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Kai Tave, you mentioned Lancer APs a few posts back, is there one you'd recommend as a good advert for the game?
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Nov 13, 2021 11:18
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D&D's model of a trinity of core books also always struck me as weird, but I came from other games, where you bought the core book and it had all the rules and stuff you needed to play except for dice an pencils. There were always suppliments; GM screens with rule reference charts, books with extra rules and subsystems, or premade adventures, but no "this is the full priced player book, this is the full priced GM book, this is the book with pregenerated stat blocks adversaries because we didn't explain the math or system for them in the GM book" outside of D&D.
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Nov 13, 2021 11:44
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Kai Tave posted:Basically I think the approachability aspect of D&D compared to other RPGs is sort of not really true, I don't actually think it is objectively more approachable than a lot of other games (yeah a lot of people "get" generic D&D style fantasy but a lot of people get a lot of other stuff too) but the recognizability factor can't be beat. But yeah D&D's recognizability is huge, no argument there.
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Nov 13, 2021 12:02
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Siivola posted:I sincerely think that if D&D didn't have box sets and Beyond to on-ramp new hobbyists into the game, Pathfinder could very well eat its lunch again. The three book core set model is ridiculous and only sustainable because D&D's so recognizable, and I think history shows that the cost of the core is actually a barrier of entry to a lot of players. They didn't have Beyond until relatively recently. I think you could attribute its recent success far more directly to popular actual plays like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone than to the cheap box sets, though obviously their availability really helps.
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Nov 13, 2021 12:23
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King of Solomon posted:They didn't have Beyond until relatively recently. I think you could attribute its recent success far more directly to popular actual plays like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone than to the cheap box sets, though obviously their availability really helps. But I don't think D&D would have gotten this big this quickly if it didn't have the intro products it does.
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Nov 13, 2021 12:37
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Siivola posted:I sincerely think that if D&D didn't have box sets and Beyond to on-ramp new hobbyists into the game, Pathfinder could very well eat its lunch again. The three book core set model is ridiculous and only sustainable because D&D's so recognizable, and I think history shows that the cost of the core is actually a barrier of entry to a lot of players. It’s not as obvious since book #1 is called a Core Rulebook not a PHB, but Pathfinder 2e has the same required core set model - core rulebook, gamemastery guide, bestiary. Running the game without any of those three would SUCK. Hell it’s arguably worse, the designers have referred to the Advanced Player’s Guide as core rulebook 4 a few times.
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Nov 13, 2021 12:43
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Arivia posted:It’s not as obvious since book #1 is called a Core Rulebook not a PHB, but Pathfinder 2e has the same required core set model - core rulebook, gamemastery guide, bestiary. Running the game without any of those three would SUCK. Hell it’s arguably worse, the designers have referred to the Advanced Player’s Guide as core rulebook 4 a few times.
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Nov 13, 2021 12:45
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Siivola posted:Oh absolutely, the Starter Set came out in all the way back in 2014 and iirc the game was really struggling to get going. Then the media interest happened and D&D was cool again, and that's why the sales picked up. Not to keep hammering on with Lancer, but Yet Another Factor that probably contributes to the alchemy of its success is, as noted, the free comp/con character tool, but also that you can totally for free download the entire player-facing part of the game. Not just like "here's the first three levels and the rest you have to pay for," but "this is the entire game except the GM stuff and setting info." It's not unique in offering up free material to prospective players, a lot of games offer free community copies even, but as one component of its larger successes I feel it's an important one. The server gets a lot of people who are like "someone told me about this game and that I could get a bunch of it for free, then told me about comp/con, and I'm super excited." Tarnop posted:Kai Tave, you mentioned Lancer APs a few posts back, is there one you'd recommend as a good advert for the game? I don't really listen to a lot of APs myself, I'm mainly aware of them from osmosis and them popping up on my twitter feed. Zero Blue Orion is one of the first ones if I'm remembering correctly, then there's The Deimos Paradox, Bring Your Own Mech, Sword & Quill Studios has done one called Skybreakers, and there's one gearing up called Lancer: Hellboars. That's just what I know of, there's probably others you can find if you go to the Lancer twitter and look through the likes and do some poking around. No guarantees on quality or anything, but people do seem enthusiastic about it. e; also there's a youtube channel by a guy called dragonkid11 who does a lot of little videos about this or that in Lancer including series' where he covers community homebrew, people submitting builds for various mechs, lore breakdowns, etc. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 12:54
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Siivola posted:Oh jeez, I didn't realize. Didn't first edition PF run okay with one core? IIRC you could play Pathfinder 1e with just the Core Rulebook (technically NOT called/considered a PHB) and the Bestiary, though I'm probably going to be corrected by Arivia on something in the Gamemastery Guide that's essential (and I defer to her expertise).
