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Kai Tave posted:I gotta be honest, as much as people complain about this thread going on hundred page tangents about Star Trek or 4E or whatever, I have to say I find it better than my immediate thought whenever I see this thread get a hundred new posts which is "who got outed as a horrible abuser/sex pest this time." The conversation is fine, it's just completely off-topic for the thread and shows no signs of stopping despite a mod explicitly saying it should go elsewhere. I get that goons love 4e and want to talk about it everywhere they possibly can, but we have many places for that conversation to go where it would be on-topic. It would be nice if we could try to keep this thread topical, because the stuff that's supposed to get posted here is often pretty important for people involved in these hobbies, and it's frustrating to see actual news get drowned out. Kestral fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 10:25
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Gorelab posted:I honestly sometimes think what made 4e do so much worse comparatively was not being as fun to read in the bathroom, even if it was a lot easier to read ruleswise. Yeah. So much of the game being a clearly written technical manual made reading sections that people remember from other games as fun and exciting feel boring, especially when thumbing through it in a bookstore to "get an idea of what the game is like." That said, if one was was being honest with themselves the spell and equipment lists from most games were often just as boring but more muddled, they just already had good associations or knew how it worked. I know I had 0 enthusiasm for 4th the first time I skimmed the book because it seemed boring every class in pbh1 "got the same stuff" because I couldn't tell how the powers actually functioned differently yet. I'm curious if the industry will shift more in terms of how stuff is presented, or if there's just not gonna be an effort there, since writers often aren't paid well or things are still often passion projects. Heck we've already gone over basic QC just isn't something most value. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 10:28
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Kestral posted:and it's frustrating to see actual news get drowned out. Such as? The 4e chat did not stop anyone from posting anything else (the Mike Selinker story notably). This conversation stemmed directly from an industry history topic too, so its not like folks just burst in here to talk about it as non-sequitur. Also, most of the talk was pretty negative on it?
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Nov 12, 2021 10:42
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Kai Tave posted:When people say they like balance in games, they don't mean "the balance has to be objectively perfect on every axis or it's trash garbage for idiots," there's a huge gulf of difference between a game where an entire subset of characters might as well not even take up pagespace because the other half can do their jobs better and a game where optimization exists but it's also hard to fall backwards into a bad time because you made the mistake of picking something that looked cool. Every single time balance in games comes up someone has to go "well perfect balance doesn't exist" and like yeah no poo poo it doesn't, but the less bad the balance is then the less preemptive work the GM has to do going "don't pick this, don't pick that, this set of options we're not using, please don't combine X and Y," etc. Insofar as making the problem completely nonexistent is probably impossible, the degree to which the problem exists is an issue that is possible to address. To some groups, a good, appropriately-balanced fight is one which their PCs will likely win unless something very seriously bad happens, but gives enough of the impression that they've broken a sweat that it doesn't seem trivial. To other groups, a good, appropriately-balanced fight is one where both sides are evenly matched and are just as likely to win the combat as each other, and the PCs' only advantage is that there are multiple players playing them but only one referee so they have a shot at outsmarting the referee and tipping the odds in their favour. You can likely find people for whom the "sweet spot" lies between those extremes - or beyond them.
