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I can’t watch BoardGameCo because the way he talks sets my anxiety through the roof. Quackalope guy seems like a good dude who just needs a friend. I know he has Jan or whatever but he seems like someone who just has way too much time to spend in his own head. I generally like his content though. I can see how he comes across as possibly insincere but I think he’s well intentioned.
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May 19, 2021 22:24
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I launched a Kickstarter for a podcast series featuring me (Ross Payton of Role Playing Public Radio), Greg Stolze, and James Wallis. It's called Ludonarrative Dissidents. Each episode we look at a single RPG and analyze it. Backers get to vote on which RPGs we examine. Check the list here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rosspayton/ludonarrative-dissidents-a-ttrpg-analysis-podcast-series We have a preview episode up on RPPR right now covering Apocalypse World if you want to find out what a typical episode will be like http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2021/05/ludonarrative-dissidents/ludonarrative-dissidents-apocalypse-world-episode-zero/
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May 19, 2021 23:06
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Oof picked a day for it with Wallis deciding to be the main character of twitter right now.
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May 20, 2021 00:15
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theironjef posted:Oof picked a day for it with Wallis deciding to be the main character of twitter right now. What's going on? Wallis has always seemed a good egg.
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May 20, 2021 00:19
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The_Doctor posted:What's going on? Wallis has always seemed a good egg. Folks are taking offense this this series of tweets: https://twitter.com/monkeyspawgames/status/1395113566886404097?s=19 I'm honestly bummed, no schadenfreude. I love Stolze's work and what I've read of Wallis' stuff is good, and RPPR shows up constantly on lists my own listeners build to recommend stuff to each other.
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May 20, 2021 00:29
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theironjef posted:Oof picked a day for it with Wallis deciding to be the main character of twitter right now. Oh, yeah. That ties in with Dennis Detwiller and GM Skarka being the main characters yesterday and the day before. It wasn't about Motherlands but certainly about 'here we are, the Olds who haven't done much of late, to tell you the indie RPG community what you should think.' (Skarka having any opinion on getting a product out is hilarious.)
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May 20, 2021 00:58
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Detwiller is producing Delta Green books at a pretty reliable rate. It’s convenient to assume assholes aren’t making anything, but not always true.
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May 20, 2021 01:11
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James apologized and deleted the tweet. It's a bad take. I haven't spoken to him about it but I don't agree with his position.
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May 20, 2021 01:38
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Never watched BoardGameCo but did deal with them when I had no other choice trying to get rid of some games, and buy some new ones. Definitely treats it more like a business than a hobby store. Claims games are "like new" when they're very much dented/scratched/dinged etc. Lowballs on any sold (to him) games, but buying a game for cheap is possible since sometimes you get lucky with some buys. Would never do business again though, didnt leave a great taste at the end of the day when all was said and done.
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May 20, 2021 05:31
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The_Doctor posted:What's going on? Wallis has always seemed a good egg. James Wallis came into my twitter mentions once to patronize at me for saying that I think RPG writers deserve to be paid at least 10c a word with a bunch of condescending garbage and then pulled what may be the greatest move I've ever seen anyone do which is to tell me "your patreon only brings in a couple hundred dollars a month, aren't you hypocritically exploiting...yourself?????"
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May 20, 2021 05:40
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Wallis did run a publishing company at one point, which is defunct. I think this probably is relevant both to why he might have Opinions on the subject, and perhaps why said publishing company may no longer be around.
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May 20, 2021 05:51
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e: ^^^^ hoo boy that twitter story is some galaxy-brain level stuff I have dealt with game trading 4 life types who always aggressively trade up and never across or down, and like, pull the box open right then and there to inventory stuff demanding that you not move on until they verify the game is good, etc (no man, you have my contact info if you find a problem -- which you loving won't, yeesh.) I seemed to run into all manner of  with math trade types. Always left me feeling like I just didn't want to repeat any of it.