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Nov 13, 2021 12:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:IIRC you could play Pathfinder 1e with just the Core Rulebook (technically NOT called/considered a PHB) and the Bestiary, though I'm probably going to be corrected by Arivia on something in the Gamemastery Guide that's essential (and I defer to her expertise). Nah this is about right. The Pathfinder 1e GMG is a very good book but it doesn’t have any crucial rules every game needs (some good ones for a lot of games with haunts and the settlement rules though). In contrast the Pathfinder 2e GMG has literally all the rules and non-combat subsystems that aren’t traps or other hazards. e: one big thing in pathfinder’s favor along these lines though is the archives of nethys; you can get all the crucial GMG content I just mentioned online for free legally and a huge portion of the game period. 5e only has its extremely limited Basic rules in comparison. Arivia fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 13:24
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Siivola posted:Oh absolutely, the Starter Set came out in all the way back in 2014 and iirc the game was really struggling to get going. Then the media interest happened and D&D was cool again, and that's why the sales picked up. Nah, it was consistently in the top 50 of Amazon's book sales, way above pathfinder, the first three shipments of just the corebook sold out at both of my FLGS's and the 4chan general for it moved at almost three times the speed of the Pathfinder one. It outright killed the 4e general which had been limping along. The first year for sales was really, really good overall. It managed to pop off 22k sales before it even released the DMG. Those numbers sound low, but they're insanely good for big expensive hardcover books. There's a weird-rear end loving meme that goes like this: "Dungeons and Dragons 5e bombed miserably and was dead in the water, was hated by everyone in existence, and then critical role made it popular." The only people I know who spread that specific meme usually have a strong correlation with people who really, really hate the Pundit and Zak and made a big deal about him being credited as a consultant and decided to boycott it. And because their super cool friends on twitter agreed with them, they just assumed that most of the RPG sphere understood and played along with this plan. The venn diagram is basically a circle. I have never met a single person in real life at the many gaming tables(comes to around 40+ people) I've been who has even heard of Zak or the Pundit. The game released, people bought it up because it was the new edition and new editions and the opportunity to get in the 'ground floor' of a property always mean decently good sales. By the beginning of 2015 the various WoD games and the pathfinder game all switched to 5e at both my university's game club and the local general game club. Curse of Strahd helped a lot too, it's an insanely common adventure path, I have a friend who refuses to play CoS ever again because she did four campaigns of that poo poo. I have no idea why people think 5e bombed at any point and I didn't hear a single person make that claim until I came to this website. The only real negative comments I ever saw otherwise were brain-dead metachasing posts like "If I play a fighter and I am surrounded by 10,000 orcs, the orcs auto-hitting with a 5% chance means my level 20 fighter can't murder them all before dying, and that means this game is bad. No you can't say 'NoBoDy WoUlD eVeR RuN tHaT', No, I am not yelling, no, I do not need to calm down." and other such nonsense. 5e, a game I dislike greatly, is easily one of, if not the most successful tabletop role-playing product of all time and it has doing this in an era(until Covid 19) where entertaining yourself(for a middle class person) has never, ever been easier, which is a crazy achievement. I prefer many other games to 5e, but i gotta tip my hat to the king.
