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homullus posted:I am not sure why you quoted me but I don't think I disagree. Leaning into the colorism in drow representation isn't great. They may have felt that lavender was less fraught than keeping drow black; I think this is the standard white fear of doing a racism, and it's also not great. They already walked back the essentialism and could (and I think should) have kept them black. Now with "grayish skin of many hues" they've opened the door to drow who can pass as other elves (i.e. white). It's a step back. I mean, they can't do it now due to the previously-mentioned implications it would create, but they really would have been better off using Mystara's Shadow Elves as their "evil underground Elf" template and made them all albinos...
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Dec 14, 2021 21:21
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KingKalamari posted:they really would have been better off using Mystara
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Dec 14, 2021 21:29
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Further clarification on the Magic: Arena thing. There's a format called Historic. Until now, you could play this format in paper if you wanted. Now, Alchemy is digital-only, and critically, you can't play Historic on Arena without Alchemy, they're just not offering a queue for that. Which means that "Historic on Arena" no longer matches "Historic in Paper." This is Bad, because it sews confusion among Historic players, leads to people thinking their paper cards work differently than they actually do, etc. If you care about playing magic on Paper, you may already be dismayed at Standard basically being dead in local game stores - I hear this is the case - but that is potentially reparable, since Standard is a format that has cards cycle out of it. Make and release a few good sets for the next year or two and Standard can recover. But Historic doesn't have this set rotation. Once it's bifurcated into an online version and a paper version that don't match, that's permanent. Nobody plays Pioneer, Legacy is wildly expensive in paper and not available on Arena, the only thing that leaves is Commander/EDH which is extremely popular (and not available on Arena and probably never will be because Arena's not set up for 3+ player magic) but definitely not what a lot of Historic/Standard type players want, and Draft formats which are certainly cool and good formats, but they're not Constructed format and so again that's just a subset of players (and a fair number of players draft to accumulate cards to use in constructed, so if their preferred constructed formats are dead, that reduces the utility of drafting.) So a lot of players who have invested in paper magic cards to play Historic are pretty sure that format is doomed and are understandably upset. A lot of players who have invested real money into Arena to build Historic decks but hate Alchemy are also upset. It turns out that if you make a game and encourage people to pour hundreds or even thousands of dollars into it, and then you make foundational changes to how the game works, people can get very upset about it. Where things kind of go off the rails are that some of those people think this is the doom of Magic itself. Meanwhile, Wizards/Hasbro is raking in record revenue and profits. Perhaps we'll see a precipitous drop in revenue next quarter, but I rather doubt it. They are doing things that they think are or will be popular with their customers on balance, and they certainly have access to the data that will allow them to make that determination objectively. If Alchemy pulls in more customers than it alienates, that's a net gain for the company. If focusing on Arena, EDH/Commander, and collectible themed special card sets, etc. earns them more money, they'll keep doing it. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 14, 2021 |
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Dec 14, 2021 21:35
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Oh no, not the most boring, stale, and prohibitively expensive formats. MtG evolving into more casual friendly formats in physical and digital isn’t going to make it a better game, but it will make it a better scene.
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Dec 14, 2021 21:58
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Do people actually play paper historic?
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Dec 14, 2021 22:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Yes, but this is true of D&D generally. Yeah, Mystara's a setting with no Orientalism or race essentialism going on. 
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Dec 14, 2021 22:56
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Leperflesh posted:Further clarification on the Magic: Arena thing. You already couldn't play Historic in paper as of August, as they released a digital-only set with brand-new cards. That's not what people are mad about : people are mad that Historic, a format that was supposed to be the Arena version of Pioneer/Modern/Legacy, is now beholden to whatever balance changes they want to make for Alchemy. Bottom Liner posted:Oh no, not the most boring, stale, and prohibitively expensive formats. MtG evolving into more casual friendly formats in physical and digital isn’t going to make it a better game, but it will make it a better scene. wtf are you talking about? Arena Standard/Historic is (relatively) cheap compared to anything in paper. And Alchemy isn't a "more casual friendly format" -- it's Standard, but with more cards you have to replace because they get nerfed. It'll definitely be less stale than Standard, but that'll make it more expensive. admanb fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Dec 14, 2021 |
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Dec 14, 2021 23:04
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, Mystara's a setting with no Orientalism or race essentialism going on. none! 