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May 20, 2021 05:54
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Also, I discovered Magical Kitties Save the Day (an all-ages RPG) and it is just the most wholesome thing ever  I am not even an RPG type, so it's pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but did I mention that it is just the most wholesome thing ever?
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May 20, 2021 05:56
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Wallis started with a decent point, that a Kickstarter for an RPG that proclaims itself a stand-alone game but says nothing about the system it's using is a 'wait and see' kind of deal, but then spun off into... whatever that was.
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May 20, 2021 05:57
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Wallis rubs me the wrong way, a pontificator who hasn't produced terribly much, and what he has produced hasn't been all THAT successful. Hogshead was a brave idea that gave us white book Nobilis. On that thought, make them cover Chuubos Magical Wish Grant Engine, Glitch, or Wisher Thaumaturge Fatalist. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 06:31 on May 20, 2021 |
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May 20, 2021 06:28
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fez_machine posted:Wallis rubs me the wrong way, a pontificator who hasn't produced terribly much, and what he has produced hasn't been all THAT successful. Any backer who watched the various updates on Alas Vegas knows that Wallis is a super-depressive dude with significant insecurities. He unloaded a ton of super-personal material on people who paid him $10 for a PDF while making excuses for years as to why his book was later than expected. He's not exactly a great one to talk about best practices in RPG publishing. I bear him a lot of good will for Nobilis, but it doesn't surprise me that he'd run headfirst into a bad take on Twitter. His intentions might honestly have been good, but road to hell, etc., etc.
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May 20, 2021 07:39
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My only personal connection to him was getting into a chummy discussion on twitter where he chided me a bit for calling him the "Baron Munchausen guy" since that's my favorite thing of his I'd read.
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May 20, 2021 07:42
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fez_machine posted:Wallis rubs me the wrong way, a pontificator who hasn't produced terribly much, and what he has produced hasn't been all THAT successful. My experience with James Wallis has been this, every time. Like, his big contribution to the industry has been being wealthy enough to start his own publishing company and subsequently fly it into the ground -- and somehow this has given him a reputation as a great game designer which he has leveraged into being a game design thinkman. (If I sound bitter it's because I absolutely am. There are far too many people who get away with this and it winds me up.) The bit where he's a paid up member of the 'things cannot be better and you're a fool to try' RPG old guard is just icing on the cake.
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May 20, 2021 08:00
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My experience with James Wallis is to say "who?" in this thread. Maybe he shouldn't be pontificating to random strangers on the Internet when as far as most of us are concerned, even within the hobby in which he's made a career, he's just one of them.
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May 20, 2021 09:09
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The only thing I really remember about Baron Munchausen is how off-putting I found the text's patronizing treatment of women; I get that it was intentionally written in "period" voice for tone, but I'm kind of sick of excuses like that for exclusionist writing in this hobby. Frankly, I'm not shocked that its author would be dispensing terrible hot takes to young minority designers.
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May 20, 2021 10:38
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The Eyes Have It posted:Also, I discovered Magical Kitties Save the Day (an all-ages RPG) and it is just the most wholesome thing ever This looks beautiful and cute and it's out of stock 
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May 20, 2021 10:41
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theironjef posted:My only personal connection to him was getting into a chummy discussion on twitter where he chided me a bit for calling him the "Baron Munchausen guy" since that's my favorite thing of his I'd read.
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May 20, 2021 10:46
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Wolfsbane posted:This looks beautiful and cute and it's out of stock They're doing a reprint with an expansion on Kickstarter.
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May 20, 2021 12:11
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Tsilkani posted:Wallis started with a decent point, that a Kickstarter for an RPG that proclaims itself a stand-alone game but says nothing about the system it's using is a 'wait and see' kind of deal, but then spun off into... whatever that was. He doesn't have that point at all though, the Kickstarter is gathering funding to do a release of a system/setting that's currently being used to do an actual play, so there's plenty of examples of the system in play. He apparently didn't know that, but maybe if you don't know poo poo about the kickstarter don't rush into with some hot take about how it'll look bad for BIPOC if it succeeds. I don't really care about dogpiling James Wallis since he seems to have scrubbed everything negative off his timeline and apologized, but there's a reason the Kickstarter is successful and it's not because people are hoping that what develops is good, it's because it already exists in play and people want it formalized and released.