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Nov 13, 2021 13:28
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license But not really to Paizo. Their bread and butter was adventure paths, so switching from 3.x to 4E wouldn't have been a huge deal. Paizo's problem was that WotC refused to renew the magazine licence at (according to Paizo) pretty much the last minute with no prior indication, after Paizo had already commissioned a bunch of art for the coming year. They couldn't reuse the art for 4E stuff any time soon because it wasn't out yet, and 3.x was otherwise in wind down. So Paizo was left with nothing but a bunch of printing contacts, the legal right to basically reprint 3.x with some numbers changed around, and a whole bunch of high quality D&D-style artwork they needed to pay for. From this you might be thinking I'm on the side of Paizo, but quite frankly gently caress Paizo. Not because they decided to make their own game with blackjack and hookers, or because they decided to go full culture war on the large multinational that dicked them over. gently caress Paizo because they decided to make the crux of their culture war be that the very concept of coherent mechanical design is bad. Paizo's management consciously decided that recruiting the shovelware industry as their flying monkeys was worth the cost of setting mainstream game design and discourse back literally decades. They are directly responsible for dragging the face of the hobby back to the Mearles-run, reactionary-courting shitshow it is today, and I hope their union woes destroy their business and drag them into destitution. It won't, but it'd be nice.
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Nov 13, 2021 13:29
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Splicer posted:From this you might be thinking I'm on the side of Paizo, but quite frankly gently caress Paizo. Not because they decided to make their own game with blackjack and hookers, or because they decided to go full culture war on the large multinational that dicked them over. gently caress Paizo because they decided to make the crux of their culture war be that the very concept of coherent mechanical design is bad. Paizo's management consciously decided that recruiting the shovelware industry as their flying monkeys was worth the cost of setting mainstream game design and discourse back literally decades. They are directly responsible for dragging the face of the hobby back to the Mearles-run, reactionary-courting shitshow it is today, and I hope their union woes destroy their business and drag them into destitution. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a capitalist system, and money talks, right? There's a lot of former 12 year olds in their thirties being grumpy and wanting dnd to be like what it was back in the day with the disposable income. Its certainly not the hip game being played by college kids, but...
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Nov 13, 2021 13:34
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:The first year for sales was really, really good overall. It managed to pop off 22k sales before it even released the DMG. Those numbers sound low, but they're insanely good for big expensive hardcover books.
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Nov 13, 2021 13:36
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A major problem most indie RPGs have with being really a financial success is that they only have one book they can sell you. Obviously it is hard to produce supplemental material when your core book sells a few tens of thousands of copies. I have played in a really good Lancer campaign for a while now, and started the first Pathfinder 2E campaign that got cut short by the pandemic and it is easy to guess which game produced more money for the industry. This is one thing Paizo does that really gives them an edge, a constant stream of new content that I can play with, read, collect, whatever. And the fact that half of it is pre written adventures perfect for a newer GM who likes the idea of running a game but is intimidated by homebrewing everything. As an adult well past my college years it can be hard to find the time to work on a campaign I am running.
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Nov 13, 2021 13:41
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I mean, at the end of the day, it's a capitalist system, and money talks, right? There's a lot of former 12 year olds in their thirties being grumpy and wanting dnd to be like what it was back in the day with the disposable income. Its certainly not the hip game being played by college kids, but... And they won. Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 13:52
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Lord_Hambrose posted:This is one thing Paizo does that really gives them an edge, a constant stream of new content that I can play with, read, collect, whatever. And the fact that half of it is pre written adventures perfect for a newer GM who likes the idea of running a game but is intimidated by homebrewing everything. As an adult well past my college years it can be hard to find the time to work on a campaign I am running. They are probably too large to be considered indie, but Goodman Games does an excellent job of this with DCC. Single core rulebook, a quick start book that is dirt cheap / often free at Cons or RPG day events, and a pretty drat good catalog of relatively cheap 1 - 3 session length adventures that don't take a lot of prep. All their new hardcopy releases come with a .pdf code. I'd have to do some math to see if it's the RPG I've spent the most money total on in the last decade, but it's certainly the one where I've bought the most individual releases. mkultra419 fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 13:52
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mkultra419 posted:They are probably too large to be considered indie, but Goodman Games does an excellent job of this with DCC. Single core rulebook, a quick start book that is dirt cheap / often free at Cons or RPG day events, and a pretty drat good catalog of relatively cheap 1 - 3 session length adventures that don't take a lot of prep. All their new hardcopy releases come with a .pdf code. I'd have to do some math to see if it's the RPG I've spent the most money total on in the last decade, but it's certainly the one where I've bought the most individual releases. The released content for DCC is amazing, I just wish the core book itself had some good GMing and adventure writing guidelines in it. It’s very much a game for people who have run games before and that’s been the main reason I haven’t recommended it to more people.
