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Nuns with Guns posted:"Earth-616" is the in-universe designation of the "main" canon comic reality, like how in DC comic's it's Earth-1, so most likely it's just being cute and meta instead of promising to use a golfball-shaped die. I'm not really enthused by the other scant details around the game though: Yeah I just wanted to make a silly joke. Though I'd love if they actually tried to do some dumb and funky gimmick mechanic like "you roll a pool of 6 d6 1 time per scene. Then spend dice in the encounter" but yeah it's just gonna be d&d but maybe with d6s. Although a dude who wrote a metaplot based game where you just select packages also seems to fit exactly what this game is going for, since it's selling it on "play as your favorites including..." Also checking his credits, the guy doesn't seem to have much actual design credits like he's primarily been the dude who writes in universe fiction for games.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:23
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BNW itself was a really stripped down Deadlands before it became Savage Worlds. It really wasn't anything special and BNW itself was supposed to ultimately be the stepping stone into a unisystem that Savage Worlds later became.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:49
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Ha my first thought was a d6 and a proprietary d16. I don't really see the appeal of making a traditional capes-style superhero RPG but I also don't see the appeal of watching movies in that genre and those make a bajillion dollars a year so I'm just out of touch. I do think it might be cool to play a game where the superpowered part of it is relatively handwavey while play focuses heavily on maintaining the divide between your regular life and your superhero life. Like a spy game where you don't have a spy agency. Or I guess like Demon: The Descent but with actual rules for that part?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:54
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah I just wanted to make a silly joke. Though I'd love if they actually tried to do some dumb and funky gimmick mechanic like "you roll a pool of 6 d6 1 time per scene. Then spend dice in the encounter" but yeah it's just gonna be d&d but maybe with d6s. Although a dude who wrote a metaplot based game where you just select packages also seems to fit exactly what this game is going for, since it's selling it on "play as your favorites including..." I'm suspecting it's going to be d6-based, too, like BNW was. And premade hero "classes" would certainly be a way to keep a superhero game "simple" like it's pitching. I'm not expecting it to be 1:1 the same system but that seems like the kind of mindset a guy who made an attempt at a streamlined superhero RPG before would go with. I wouldn't be surprised if making it so that only premade canon characters were playable was a condition of Marvel doing a new RPG. Wasn't there some restriction like that in place for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, which is why the Cortex rules couldn't provide full from-scratch character generation?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:58
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Nuns with Guns posted:I wouldn't be surprised if making it so that only premade canon characters were playable was a condition of Marvel doing a new RPG. Wasn't there some restriction like that in place for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, which is why the Cortex rules couldn't provide full from-scratch character generation? Marvel Press Release posted:Players will finally be able to take on the roles of Marvel’s most famous Super Heroes – or create entirely new ones I don't have any expectations for this game doing anything to impress, but the fact that it'll be available "wherever graphic novels and books are sold" since Marvel themselves are publishing it could give it an edge in terms of actually being discoverable for the target audience of people who've seen/heard other people play D&D, think it seems cool, and maybe have played D&D themselves.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:30
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The game that takes a shot at D&D is never going to be an itch.io darling. "Bland mechanics" + "mega-popular IP" + "available in regular stores" isn't going to be popular here, but I can see it doing great on Target endcaps.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:35
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A Hasbro/Disney bifurcated mainstream RPG space might be a little more interesting, at least?
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Jun 4, 2021 20:43
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CitizenKeen posted:The game that takes a shot at D&D is never going to be an itch.io darling. I think quality literally doesn't matter in such a case, and it will come down to simply being the right moment in pop culture. (Which may possibly be half-manufactured by a giant corporation, but again quality is orthogonal.)