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May 20, 2021 14:22
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They use Cortex for the actual play, but mention in the kickstarter they might not be able to use that if they don't have money for the license, and would then make their own system.
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May 20, 2021 14:47
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M. Night Skymall posted:He doesn't have that point at all though, the Kickstarter is gathering funding to do a release of a system/setting that's currently being used to do an actual play, so there's plenty of examples of the system in play. He apparently didn't know that, but maybe if you don't know poo poo about the kickstarter don't rush into with some hot take about how it'll look bad for BIPOC if it succeeds. I don't really care about dogpiling James Wallis since he seems to have scrubbed everything negative off his timeline and apologized, but there's a reason the Kickstarter is successful and it's not because people are hoping that what develops is good, it's because it already exists in play and people want it formalized and released. Assuming we're talking about Into the Motherlands, I'm sure all of that is true (and it's definitely true they're doing great, funding-wise so it's not like they need to fix anything) but if you're just coming to it from the KS page (which is going to be a common experience), there's no mention of the actual play on the page that I could see, and the sole mention of system is an FAQ that reads as follows: quote:We have the privilege of having a number of different options available to us. I can see why that would read like "we haven't picked a system yet". Now, if the original take (which I haven't seen since he deleted it) was that they're gonna make BIPOC look bad by doing this...yikes. PS: They might talk about this stuff in the video. I haven't watched a KS pitch video since 2012 and would still consider it an omission to not reiterate details of that sort in the text pitch. YMMV.
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May 20, 2021 15:02
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90s Cringe Rock posted:A common misconception. He's actually Munchausen's Proxy. 
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May 20, 2021 15:24
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Kai Tave posted:“your patreon only brings in a couple hundred dollars a month, aren't you hypocritically exploiting...yourself?????" That’s some very ‘But you, yourself live in a society’ energy.
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May 20, 2021 15:35
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And that FAQ question wasn't added until 6 hours after the Kickstarter launched, so for a while there they had literally no information on what system they were going to use, despite all the tiers talking about being a complete game.
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May 20, 2021 15:36
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malkav11 posted:Assuming we're talking about Into the Motherlands, I'm sure all of that is true (and it's definitely true they're doing great, funding-wise so it's not like they need to fix anything) but if you're just coming to it from the KS page (which is going to be a common experience), there's no mention of the actual play on the page that I could see, and the sole mention of system is an FAQ that reads as follows: Yeah, it's probably fair to say they haven't done a great job of targeting the kickstarter at people who don't already know who they are. Whether or not that was the correct thing to do is debatable, clearly they're successful as is. I followed almost everyone involved before it launched, so I just skimmed the pitch anyway. Although mostly because they're all involved with Paizo stuff in some way. Several of them are on the writing team for Glass Cannon's new setting which should be really cool. Honestly I'm more worried they're spreading themselves super thin than that they can't get a license for an existing system or whatever.
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May 20, 2021 15:40
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M. Night Skymall posted:Yeah, it's probably fair to say they haven't done a great job of targeting the kickstarter at people who don't already know who they are. Whether or not that was the correct thing to do is debatable, clearly they're successful as is. I followed almost everyone involved before it launched, so I just skimmed the pitch anyway. Although mostly because they're all involved with Paizo stuff in some way. Several of them are on the writing team for Glass Cannon's new setting which should be really cool. Honestly I'm more worried they're spreading themselves super thin than that they can't get a license for an existing system or whatever. Yeah, I was assuming they must have significant profile with some crowd or other (that I am not in) to be doing those sorts of numbers without that stuff. Which is fine. My concern personally wouldn't be whether they can get a license for an existing system (they do say they've had multiple offers and I'll take them at their word), but rather whether I would want to play using the system they select. For example, if they're Paizo adjacent as you say, licensing Starfinder's ruleset would seem like a possibility and that's just not my bag.