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Nov 13, 2021 13:59
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I'm not sure the model is viable for a lot of indie houses, and I have no idea if the actual book is profitable or just a loss leader to get people in the door, but DCC selling a bare-bones softcover of their core book for $25 definitely got me to make that impulse purchase. It scratches that "neat physical object" itch at a comfortable price point.
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Nov 13, 2021 14:01
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mkultra419 posted:They are probably too large to be considered indie, but Goodman Games does an excellent job of this with DCC. Single core rulebook, a quick start book that is dirt cheap / often free at Cons or RPG day events, and a pretty drat good catalog of relatively cheap 1 - 3 session length adventures that don't take a lot of prep. All their new hardcopy releases come with a .pdf code. I'd have to do some math to see if it's the RPG I've spent the most money total on in the last decade, but it's certainly the one where I've bought the most individual releases. the DCCRPG line allegedly cracked over a million units sold sometime in 2018, so it must be making people happy somewhere. I am pretty sure that counts the 3.5 work too, but still, that's a lot of modules and books. Lumbermouth posted:The released content for DCC is amazing, I just wish the core book itself had some good GMing and adventure writing guidelines in it. It’s very much a game for people who have run games before and that’s been the main reason I haven’t recommended it to more people. Its kind of funny that they often reprint wholesale ideas from other books and people go "dude, a new and creative idea, mind is blown." OTOH, the advice you shouldn't go, "There is a goblin there" but rather describe what it looks like for a more immersive game was in B/X.
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Nov 13, 2021 14:02
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:
Yeah I just thumbed through the book and there’s like a bunch of edge cases about alignment and poo poo but nothing in the way of GM advice. I think they could insert some of the original How To Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck in there without heavily affecting the page count. Honestly DCC is the one RPG I can think of that would really thrive with an Old School Essentials style booklet split.
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Nov 13, 2021 14:18
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I have no idea why people think 5e bombed at any point and I didn't hear a single person make that claim until I came to this website.
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Nov 13, 2021 14:26
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I've never been under the slightest impression that 5E "bombed," but it did have a pretty slow content rollout at first compared to previous editions so there were comparatively long periods of nothing new to talk about. Bombed or not, it isn't really wrong to say that things like Critical Role blowing up big have given it a substantial boost regardless of where it's been boosted up from.