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Dec 14, 2021 23:05
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Panzeh posted:Do people actually play paper historic? Mostly in the sense of just playing casual magic, in my experience, where you play with what cards you happen to have.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:27
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admanb posted:You already couldn't play Historic in paper as of August, as they released a digital-only set with brand-new cards. Ah, that's right... it sounded in the main Magic thread as though this was the death blow, but I guess it was clear even then that paper historic wasn't going to survive? quote:That's not what people are mad about : people are mad that Historic, a format that was supposed to be the Arena version of Pioneer/Modern/Legacy, is now beholden to whatever balance changes they want to make for Alchemy. I guess part of the anger is that people spend real money and scarce wildcards on decks that can be randomly nerfed via Alchemy changes and you don't get a refund for cards that get nerfed (for those reading along, you get refunded a matching-rarity wildcard for cards that get banned in a major format, so in theory you're not out actual money). Because just generally being subject to balance changes... well, bans and new cards do that anyway for all formats. quote:wtf are you talking about? Arena Standard/Historic is (relatively) cheap compared to anything in paper. And Alchemy isn't a "more casual friendly format" -- it's Standard, but with more cards you have to replace because they get nerfed. It'll definitely be less stale than Standard, but that'll make it more expensive. Yeah the most expensive format, Legacy, remains 100% intact and unmolested by any of this. Historic had promise to be a less-expensive format because aside from bans, cards don't rotate out - so if you spend money or resources on a deck archetype, it may evolve with new cards coming in but you don't face the rotation of Standard where almost all the cards you buy become obsolete within a couple of years. The thing to understand about Arena is that it's nominally free-to-play, and you can totally play 100% for free for years - I am doing exactly that - but if you want to actually play competitive decks in any format, you have to sink either a huge amount of time into grinding, or pay real money. Either way, people get pretty sore when things they invested in, in good faith, get yanked away from them. Playing competitively in Historic was therefore probably a long-term less expensive prospect than playing competitively in digital Standard. But as admanb points out, Alchemy seems like it will flip that script. And if you're already down on playing Standard (paper or digital) right now because "it sucks and is stale" (that seems to be the thread consensus in the magic thread), and Historic will cost more, and you can't play digital EDH/Commander, what's left? Limited (that means drafting), expensive paper formats like Modern, Pioneer, Legacy and Vintage; and paper Commander/EDH. Magic dominates the CCG segment of the industry, and the strategic direction of the company indicates the strategic direction of the industry. I believe it is premature to predict its demise, but it is probably fair to say that it looks like Wizards continues to innovate new and exciting ways to coax gamers into giving them more money in order to play their games. Alchemy is, by itself, a fairly small thing, but it is being seen as a sign of things to come, and that's kind of fair.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:31
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, Mystara's a setting with no Orientalism or race essentialism going on. I don’t believe this for a split second. Even just the default fluff on monks gets into this.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:I don’t believe this for a split second. Even just the default fluff on monks gets into this. This is BECMI, ain't no Monks here. You want hard-baked, mechanical orientalism you've gotta play a Mystic. In all seriousness though: Mystara definitely has its share of problems with race, orientalism and bio-essentialism but they're of a bit of a different sort than most of the other campaign settings of the time? That's not to say it's better or worse than Greyhawk or Krynn, but I feel like we would have a much different state of affairs in modern D&D if Mystara had been focused on as the flagship campaign setting over Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:37