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Jun 4, 2021 20:44
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That Old Tree posted:I think quality literally doesn't matter in such a case, and it will come down to simply being the right moment in pop culture. (Which may possibly be half-manufactured by a giant corporation, but again quality is orthogonal.) I agree completely.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:46
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1st Stage Midboss posted:It does say: Ah, my bad, I missed that. I've seen D&D boxes in Target before, so there's already more penetration in accessible markets. It would be interesting to see how a branded Marvel superhero game does when it's one of the few other RPGs with the potential to be as accessible as D&D to potential consumers.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:49
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quote:Might, Agility, Resilience, Vigilance, Ego, and Logic
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Jun 4, 2021 20:51
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My Lovely Horse posted:Gotta admit, if you're gonna have the big six, these are much better things to name them than the D&D words.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:15
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someone's going to say "bbbut wolverine" and I am going to laugh in their face
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Jun 4, 2021 23:16
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I'm not giving money to the Mouse even if the game is good
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Jun 5, 2021 00:02
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No dedicated thread, so I'll just ask here: anyone who played any of the Silhouette-based games (Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Tribe 8, Gear Krieg) - was Silhouette actually good at anything? My experience was through Tribe 8, which admittedly was not a very good fit for a mech system (though it is a fantastic setting and I am agonizing over every possible choice for a system update because I torture myself with these things), but I'm really trying to understand the decisions made in designing Silhouette and coming up with empty hands. But maybe it secretly really worked well for the other three games built on it and I just don't have the experience?
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Jun 5, 2021 00:39
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I couldn't really find a better thread for this, but thought people might find it interesting... While playing in a 5e Tyranny of Dragons campaign, the other players and I realized how weirdly gigantic the travel distances between the cities on the map were. We realized that travelling from Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep was about the same distance as going from San Diego to Portland with only 2 or 3 towns along the way. This got me thinking of the relative scale of other RPG campaigns and fantasy worlds as a whole. As a result I decided to bring a bunch of fantasy maps with scales into Photoshop and resize them all to the same relative scale to compare how large they are. Here's what I ended up with:  You can see some interesting details by comparing settings this way: Greyhawk and Faerun are both nearly twice as large as Middle Earth; The largest non-tabletop map is Conan's Hyborea, which is modelled after prehistoric Europe, Africa and the Middle East; The map of Athas is tiny compared to everything else and more modern campaign settings like 13th Age and Golarion are significantly smaller than the ones from 1e D&D. The map of Mystara is also an interesting oddity as its total area is about the same as Earth (It's landmasses are just the continents of Earth 150 million years ago) but only select sections are mapped out in any detail. So while the map of Mystara's playable continent is larger than Greyhawk or Faerun, the actual "Known World" area that received the most mapping attention and the area campaigns were assumed to take place, was significantly smaller, being roughly on par with the map of Athas. Not included are 4e's Nentir Vale, which was deliberately vaguely defined and whos primary map covers an area too small to be noticeable on this scale, and a map of WoW's Azeroth which was actually larger than the surface of the Earth... edit: Realized I made a boo-boo on the relative scale of Krynn. After fixing it, Krynn has a significantly smaller landmass than Greyhawk or Faerun KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jun 5, 2021 |
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Jun 5, 2021 01:37
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Wait, does the Warhammer Fantasy map also have the New World on it?
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Jun 5, 2021 01:55
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That's great, I love it! The thing I always want to know about fantasy maps is their population densities, since that tells you a lot about what you can expect in terms of e.g. food production systems, scale of warfare, political complexity, that sort of thing.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:00
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My Lovely Horse posted:Gotta admit, if you're gonna have the big six, these are much better things to name them than the D&D words. I have no idea what Vigilance and Ego do just from the names, but on a certain level, I can appreciate how far out of their way they went for that acronym.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:04
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:I have no idea what Vigilance and Ego do just from the names, but on a certain level, I can appreciate how far out of their way they went for that acronym. Wisdom and Charisma
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Jun 5, 2021 02:12
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KingKalamari posted:I couldn't really find a better thread for this, but thought people might find it interesting... I'd be curious to see Glorantha compared to this.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:25
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Tulip posted:That's great, I love it! Keep in mind that, as ever, fantasy authors are terrible at numbers.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:34
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Haystack posted:I'd be curious to see Glorantha compared to this. Ooo, that's a good one! I'll add it to the next version. On initial inspection the Second Age map of Genertela, Pamaltela and the ocean between them is comparable in size to Mystara, though a lot more of the Glorantha map is water. Ghost Leviathan posted:Keep in mind that, as ever, fantasy authors are terrible at numbers. The Forgotten Realms are especially bad for this: Most of the major cities have absurdly high populations given the level of technology (Waterdeep has a population of over 2 million, though I believe only 200,000 live in the city proper) with hundreds of miles of empty wilderness in-between (Waterdeep's closest neighbor, Daggerford, is nearly 180 miles away and has only has a population of 1,200). For comparison: At the height of the Roman Emprie, Rome had an estimated population of 1.2 million and is only about 100 miles from the city of Naples which had a population of 30,000-35,000 people by the time of the Lombard Invasion in the late 6th century (This was the furthest-back I could find reliable population estimates for Naples. While this was several hundred years after Rome hit 1.2 million, I don't think Naples would have had less than 1/10ths of its population at the time).