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Nov 13, 2021 14:30
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DCC is also interesting in that it was basically born of the same circumstances that Pathfinder was: Goodman Games couldn't make their "for level 0 Commoner 3.5 character" adventures anymore with the release of 4e and and the GSL, and they even tried to work inside the 4e ecology for a while but the modules didn't take, so they did their own separate game under the OGL so they could control the license. This also explains why Goodman was pretty bitter at/about 4e to the point of that whole book-burning art issue. Of course, the key difference is that DCC actually iterates on 3.5 to develop its own design ethos based on what Goodman Games was already doing with very low level 3.5 characters
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Nov 13, 2021 14:38
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Coolness Averted posted:D&D's model of a trinity of core books also always struck me as weird, but I came from other games, where you bought the core book and it had all the rules and stuff you needed to play except for dice an pencils. There were always suppliments; GM screens with rule reference charts, books with extra rules and subsystems, or premade adventures, but no "this is the full priced player book, this is the full priced GM book, this is the book with pregenerated stat blocks adversaries because we didn't explain the math or system for them in the GM book" outside of D&D. (Sure, Basic D&D also existed at this point in time - but Basic alone cuts off at 3rd level. You could play with it for a bit, but to get the level of long-term play comparable to AD&D or RuneQuest you really needed Expert, which didn't exist until 1981, so you're looking at two boxed sets.) D&D has been a premium product ever since TSR realised how much power the name recognition factor gave them. KingKalamari posted:- 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. From a presentation perspective, I feel like a lot of people would look at that and say "Well, that's just the old system with some options taken away, isn't it?", and they wouldn't be all that wrong. For anyone who liked the old system, it felt like an attempt to take options away in order to promote a default where you'd play with the presented points-of-light assumptions (in which the spread of the rule of law is an unalloyed good and unfettered chaos is the major challenge facing people), rather than a blows-against-the-empire model; the 4E designers were probably right to say "D&D is better at some social models than others, so let's aim at those", but keeping a lot of the old terminology in place still acts as a reminder of what has been taken away. For anyone who disliked the old system, the new one seemed cowardly at best (a shameless lift from WFRP at worst). I remember my own reaction being "Eh, poo poo or get off the pot already". The lesson for the industry seems to be twofold: - If you come at King Sacred Cow, you better not miss. - If you actually kill your sacred cows entirely, a chunk of your player base will decide that the game is no longer meaningfully the same game any more. The latter one has happened before: WFRP had this with third edition, with slightly more justification because it did have a completely different system from 1E and 2E. Traveller: the New Era is a spectacular example, where they blew up the setting so it didn't really resemble what had come before and junked the old system entirely. More or less the only times I have seen a game come out with a wholly replaced system and people have been fine with it has been examples like Kult: Divinity Lost, where the community around the game largely already conceded that the system was rubbish, the new game was acknowledged as respecting the original's setting and themes, and the original game had laid fallow long enough that it wasn't like the version with the new system was supplanting a currently-supported version. 4E proved that D&D is not immune to that, and the fact that this is the case puts Wizards in an awkward position. If a smaller company cooks up a 100% new system that they consider an outright improvement over an older system, they can just release the system under a new title; chances are, the old system doesn't have so much more name recognition than the designer/publisher themselves that changing the system name makes much of a difference. In addition, not many publishers are dealing with games which have as long and storied a history as D&D has, so there's been less time for those cows to get sacred in the first place. The closest equivalent is Chaosium - who are happy to support Heroquest/Questworlds as an alternate system for Glorantha, and who have indeed recently updated both Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, but Chaosium is and always has been in the game of incremental improvements, not revolutionary rethinks when it comes to new editions of named products. This does lead to the industry-affecting problem people have cited that Wizards don't feel able to truly revolutionarily change D&D without losing the fanbase and creating the sort of ill-feeling which drives away old customers and new alike. (Nobody wants to go back to the worst days of the 4E edition war.) To be fair, there is a Ship of Theseus aspect to this sort of thing. If it's legit to change absolutely everything about a game - implied setting, rules sacred cows, GM-player relationship, everything - but still say it is D&D or WFRP or Traveller, then "D&D" or "WFRP" or "Traveller" denote nothing except a brand. A further wider industry point, then: some of your audience are invested in the brand as a brand, and will be excited about where you take it next if you go in a bold new direction. Some of your audience are in fact invested in the brand solely as a shorthand for the particular set of game mechanics or setting features you currently provide which they like, and if you move away from them, they'll move away from you. It is sensible to make a decision about how far you are willing to repair the Ship of Theseus before your audience won't agree it's the Ship of Theseus any more.