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Nov 12, 2021 13:35
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I mean if there's really important industry news happening people are free to post it whenever they want. It may happen that there are actually moments where nobody's been a super notable shithead lately (except Mike Selinker apparently) or whatever constitutes the bulk of industry news for this particular industry. WotC's made a lot of money lately I guess, which is industry relevant in a broader sense but also not really something that has a lot of room for discussion outside of acknowledging that D&D isn't getting dislodged off its throne any time soon.Coolness Averted posted:I'm curious if the industry will shift more in terms of how stuff is presented, or if there's just not gonna be an effort there, since writers often aren't paid well or things are still often passion projects. Heck we've already gone over basic QC just isn't something most value. In an industry/hobby sense, enough time has passed that knee-jerk edition warring seems to have progressively fallen by the wayside and more people seem interested in messing with how games like 4E worked including formatting, keywording, etc. Lancer is notably a game that has a very "4E statblock" sort of presentation and doesn't seem to have drastically suffered for it, other games like the recently released Maharlika or Gubat Banwa (which also happen to be examples of the Southeast Asian RPG scene which is getting more visibility in indie circles lately) also seem comfortable taking inspiration from it in various ways, same for ICON which is in early development, etc. As noted, making a 4E clone would be a shitload of work. It's not necessarily some task for certified geniuses only, but looking back on just how much stuff they made for every single class across 30(!) levels, even with whatever sameness might have existed there it's honestly kind of insane that they made a game like that, then made a bunch of other material for it that also had that much stuff, and it all stayed relatively decent quality until the turnover point. That was the product of a D&D team that had not, at the time, undergone a lot of successive yearly layoffs. Even then, I'm sort of amazed they did it, and I'm going to guess that it was probably not a relaxed endeavor. So making a real retroclone retroclone is likely to be a pretty involved effort. In a broader sense, just looking at presentation, layout, etc, that I think comes down more to factors related to knowing and having the money to hire really good layout editors with an eye towards functionality as well as aesthetics, where I would say historically RPGs have been more concerned with aesthetics first and usability second. Thing is, good layout editors cost money (deservedly) and indie RPG budgets are often on a shoestring. So to sum it up, I don't think there's necessarily any sort of entrenched edition war sentiments getting in the way of shifting how games are written, laid out, etc, so much as like everything else it's a money issue. And yeah, when you have tiny budgets then you have to prioritize, and some things aren't as "valuable" to a lot of pledging backers as others.
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Nov 12, 2021 13:53
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Warthur posted:I always thought the thornier balance problem, especially in games with D&D-like levels of combat-as-centre-of-play, isn't PCs vs. other PCs (which isn't to say that it shouldn't be addressed) so much as it's "how do you balance fights?", particularly since there can't be a one-size-fits-all question because the level of difficulty people want in a fight might genuinely vary. What does "winning" mean in your fight? More importantly what does "losing" mean? What's the metric for "difficulty"? Is sudden death (that is "I'm fine welp now I'm dead") common/possible/theoretically possible/impossible outside special circumstances? Are there mechanical non-death consequences to combat (resource depletion including HP, injuries, etc)? If so how long do these persist? These are all much harder questions. For example, in 4E "difficulty" was easily adjustable from day 1 by increasing the XP budget or encounter level because 4E had a very well constructed encounter building system. However MM1 combat was slow and drawn out due to the standard monster formulas having low damage and/or to-hit but having high HP and/or defences. The 4E MM3 increased the damage and to-hit and reduced the HP and defences, which drastically altered the combat feel while having minimal impact on how many dailies, healing surges, and consumables you lost for a particular "difficulty". But even then most of the 4E style stayed intact; the assumption is that the players will win, actually dying is a long drawn out process with plenty of warning, and there's no mechanically supported loss condition other than TPK. And to be clear, 4E is about big drat (time consuming to build) heroes kicking down doors and punching in teeth so the only one of those that's arguably a problem rather than a preference is the last one.
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Nov 12, 2021 15:18
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Kestral posted:The conversation is fine, it's just completely off-topic for the thread and shows no signs of stopping despite a mod explicitly saying it should go elsewhere. I get that goons love 4e and want to talk about it everywhere they possibly can, but we have many places for that conversation to go where it would be on-topic. It would be nice if we could try to keep this thread topical, because the stuff that's supposed to get posted here is often pretty important for people involved in these hobbies, and it's frustrating to see actual news get drowned out. The thing is that 4e represented probably the biggest industry shift in years. The hobby frontrunner took a massive step towards a legible and purposefully designed game with clear rules. Then it bounced off hard. There's a million reasons for this, and not many places you can discuss any of them. This discussion gets mistaken for edition warring. Posters see it as an open invitation to air edition grudges, and then mods shut it down. It's probably the most interesting and relevant topic if you care about games getting better, because it shows that there's a cap on how much improvement the audience will bear. That, to me, is a more interesting and fruitful discussion that how a Gygax kid hosed up again or what some hateful chud just tweeted.