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Jun 5, 2021 03:03
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I was gonna say, FR seems to be the classic example of a vast setting where almost everything published for it concerns the Northwestern coast of one continent.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:17
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Halloween Jack posted:I was gonna say, FR seems to be the classic example of a vast setting where almost everything published for it concerns the Northwestern coast of one continent. That’s everything in 5e, but definitely not the case overall. What makes figuring out population density harder for the FR is that there’s actually two sets of numbers - 3e cut the listed populations by up to 9/10ths, which makes comparing numbers between different editions’ sources quite difficult. However, one thing that the FR (at least pre-4e and all this goes out the window after that) makes quite clear is that there are a lot of settlements and people NOT explicitly labeled on the map. Any town or larger is surrounded by farming villages, homesteads, and so on. There’s plenty of settlements to make the numbers make more sense, which makes the 3e numbers a bit easier to work with, as there’s general demographic systems in the 3e FRCS. 180 miles sounds very very wrong to me for the distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford, but I’ll have to pull out some maps to check.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:30
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Okay, let me see about distances first, specifically the distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford. 2e The North poster map: directly measured by hand, it's 4 inches aka 120 miles. This is a direct line between the two, the Trade Way curves out a bit. 3e FRCS page map of the North: directly measured by hand, it's 1 3/8ths of an inch, aka 110 miles. (Note this map has an incorrect scale in the first printing.) The 3e maps were changed significantly, this doesn't surprise me. 5e map of the Sword Coast from Laeral Silverhand's Adventuring Kit: directly measured by hand, 1 and 3/16ths of an inch, aka 115 miles. So between the three, they're all relatively similar and work fine. Population: Cyclopedia of the Realms and A Grand Tour of The Realms (so the 1e and 2e campaign setting box sets) note over 100,000 people in Waterdeep. Waterdeep: City of Splendors (the 2e box set) notes 122,000, and that it can swell to up to 600,000 during holidays, with the season, trade and so on. The 3e FRCS notes the City itself as having 132,661 (a 1,347,840 population is for the area of the whole city state extending 30 or 40 miles beyond the city's walls). City of Splendors: Waterdeep matches the 3e FRCS city figures, noting it expands to x5 in spring and summer. So for the actual city, you have a total of 120,000-130,000 over about three decades, when the Realms is comparatively equal to the early Renaissance. Waterdeep is the major cosmopolitan and trading city of Faerun, so it's definitely comparable to the Italian trading city-states of the real world: Wikipedia tells me Venice was over 100,000 and up to 170,000 during the medieval and renaissance periods. It matches pretty well. The seasonal swelling of Waterdeep makes sense in setting - it is THE single major port (the only other competitors being Luskan, which is not safe to ship through, and Neverwinter, which is geographically remote and does not have Waterdeep's harborage) for the incredible natural resources of the North, and the economic details we have about the North describe rushes of economic activity to try and ship goods of all kinds to and through Waterdeep as soon as the frosts fade. At this point, you can begin sending stuff south down the Dessarin to Waterdeep, and it takes another month for the roads to become solid instead of mud. In other words, the city is so large because it is the single focus point for incredible amounts of trade and exported resources across the continent. Not completely realistic? Sure, but it makes for excellent gameplay, and isn't that what we want a D&D setting to actually do? e: looking at your project closer, you used the 4e map which is Just Bad, basically someone just scribbling on the 3e map with a bunch of photoshop brushes. It's not an effective way to compare the entire setting. Arivia fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 5, 2021 |
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Jun 5, 2021 04:13
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KingKalamari posted:Ooo, that's a good one! I'll add it to the next version. On initial inspection the Second Age map of Genertela, Pamaltela and the ocean between them is comparable in size to Mystara, though a lot more of the Glorantha map is water. 2 million is absolitely ridiculous, even the biggest chinese metropolitan centers couldnt reach that even until the 1800s iirc lol. Not to mention the necessary farmland to supply this big of a city means that you woild have way more smaller urban centers nearby.