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Nov 13, 2021 15:02
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Siivola posted:Oh jeez, I didn't realize. Didn't first edition PF run okay with one core? PF1 essentially combined the Player's Guide and the Gamemaster's Guide into a single massive sometimes poorly bound book that cost slightly less than the PHB and DMG combined. Which is good if your group buys a single book for the entire group, bad if your group wants every player to have their own book. The solution they came up with for a cheaper core book was kind of hilarious, too: Just take the pdf for the massive tome and print it out on cheaper paper at like 50% size, maybe cut out some of the fluff, soft bind it, job done. Magnifying glass not included. This kind of bumps into one of the big unsolved problems in RPGs: designing a book as instruction guide and designing a book as convenient reference manual are different and largely contradictory goals, and I don't think this is a circle that's ever been squared in any really economically feasible way.
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Nov 13, 2021 15:19
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Tendales posted:This kind of bumps into one of the big unsolved problems in RPGs: designing a book as instruction guide and designing a book as convenient reference manual are different and largely contradictory goals, and I don't think this is a circle that's ever been squared in any really economically feasible way. Catalyst games labs sells a reference tome(Total Warfare) and several rulebooks(Battlemech Manual, Techmanual, Campaign Operations, Advanced Operations), I'm not sure if that's better though. It feels worse.
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Nov 13, 2021 15:54
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Tendales posted:This kind of bumps into one of the big unsolved problems in RPGs: designing a book as instruction guide and designing a book as convenient reference manual are different and largely contradictory goals, and I don't think this is a circle that's ever been squared in any really economically feasible way. I know it's a minority opinion but games have way too many character options. If I never have to print a spell card again, it'll be too soon.
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Nov 13, 2021 16:21
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Kai Tave posted:Not to keep hammering on with Lancer, but Yet Another Factor that probably contributes to the alchemy of its success is, as noted, the free comp/con character tool, but also that you can totally for free download the entire player-facing part of the game. Not just like "here's the first three levels and the rest you have to pay for," but "this is the entire game except the GM stuff and setting info." It's not unique in offering up free material to prospective players, a lot of games offer free community copies even, but as one component of its larger successes I feel it's an important one. The server gets a lot of people who are like "someone told me about this game and that I could get a bunch of it for free, then told me about comp/con, and I'm super excited." And then there's me, who was sold on it when I was told I could play a Voltron lion.
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Nov 13, 2021 16:24
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:There's a weird-rear end loving meme that goes like this: "Dungeons and Dragons 5e bombed miserably and was dead in the water, was hated by everyone in existence, and then critical role made it popular." e: I mean it's D&D, it was always going to sell well. Despite an active competitor and former employees poo poo talking it online 4E sold so well that they needed to do a second printing before it even hit street date (ref: https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/12654/d-d-4e-back-press) Siivola posted:4E was very popular in here and the NEXT playtest got panned real bad when it first came out. I think I wrote the game off at that point and it didn't pop back onto my radar until a friend mentioned she's been playing D&D at work and watching Crit Role. But it's really important to note that when 5E announced the forum attitude was extremely optimistic and open to it. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 16:53
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With regards to the 5E bombed chat, I don't think that's true either, even if people who don't like 5E (like me) kind of wish it was true. Everything I'm about to say is 100% half remembered anecdotes with no evidence to support it, but I recall hearing that despite being the biggest name in TTRPGS, D&D isn't super profitable. Selling books to a niche gaming market isn't a huge money maker apparently, at least to Hasbro, and definitely compared to Magic. I think 5e's slow content release is just the result of corporate interests shrinking investment in the brand. Push something out, slow down development, just push enough books out to keep people playing and otherwise sell dice and premium accessories and let Critical Role carry the whole thing. 3e and 4e pushed out a ton of books but I imagine someone higher up was eventually like "why are we putting so much money into this" and here we are.