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Nov 12, 2021 15:46
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moths posted:The thing is that 4e represented probably the biggest industry shift in years. The hobby frontrunner took a massive step towards a legible and purposefully designed game with clear rules. I was going to say that this is more of a discussion for the otherwise pretty dormant philosophy thread, but your bolded does make sense.
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Nov 12, 2021 15:54
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Pigeonholing any 4e-related discussion to the 4e thread insures that only the people that, in November 2021, are still so deeply ensconced in 4e that they read the 4e thread on Something Awful Dot Com are the ones that will read and contribute. We should definitely do this because letting people of various backgrounds and interests see information about a system they may or may not have a deep familiarity and understanding of would never benefit them, or the discussion as a whole, and letting them learn a little more about how things have evolved over the years in a meaningful, productive, non-flamewar discussion is just Not How Things Are Done. I now return you to "Shitter of the Week and Other Industry Topics You Don't Have to Spend Ten Seconds Scrolling Past: A Thread".
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Nov 12, 2021 15:54
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Fine fine, back to the old perennial "people coming up with humorous time lengths to compare to how long Far West has taken so far." Did you realize if you bought a cat when GMS succeeded at the Far West KS, that cat would be pretty old now?
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Nov 12, 2021 16:59
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Cleopatra lived closer in time to the current release date of Far West than she did to the construction of the pyramids.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:04
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Gorelab posted:I honestly sometimes think what made 4e do so much worse comparatively was not being as fun to read in the bathroom, even if it was a lot easier to read ruleswise. I don't think there was any one factor that caused the backlash against 4e, it was more a series of individual factors that just happened to come together in a specific way: - It saw a change-up in the way the rulebooks were presented, prioritizing clearly explaining the rules and making material player facing over fluff details that make for good bathroom reading. - It challenged a bunch of existing sacred cows that had been established in earlier editions like Vancian casting, the alignment grid and the martial/caster divide. - It released on the heels of the OGL and the original D20 boom, which set the stage for Paizo to release Pathfinder and capitalize on the market that crops up at every edition change of players who were reluctant to make the switch to the newest edition. - Paizo itself heavily based their initial marketing push for Pathfinder on stoking the edition war fires. - 4e itself released with some key mechanical flaws in the monster math that, while corrected in later releases, led to combat being much slower and boring than it should have been, giving a poor initial impression of the system to a lot of players - The edition as a whole had a distinct lack of good adventures, which didn't really give players and DMs a proper showcase of how the system should run in actual play. I think, to tie things back into the topic of the thread, the response to 4e teaches us something about the industry as a whole: Presentation, timing and sample adventure modules can make or break a system, perhaps even more than the system's mechanical foundation. What's kind of unfortunate is that I feel like WotC hasn't really learned the right lesson from this experience, as I think they've begun working under the assumption "RPG Design doesn't matter" rather than "It takes more than solid RPG design to make a system successful"
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Nov 12, 2021 17:29
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While I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, LANCER has notably succeeded despite the lack of a good introductory adventure. I would also point to 5e having a subpar introductory adventure in the starter kit - a lot of people had bad experiences with the goblin ambush and cave fight, even if they enjoyed the rest of the adventure. I'm not sure a good first adventure is the make-or-break piece of a game system.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:45
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5E also has the confounding variable of tie in media that is many times more popular than the entire table top gaming industry. Same way 2E was propped up with tie in novels that sold many times better than all source books put together. It genuinely did not matter the merits of the system that in publication when Stranger Things and the Adventure Zone launched, those bits of promotion would launch it to modern D&D's success.