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May 20, 2021 15:59
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M. Night Skymall posted:Yeah, it's probably fair to say they haven't done a great job of targeting the kickstarter at people who don't already know who they are. Whether or not that was the correct thing to do is debatable, clearly they're successful as is. I followed almost everyone involved before it launched, so I just skimmed the pitch anyway. Although mostly because they're all involved with Paizo stuff in some way. Several of them are on the writing team for Glass Cannon's new setting which should be really cool. Honestly I'm more worried they're spreading themselves super thin than that they can't get a license for an existing system or whatever. They might just be trying to decide what they thinks works best for their desired world feel, which is sensible enough. Starfinder is going to be very different from Cortex is going to be different from 2d20. Like malkav said, I definitely want to know what they're going to choose before I go in on it.
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May 20, 2021 16:04
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I can't imagine they'd choose Starfinder, I feel like most of the stuff I watch involving it is successful in spite of it. Hopefully they just stick with a more purposeful flavoring of Cortex, less RPG toolkit and more actual RPG for playing mother lands.
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May 20, 2021 16:19
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M. Night Skymall posted:I can't imagine they'd choose Starfinder, I feel like most of the stuff I watch involving it is successful in spite of it. Hopefully they just stick with a more purposeful flavoring of Cortex, less RPG toolkit and more actual RPG for playing mother lands. I wouldn't really expect so, to be fair. But system matters a ton to me and as someone whose enthusiasm mainly lies in indie story-game type stuff there's a whole lot of widely used more trad systems I wouldn't be into. (Cortex, actually, I'd probably consider. But I need to know!)
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May 20, 2021 16:22
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Generally though even if the Kickstarter looked like an absolute clown show and promised a bunch of impossible stuff that still wouldn't reflect badly on BIPOC designers or whatever, as the Motherlands designers are just some people, not all BIPOC as a gestalt. I'd say whether or not he was right that the KS looks sketchy is immaterial. Basically the same as if he had said "Far West continuing not to come out is making beardy white dudes look bad, hope they can recover!"
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May 20, 2021 16:24
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The makers of Sensor Ghosts and Assembly have their third game up, Pilfering Pandas, and it's near enough funded already
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May 20, 2021 16:30
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malkav11 posted:I wouldn't really expect so, to be fair. But system matters a ton to me and as someone whose enthusiasm mainly lies in indie story-game type stuff there's a whole lot of widely used more trad systems I wouldn't be into. That's about my read on it too, and it's essentially what Wallis said initially. He didn't actually double down until someone said he was having a chilling effect on BIPOC creators. Doubling down was a bad move, and he was completely wrong in that follow up statement.
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May 20, 2021 16:32
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My original thing where I thought they'd picked a system was based on the twitter conversation surrounding it. They heavily implied there that they were going to continue using Cortex and just release an official product of the rules used in the Actual Play, but yeah there's nothing to actually support that in the Kickstarter pitch, my bad. Mechanics for systems are kind of academic for me since I have no chance of getting an indie RPG to the table, I'm mostly interested in ripping off setting ideas/societies that I can drop in or use to replace boring/bad ones elsewhere. And the art, although the fact that one of the races is just a stylized picture of Gabe is kind of hilarious.
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May 20, 2021 16:46
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theironjef posted:Generally though even if the Kickstarter looked like an absolute clown show and promised a bunch of impossible stuff that still wouldn't reflect badly on BIPOC designers or whatever, as the Motherlands designers are just some people, not all BIPOC as a gestalt. I'd say whether or not he was right that the KS looks sketchy is immaterial. Basically the same as if he had said "Far West continuing not to come out is making beardy white dudes look bad, hope they can recover!" Yeah, I don't think that part is remotely defensible.
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May 20, 2021 17:01
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New Redgrass wet palette. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redgrass/redgrass-wet-palette-2-the-best-painting-tool-for-miniatures
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May 20, 2021 17:13
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