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Nov 13, 2021 16:59
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Kai Tave posted:I've never been under the slightest impression that 5E "bombed," but it did have a pretty slow content rollout at first compared to previous editions so there were comparatively long periods of nothing new to talk about. Bombed or not, it isn't really wrong to say that things like Critical Role blowing up big have given it a substantial boost regardless of where it's been boosted up from. 5e's monetary success is really secondary to preserving Dungeons and Dragons' value as a brand. It's kind of like how Marvel comic-book sales don't really matter because the entire institution exists as an IP nature preserve where Disney and Sony keep the Avengers and Spiderman live. To that extent, it's in WotC's interest to dominate the market. They learned how back when they paid the Penny Arcade and CAD guys to actual play 4e, but that experiment ran out of money. (I think at one point Tycho said as much, when asked why they stopped recording D&D sessions.) That was goddamn huge, and Mearls was involved. I'm sure some lizard part of his brain connected the dots, which lead to CR and TAZ becoming what nerds crave and keeping the D&D brand viable long after it should have ceased.
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Nov 13, 2021 17:51
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I think Hasbro’s attitude to D&D can probably be summed up by the text of their report in which they complained that gains made on D&D were cancelled out by losses taken on Pie Face.
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Nov 13, 2021 19:29
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Coolness Averted posted:D&D's model of a trinity of core books also always struck me as weird, but I came from other games, where you bought the core book and it had all the rules and stuff you needed to play except for dice an pencils. There were always suppliments; GM screens with rule reference charts, books with extra rules and subsystems, or premade adventures, but no "this is the full priced player book, this is the full priced GM book, this is the book with pregenerated stat blocks adversaries because we didn't explain the math or system for them in the GM book" outside of D&D. I honestly think that the core book trinity model of D&D, while ultimately a bad status quo from an end user standpoint, has some major advantages from a marketing standpoint: The majority of people looking to get into D&D are only going to end up interacting with the game from a player standpoint, which means they really only need to buy the player's handbook and have a DM who owns the full set to start playing. So, what we end up with is a system where, because the majority of consumers are only buying one of the three core books to play, consumers are fooled into feeling like the game isn't as expensive as it actually is. It doesn't matter if, objectively, even the Player's Handbook is way more expensive than a one-book indie RPG, it's all about consumer perception. moths posted:5e's monetary success is really secondary to preserving Dungeons and Dragons' value as a brand. Yeah, at the end of the day, I think market dominance is much more important to WotC's bottom line than individual sales. I think that, even if 5e ended up having lower sales overall than previous editions (Which, I should state, is not the case) regaining their dominance over total sales within the market would have been a big enough victory to justify the edition. KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 19:55
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Honestly, it's not even that I would say the average player doesn't need anything more than the basic rules which are available for free. From my experience in playing and being the GM of games, at least online and in person at the stores I've played in, the DM almost always provides everything. I can obviously only speak anecdotally but it does kind of feel like if the GM isn't providing everything then people are just pirating it from one of the many sites that has that stuff in a easily accessible database.
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Nov 13, 2021 20:04
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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. my view, as someone who posts very occasionally - it's fine, threads don't always have to be purely on topic, if things actually take over a thread for more than a day or two maybe nudge people around. Artificially halting a conversation to say GO TO THE CORRECT THREAD often does far more damage to organic conversation flow and evolution than small-medium amount of veering off-topicness.
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Nov 13, 2021 20:15
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hyphz posted:Don’t forget that original 4e tool was written in Silverlight. Remember that? Exactly. the funny thing about this one is that in 2006-2007 if you sat down a bunch of big-brained industry professionals there would have been a round of 'what web platform should we commit to? flash is widely condemned, microsoft are throwing a bazillion dollars at their alternative, developers like it, this seems like a reasonable bet!' meanwhile Apple were busy releasing the 'iphone' and Google were laying the groundwork for 'chrome', neither of which you've heard of but had some minor tech industry effects
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Nov 13, 2021 20:19
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hyphz posted:Don’t forget that original 4e tool was written in Silverlight. Remember that? Exactly. No, the original 4e tool was an offline .NET executable, which periodically phoned home to get the latest content. It was deliberately deprecated in favor of the online-only Silverlight implementation to force people to maintain an active D&D Insider subscription to use the tool. And then Silverlight was deprecated. Whatever the merits of 4e as a game are, the game-as-a-service implementation they did for the character builder had some definite problems.