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Nov 12, 2021 18:23
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Kai Tave posted:In an industry/hobby sense, enough time has passed that knee-jerk edition warring seems to have progressively fallen by the wayside and more people seem interested in messing with how games like 4E worked including formatting, keywording, etc. Kai Tave posted:I also think the idea that tabletop roleplayers don't notice or care about this sort of thing as long as it's flashy and cool-enough looking is kind of spurious, it sort of rests on an assumption that roleplayers just somehow aren't concerned with balance, which has never really been true in my experience, even if it didn't keep them from playing the game people still notice this stuff, and honestly a lot more people nowadays seem capable of noticing it given how readily available tons of "let's crack games open under the hood to see what makes them tick" material is available for even the casually interested gamer to peruse. Gorelab posted:I honestly sometimes think what made 4e do so much worse comparatively was not being as fun to read in the bathroom, even if it was a lot easier to read ruleswise.
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Nov 12, 2021 18:31
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Lost Mine of Phandelver is fine, getting dunked by goblins is what you do in this system.
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Nov 12, 2021 18:35
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Halloween Jack posted:Many people seemed to feel the same way about Vampire: the Requiem's choose-your-own-lore. (I thought Damnation City in particular was a fun read in addition to being very useful.) Choose-your-own-lore is fine so long as the stuff that is codified is as interesting and fun as the weird in universe speculation. "We might be the descendants of weird ghost owls" is neat. "Who knows if there's actually a camarilla" would not be.
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Nov 12, 2021 18:40
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I haven't discussed this with Potatocubed yet (and I will). But I wanna address this with the thread. I never especially liked it when mods were too zealous about keeping threads on topic. Over months and years, every thread develops a community of regulars, and those people naturally want to be allowed to take their conversations and follow them wherever they go. However, those frequent-posting regulars, when they do that, essentially dominate the thread, and it tends to become increasingly insular as a result. The trend is to treat a megathread as essentially a slower Discord chat. There's a lot good about that, but also lots of folks who would rather not just hang out in chat threads on SA. Topicality exists for good reasons. It used to be that most forums didn't allow chat threads, but the existence of a stickied chat thread in many subs nowadays is supposed to try and give people a place to do this kind of thing: just meander around with whatever topics they want, with their regular posting pals. But what do do when folks in a different thread, with a different set of regulars, spontaneously convert their topical thread into a chat thread? I do not see my role here as purely "posting cop." I'm supposed to be helping and serving the trad games community. But I am hearing mixed feedback. One of the reasons we have an industry thread is to make a place in Trad Games for a specific topic that inevitably derails any other thread it comes up in. There are very clearly at least a few people who are annoyed that the Industry thread has been going on about 4e and game design for a week. After I made a post, a new thread of conversation opened and was sustained for a couple of days in the science & philosophy of RPGs thread (it starts here). Great! But it also continued here, basically unabated. There's at least six or eight of you who obviously want to keep talking about it, and you want to do it here and not anywhere else. Why? What I'm not willing to just concede without discussion is that a thread should always serve whoever happens to be the top ten posters in it. I am willing to do what serves the community, which includes enforcing topicality in this thread if that's for the best: if I have to I'll lock this thing until someone PMs me a genuine Industry thing they want to post about. Or I can just hand out a dozen probations. That seems harsh and probably won't make me many friends. I'd really rather not. I think a much better approach is to ask you guys - all of you, especially lurkers, to just clearly communicate what you actually want. If we need to re-label this as an "industry and also random chat thread" and have two chat threads in TG? Ok? If that's what the community genuinely wants. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 19:29
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Gorelab posted:I honestly sometimes think what made 4e do so much worse comparatively was not being as fun to read in the bathroom, even if it was a lot easier to read ruleswise. I've always found this perspective weird, and figured it was just because I really gelled with the templating and modern layout. But then in the past few years I read all five editions back to back in relatively quick fashion and discovered something. 4e has MORE lore and fluff in it than every edition, including 5th. There's literally just more wordcount dedicated to explaining how species fit in the world, how the classes work, getting into the Points of Light setting and Arkhosia and Bael Turath, descriptions of the various class paths and little blurbs on every ability eventually add up to more reading, not less. My guess since then has been a mix of "Paizo worked really hard to convince a lot of people the game had a bunch of stuff in it didn't and a lot of stuff missing that was actually there" mixed with "the templating is so thoroughly done that people who are naturally inclined to bounce off it simply see it and not all the good reading that's also in there."