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Jun 5, 2021 04:31
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Sharn has 300/500k in comparison which is honestly more reasonable.
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Jun 5, 2021 04:33
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Arivia posted:Okay, let me see about distances first, specifically the distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford. Why are you putting so much effort into verifying the distance? I just looked at a hexmap of Faerun before I posted,. noticed Waterdeep was 2-3 60 mile hexes away from Daggerford and rounded up to the nearest hex. The total distance doesn't even really matter as my point was that the other nearest city on the map has an incredibly lower population. Arivia posted:
KingKalamari posted:The Forgotten Realms are especially bad for this: Most of the major cities have absurdly high populations given the level of technology (Waterdeep has a population of over 2 million, though I believe only 200,000 live in the city proper) with hundreds of miles of empty wilderness in-between (Waterdeep's closest neighbor, Daggerford, is nearly 180 miles away and has only has a population of 1,200). Arivia posted:
Why do you always feel the need to trip over yourself and play apologist every time someone says anything bad about something you like? People can have different opinions on a campaign setting without being grossly misinformed about the details and you don't need to run in and play evangelist just because I said I think the setting's population distribution is unrealistic. The Forgotten Realms aren't going to be upset that I don't like them...
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Jun 5, 2021 04:40
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I'm the guy who obsessively checks population numbers and economic and government minutae when writing up a setting, then never really has any of it come into play as anything but basic backdrop.
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Jun 5, 2021 04:43
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KingKalamari posted:Ooo, that's a good one! I'll add it to the next version.
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Jun 5, 2021 04:49
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Yawgmoth posted:Add Eberron (specifically Khorvaire) into the mix too, I'd be real interested to know how it measures up. As I recall, it is staggeringly huge for the expected travel. It's actually on the current version, right next to Greyhawk. Size-wise it's slightly smaller than either Greyhawk or Faerun, though I think he huge landmass actually makes more sense for Eberron, even when adventurers are assumed to hew pretty close to Sharn because it has better travel technology baked into the setting. Greyhawk is larger than Europe, and has its official adventure modules scattered all across the map, but because the fastest method of reliable transport in the setting is by boat it's going to take a party of adventurers an absurdly long time to get from Point A to Point B. I actually played in a Greyhawk campaign run by a guy who was pretty deep into all the official lore and, while I had a good time, I remember it being really weird that our party started in the Lands of Tenh and, after a few adventures, ended up travelling about half the length of the Oregon Trail to follow-up on some vague rumors of weird stuff going on in Hommlet. In contrast, if we ran into the same situation in Khorvaire, we'd have been able to hop on an airship and cover that distance in at most a couple of days.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:04
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KingKalamari posted:Why are you putting so much effort into verifying the distance? I just looked at a hexmap of Faerun before I posted,. noticed Waterdeep was 2-3 60 mile hexes away from Daggerford and rounded up to the nearest hex. The total distance doesn't even really matter as my point was that the other nearest city on the map has an incredibly lower population. But that's the whole point - you're spreading gross misinformation, and it sucks to have people making poorly informed value judgments like you were? Like, you went "well these demographics make no sense and it sucks" off of a distance number that you (without telling anyone) made a guess at off of a hex map (and there aren't any official hex maps of this area, period) and compared two incomparable population numbers without any understanding of any underlying relationships. It's okay to say you don't like a thing! But you were posting numbers as if you had discovered concrete information and made educated critique on the basis of those numbers, when both your numbers AND your criticism was incorrect. So the setting's population distribution isn't unrealistic: you just didn't know how it worked, and hadn't researched it adequately.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:11
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Haystack posted:I'd be curious to see Glorantha compared to this.  So the northern continent of Genertela (where 95% of the setting material is located) is a little smaller than the continental USA.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:19
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FMguru posted:From the 1988 boxed supplement Glorantha - Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars Here's the similar comparative map from the 1e Forgotten Realms Campaign Set: 
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Jun 5, 2021 05:25
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There's magic. Just like technology, this should allow for larger cities than the Renaissance normally would. So, I'm good with huge fantasy cities. And it's silly to judge realism based on real-world medieval cities.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:30