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Nov 13, 2021 20:52
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Heliotrope posted:I remember when The Adventure Zone switched to Monster of the Week, a bunch of their audience got mad and basically said "Why aren't they doing this in D&D? There's no need for another system! This sucks because it isn't D&D. When are they going back to D&D?" And when the ads for their third campaign were airing, Travis very specifically said "We're going back to D&D for this one." Revisiting this post, I didn't listen to the Monster of the Week arc of TAZ myself, but I've had friends who are big PBTA-heads who did and it was pretty clear at points that they were also just not handling the PBTA rules properly. They were still treating the GM as the arbiter who leads the players to encounters like a D&D DM, and throwing off "The Conversation" balance. I can see how that would be pretty frustrating to listen to and a bad introduction to a PBTA game. Especially when they were clearly skimming over places and ignoring the D&D rules when it was convenient, or admitted to fudging rolls sometimes, which all lifts the D&D experience up. I think that's all one thing that'll make the mass purchase of the Avatar: TLA RPG an interesting point. PBTA games in general can be pretty bad about properly explaining the change in the player and GM dynamics relative to D&D, which is going to be the most common RPG any of the Avatar KS backers have played. And there's a lot of knock-on effects to how that propels the game forward. I've also got some reservations to the Masks ruleset and design choices that make me wonder if it's a good choice for a beginner's RPG that this is going to end up being for a lot of people. There are some choices in the playbooks and move designs I think are kind of frustrating, and some choices in where important rules were placed that really mess poo poo up if you don't read the right place in the book.
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Nov 13, 2021 20:52
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Nuns with Guns posted:Revisiting this post, I didn't listen to the Monster of the Week arc of TAZ myself, but I've had friends who are big PBTA-heads who did and it was pretty clear at points that they were also just not handling the PBTA rules properly. They were still treating the GM as the arbiter who leads the players to encounters like a D&D DM, and throwing off "The Conversation" balance. I can see how that would be pretty frustrating to listen to and a bad introduction to a PBTA game. Especially when they were clearly skimming over places and ignoring the D&D rules when it was convenient, or admitted to fudging rolls sometimes, which all lifts the D&D experience up. Yeah, I never really listened to TAZ post-Balance, but I remember even in the chapter where they briefly switched over from 5e to a bare bones, homebrew PBtA-like they were really not following the underlying principles of the PBtA system. I think there's also something to say about people's attachment to, for lack of a better description, the "D&D-like" genre that exists even outside of the baseline mechanics of the game. It's often been said on here that D&D isn't really a fantasy simulation game, it's a D&D simulation game, and I think extends even beyond the mechanics and into the types of stories you can tell and the expected set dressing you see in D&D games. The switch between Balance and Amnesty wasn't just a shift in system, it was also a broad shift in genre from D&D-like fantasy to rural, urban fantasy, which I can see being a turn off to fans of the former. Nuns with Guns posted:I think that's all one thing that'll make the mass purchase of the Avatar: TLA RPG an interesting point. PBTA games in general can be pretty bad about properly explaining the change in the player and GM dynamics relative to D&D, which is going to be the most common RPG any of the Avatar KS backers have played. And there's a lot of knock-on effects to how that propels the game forward. I've also got some reservations to the Masks ruleset and design choices that make me wonder if it's a good choice for a beginner's RPG that this is going to end up being for a lot of people. There are some choices in the playbooks and move designs I think are kind of frustrating, and some choices in where important rules were placed that really mess poo poo up if you don't read the right place in the book. It's definitely going to need a section that clearly outlines the broader philosophy of running the system to be successful. It reminds me of when Dungeon World was initially released and just how bad a job the book did of concisely communicating how you were supposed to run the system. Like, when the most common advice for new GMs looking for guidance is "Read this third party guide online that explains how the system is supposed to be run" you know the core book has missed the mark.
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Nov 13, 2021 21:12
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