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Nov 12, 2021 19:32
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lurker here I'm content to / do just scroll past people talking about D&D for the millionth time, the sick fucks. unless people are being dicks I think mindless chat keeps a thread live until actual industry stuff happens
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Nov 12, 2021 19:44
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Leperflesh posted:Great! But it also continued here, basically unabated. There's at least six or eight of you who obviously want to keep talking about it, and you want to do it here and not anywhere else. Why? The industry implications of the transitions between 3.x, 4e, and 5e are incredibly relevant to the industry. There was probably enough to unpack in Monty Cook presenting a 4e mechanic for Next to merit its own thread. As the big kid on the block, and the hobby's flagship game, there's a lot to be learned from those examination and discussions. They're interesting. And that was a discussion already happening here instead of in the half dozen threads you suggested scattering it into. It came across as kind of insulting that one poster whines about 4e discussion and everybody needs to clear bandwith because they might miss an opportunity to dunk on a Venger Satanis tweet.
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Nov 12, 2021 19:53
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4e dying at the hands of paizo and mearls is the largest tragedy design-wise in TTRPGs to date so it makes sense that we would endlessly circle it. The degree to which it set us back is vast.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:07
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As a lurker, I think anyone who’s pearl clutching about missing “actual industry content” in this thread because of discussion that isn’t actually off topic should post some of the drat news we’re all supposedly missing while discussing these things. Posting five paragraphs about how oh geez I don’t want to be a posting cop should I just rename this “chat thread 2” or probate a dozen people isn’t actually conducive to figuring out why a bunch of people continue discussing this industry topic here instead of the handful of mostly dead threads you suggested they move on to last time.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:15
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Leperflesh posted:What I'm not willing to just concede without discussion is that a thread should always serve whoever happens to be the top ten posters in it. I am willing to do what serves the community, which includes enforcing topicality in this thread if that's for the best: if I have to I'll lock this thing until someone PMs me a genuine Industry thing they want to post about. Or I can just hand out a dozen probations. That seems harsh and probably won't make me many friends. I'd really rather not. I think a much better approach is to ask you guys - all of you, especially lurkers, to just clearly communicate what you actually want. If we need to re-label this as an "industry and also random chat thread" and have two chat threads in TG? Ok? If that's what the community genuinely wants. I found it sorta funny that when you listed other threads to go talk about the differences in, every thread I also read already had "No talking about edition differences in here" rules. But honestly this thread being all about industry has already led to stuff I dislike more than edition talk: When it becomes grogs.txt lite, and it's all just breathless "Zak S said a thing! Everyone run down the greatest hits and go get out your pant-shitter memes!" Oh and I'm not personally offended by your very normal mod post. I'm sure there were reports and all. You're a good mod, Charlie Brown. theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 20:19
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Avoiding other threads because they're "mostly dead" is a self-fulfilling thing, though. "This is actually on-topic" wasn't what I was expecting, I guess I can see how there's a relationship, although if you interpret it that broadly, anything that happens with TG games is "related" to the games industry. I certainly didn't intend to insult anyone. "Help keep threads on topic" has been in the domain of moderator responsibilities forever. I admit I'm a little taken aback that folks are annoyed by a very normal mod note about derails? theironjef posted:I found it sorta funny that when you listed other threads to go talk about the differences in, every thread I also read already had "No talking about edition differences in here" rules. Hmm. Yeah, it's not good if there's literally noplace you're allowed to talk about edition differences. I'll look into that, for sure.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:21
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tokenbrownguy posted:lurker here Same. I scroll past "literally just posting the entire Age of Sigmar library verbatim" in F&F as it is, I don't mind scrolling past 4e discussion (I actually find it at least vaguely interesting).