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Arivia posted:But that's the whole point - you're spreading gross misinformation, and it sucks to have people making poorly informed value judgments like you were? Oh no, the bureau of academic ethics in Elf-Games is going to disbar me. Arivia posted:Like, you went "well these demographics make no sense and it sucks" off of a distance number that you (without telling anyone) made a guess at off of a hex map (and there aren't any official hex maps of this area, period) and compared two incomparable population numbers without any understanding of any underlying relationships. No, I just agreed with another poster that D&D campaign settings tend to be bad with population demographics and the like. I also found it weird that you're so focused on the exact distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford when my original point was that it's the nearest city to Waterdeep that was marked on the map, but has less than a 10th of the population? Arivia posted:It's okay to say you don't like a thing! But you were posting numbers as if you had discovered concrete information and made educated critique on the basis of those numbers, when both your numbers AND your criticism was incorrect. See, this is what I'm talking about : I've made some incredibly mild criticism about an entirely subjective aspect of a campaign setting (The believability of population demographics) and you're presenting this like I'm some kind of elfgame scientist being paid off by the tobacco industry to falsify research papers. I looked up the numbers I posted on the Forgotten Realms wiki and included a bunch of "nearly"'s, "almost"'s and "I believe"'s before most of those numbers to show they were estimates which I thought pretty clearly conveyed I wasn't speaking authoritatively about the population of made up elf game cities.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:42
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dwarf74 posted:There's magic. Just like technology, this should allow for larger cities than the Renaissance normally would. I can also see it if the population figures include stuff like monsters and awakened animals. Also for city population a lot of gamers and writers tend to begin and end at the city walls; most real-world city population figures differentiate between the metropolitan area proper and the outlying communities which farm for and are governed by the city. That can really changes things too. When running my own homebrew setting which had a central city as a base of operations, I had 4-5 farming communities outside to explain how the people remained fed.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:48
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Libertad! posted:I can also see it if the population figures include stuff like monsters and awakened animals. Also for city population a lot of gamers and writers tend to begin and end at the city walls; most real-world city population figures differentiate between the metropolitan area proper and the outlying communities which farm for and are governed by the city. That can really changes things too. It's honestly amazing just how decentralized the population was prior to the industrial revolution, it's something I still have a hard time wrapping my head around.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:55
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KingKalamari posted:Oh no, the bureau of academic ethics in Elf-Games is going to disbar me. If you're trying to make a critical argument, it helps everyone to make it clearly and from a well-informed basis. I'm not being academic, I'm responding with the same rigor as is usual for the forum? I looked up the distances because 180 miles felt off to me. The various maps I used are from different editions; I didn't know what you were going of off, so I checked what was reasonable (aka what I have at hand readily) just in case it was different between the various projections. You just confessed to using a fan made hex map and you interpreted it very broadly, so I was right to double-check your measurements. Then, you're saying you've checked a source (the FR wiki) that can often be missing information or incorrect. You used a general figure and made a gross comparison without making any effort to understand the underlying demographics that you were critiquing! You may not have a lot of experience making critical statements, so maybe you thought you were coming off as making an estimate or being less certain than you actually did. But what you actually did - providing no sources nor supporting details, and not making an actual critical argument but instead taking two disparate pieces of information - isn't actually informing anyone, nor does it come off as a guess. Your wording portrayed you as attempting to make a critical statement and advance an argument that you couldn't support. So I've gone into such detail and done the work to try and check all the corners of the actual issue you suggested, exhaustively disproving it from all the angles to make it clear that your original statements were incorrect. I'm not trying to style on you, but I am trying to show others reading this that you are incorrect so they won't repeat your incorrect statements elsewhere. I'm trying to fix the mistakes you made as part of this discussion. If you'd made a better statement in the first place, this would be easier to do, and I wouldn't need to do so much work that you seem to think is showboating. But I respect that you may be coming from a place where you don't know how you came off, or what you were actually saying. I'm not mad at you, or trying to make you feel bad, but I did this to correct the (guileless) faults you've made. Hopefully this explains where I'm coming from.
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Jun 5, 2021 06:01
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