are put together and how they would break.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:57
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moths posted:This isn't really the case in a complex rules set, though. There are still people who think every 4e class plays the same, for example. Often nuance that got overlooked on a read through makes a huge difference in practice, and when there are more rules interactions than one person can easily track, evaluation requires an actual test-drive. I'm not sure that was what I was thinking of, though. Working out how every 4e class plays is one thing, but the tone of the game you get is what you signed up for - heroic fantasy adventure - and the book makes that clear. Finding that the stock Wizard is a bit rubbish is a bit different from that, especially since there's options within the game. On the other hand, major tonal errors between the game in play and the expectations from the book can be pretty jarring and problematic for the group (the most typical case being a game that's more dark/depressing/incompetent than conveyed because the success/failure balance on rolls is wrong or because negative factors are so plentiful compared to positive ones), and the book not giving any clear expectations can be problematic for selling the game.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:59
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Lemon-Lime posted:No, you can 100% spot glaring issues in systems you've never seen before or that are very different from existing systems. All it requires is for the reader to have read widely, instead of just having read 50 different d20 games. Again, if it's glaring, I don't really a curator, do I? I don't need to go to Rotten Tomatoes to be told that Holmes and Watson sucked. I'm looking for the less obvious, pernicious problems that are endemic to a system that are only really apparent after a few sessions.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:03
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