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Nov 12, 2021 20:22
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Mr. Maltose posted:As a lurker, I think anyone who’s pearl clutching about missing “actual industry content” in this thread because of discussion that isn’t actually off topic should post some of the drat news we’re all supposedly missing while discussing these things. I think the idea is that if there's nothing really happening industry-wise, this thread could just lie dormant, so that when people see new posts, they know something specifically happened. Like, the TVIV B5 thread can be just dead for a bit, then something's up (because an actual person died  ).theironjef posted:I found it sorta funny that when you listed other threads to go talk about the differences in, every thread I also read already had "No talking about edition differences in here" rules. Maybe that needs to be revisited for other threads, rather than exclusively taking over this one. And I think the discussion has made it clear that there is room and interest in edition comparison that isn't edition warring, which I think is progress.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:24
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Kai Tave posted:I also think the idea that tabletop roleplayers don't notice or care about this sort of thing as long as it's flashy and cool-enough looking is kind of spurious, it sort of rests on an assumption that roleplayers just somehow aren't concerned with balance, which has never really been true in my experience, even if it didn't keep them from playing the game people still notice this stuff, and honestly a lot more people nowadays seem capable of noticing it given how readily available tons of "let's crack games open under the hood to see what makes them tick" material is available for even the casually interested gamer to peruse. To try and bring it back to an industry structure topic, the problem isn't that people don't care, it's that there's too much inertia for players to change things even when there are flaws they do care about. Which means that the way to make money is to get there first to benefit from the inertia. It's present in plenty of industries - software is notorious for prioritising early release over working properly, on the basis that many users and businesses will duct-tape over software flaws for years rather than just stop using it. Board games oddly have the inverse problem of being too disposable, know that they sell well to "whales" who collect the things en masse. If a balance flaw or a randomness issue only comes up after 5-6 games, there's really nothing to make the publisher care, because the money will be long gone and many of the best customers may not even play the game that many times. This escalates even further with Legacy games, where a flaw that comes up late in the campaign can just be ignored.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:26
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I think there have been digressions, but I'm not even sure that the overall conversation is off topic. When I was saying that a lot of successful games have trash for rules, I wasn't only thinking of D&D. Mothership is having a big Kickstarter now and people were saying stuff like "yeah, the new version is supposed to have updated these rules so they actually work now." Troika is popular and the general consensus here seems to be that the rules are completely broken. People have been pointing to Lancer as an example of a game doing well with good rules and not great adventures, but it also has great art and is made by a guy who already had a good following from elsewhere. It's legitimately hard to think of more than a handful of games that succeeded on the back of their great rules. I think the most important factors are: 1. Having an existing fanbase and/or bringing in a following to our small pond from a bigger pond. (E.g. anything CR publishes, Lancer, having the Avatar or Marvel license) 2. Art and presentation 3. Good modules and adventures If you have even just 2 of these 3, you can have rules that are unoriginal, bad, or even completely non-functional and still be a success.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:45
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Impermanent posted:4e dying at the hands of paizo and mearls is the largest tragedy design-wise in TTRPGs to date so it makes sense that we would endlessly circle it. The degree to which it set us back is vast. And unlike the equally dead-though-for-different-reasons earlier editions of D&D, we've just (re)hashed out why it seems unlikely that there could be a new home for 4E lovers in the form of a retroclone - too much drat effort to put out for the size of the audience. I'm sure there is a business school term for a segment that is inherently expensive to cater too and too small to be worth it, but it escapes me at the moment. Until someone figures out a way to crank out the equivalent of Heroic tier powers for each role at something like a third of the effort at present, I guess we're all stuck playing LANCER. Which is a great game, though I question the assertion that LANCER has a great introductory adventure given how much shade I've seen thrown at Wallflower.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:54
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Leperflesh posted:Avoiding other threads because they're "mostly dead" is a self-fulfilling thing, though. "This is actually on-topic" wasn't what I was expecting, I guess I can see how there's a relationship, although if you interpret it that broadly, anything that happens with TG games is "related" to the games industry. I think the hesitation people have to taking discussions to other threads is less a concern about the new thread being dead, and more a case that there's not really a guarantee the people you've been talking to are going to follow you. Even if someone posts a link to the new thread, it's often the case that some of the participants just don't end up following up on the discussion when it moves to a new thread and that almost always kills the discussion.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:55
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kaynorr posted:And unlike the equally dead-though-for-different-reasons earlier editions of D&D, we've just (re)hashed out why it seems unlikely that there could be a new home for 4E lovers in the form of a retroclone - too much drat effort to put out for the size of the audience. I'm sure there is a business school term for a segment that is inherently expensive to cater too and too small to be worth it, but it escapes me at the moment. I think most people in the conversation are claiming that LANCER is successful in spite of the lack of good intro adventure, which is fair because Wallflower is not what I'd point to when discussing good adventure design to introduce a game and setting.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:58
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4e was a decade ago, do the edition wars even exist anymore?
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Nov 12, 2021 20:59
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:4e was a decade ago, do the edition wars even exist anymore? yes
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Nov 12, 2021 21:02
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Impermanent posted:4e dying at the hands of paizo and mearls is the largest tragedy design-wise in TTRPGs to date so it makes sense that we would endlessly circle it. The degree to which it set us back is vast. I think this is the closest the conversation has been to an edition war this whole time. People have been having a good, respectful, informative conversation. Let it be.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:07
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:4e was a decade ago, do the edition wars even exist anymore? there was a qcs thread this year whining about the mod team's blatant pro 4e agenda because someone ate a 6'er for driveby threadshitting in a d&d thread lol Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 21:09
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Edition warring was not a concern for this particular thread of conversation, at least not for me.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:09
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Mr. Maltose posted:I think most people in the conversation are claiming that LANCER is successful in spite of the lack of good intro adventure, which is fair because Wallflower is not what I'd point to when discussing good adventure design to introduce a game and setting. Yes, that would be more in line with my take on the subject. LANCER succeeds despite a number of headwinds including the lack of a good introductory adventure, but I'm not sure how repeatable that is. In particular, I don't think you can count on having your collaboration partner being an epically talented artist who brings a healthy pre-existing following to seed interest in your product, along with making said product look spectacular to boot.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:09
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kaynorr posted:Yes, that would be more in line with my take on the subject. LANCER succeeds despite a number of headwinds including the lack of a good introductory adventure, but I'm not sure how repeatable that is. In particular, I don't think you can count on having your collaboration partner being an epically talented artist who brings a healthy pre-existing following to seed interest in your product, along with making said product look spectacular to boot. LANCER also released as a free playtest version at least a year before the kickstarter launched. E: Basically, LANCER's success can be attributed, at least in part, to three things in my opinion: 1. Authors who have pre-existing audiences due to other projects. 2. An extended, free-of-charge playtest period to build word of mouth. 3. A fan-made, exceptional companion app. King of Solomon fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 21:11
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KingKalamari posted:I think the hesitation people have to taking discussions to other threads is less a concern about the new thread being dead, and more a case that there's not really a guarantee the people you've been talking to are going to follow you. Even if someone posts a link to the new thread, it's often the case that some of the participants just don't end up following up on the discussion when it moves to a new thread and that almost always kills the discussion. My favourite threads are "current events" threads like this because the current events are built in conversation starters. The derails are what make the threads good. Which is a pretty chat thready attitude now I say it out loud.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:13
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