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Leperflesh posted:Ah, that's right... it sounded in the main Magic thread as though this was the death blow, but I guess it was clear even then that paper historic wasn't going to survive? Yah. Historic was already a "live" format in the sense that they managed the card pool and banned where necessary. People weren't mad about that, because it was nice to (a) have a format to play Arena when you were bored of Standard and (b) have some payoff for your investment in Standard format cards that have now rotated out. The cost of sometimes having a deck invalidated by bans (which at least reward wildcards) and having non-Standard cards injected in (with the long-term goal of making Pioneer playable in Arena) were... mostly accepted, if occasionally complained about. And I can also see where the appeal of Alchemy comes from. Digital card games have led to metas being solved lightning fast and mean the average player can now play dozens or hundreds of games a week where before they might've played 10-20. A faster-moving format makes sense, even if it doesn't fit with how a lot of people see Magic. But the way they've implemented Alchemy, the set of new cards they've released, and the lack of adjustment to an economy that's already straining under the speed of releases, is not a good look. And tying Historic to the same balance changes when they're clearly making the changes for Alchemy and only looking at Historic as an afterthought it actively infuriating. oh yeah they also hosed up the one good casual format in Arena, because Historic Brawl (1v1 EDH but with 60 card decks) is also tied to the Alchemy changes lmao
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Dec 14, 2021 23:40
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homullus posted:I am not sure why you quoted me but I don't think I disagree. Leaning into the colorism in drow representation isn't great. I'm sorry! I quoted you because I was replying to you and wanted to give context. I thought what you said was cool and good.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:51
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KingKalamari posted:This is BECMI, ain't no Monks here. You want hard-baked, mechanical orientalism you've gotta play a Mystic. I think it's even less about settings and more about the willingness and power WotC is willing to put into getting it right. We've seen repeatedly throughout 5e that WotC will take good treatments written by good people of colour and make just horrible bigoted messes out of them.
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Dec 14, 2021 23:58
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All the more reason to only buy 3rd party products! 
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Dec 15, 2021 00:05
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Arivia posted:none!
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Dec 15, 2021 00:15
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Splicer posted:Huh those pants don't leave much to the imagination oh wait those aren't pants Look, I told you when we killed the deer, there's not enough leather, so you can have pants but no shoes, or shoes but no pants. I thought that was pretty clear.
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Dec 15, 2021 01:03
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Absurd Alhazred posted:B-b-but their new job posting asks for: These are like those qualities that they put on the job applications that they no one applying can ever fulfill. Like I can think of a total of 2 people in the world that fulfill these criteria and would also work at wizards and they were both previously laid off by Wizards. And also if I told you names I'd probably get talked down to 0 within a page, because we have some strict opinions about what 'balanced' means in these parts. Leperflesh posted:Magic dominates the CCG segment of the industry, and the strategic direction of the company indicates the strategic direction of the industry. I believe it is premature to predict its demise, but it is probably fair to say that it looks like Wizards continues to innovate new and exciting ways to coax gamers into giving them more money in order to play their games. Alchemy is, by itself, a fairly small thing, but it is being seen as a sign of things to come, and that's kind of fair. So, one thing I've been wondering as I see MTG move more into the digital space, if paper magic stops being supported at some point, are FLGS's just completely screwed?
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Dec 15, 2021 02:54
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DalaranJ posted:
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Dec 15, 2021 03:12
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DalaranJ posted:So, one thing I've been wondering as I see MTG move more into the digital space, if paper magic stops being supported at some point, are FLGS's just completely screwed? Really it's hard to say, because it's unprecedented. There are no previous CCGs which died in paper format but continued to thrive in digital format, but there are also no CCGs as big and impactful as Magic. If paper magic died, game stores would lose like a quarter to a half of their current revenues, yeah. However, I think gamers have that money to spend and other products might fill in the gap, one way or another, so it's not necessarily the case that game stores would all go bankrupt. That said, I do not believe paper magic is going to die; and while it's still alive, stores are critical as gaming venues which act as one important branch of the marketing for the game; I suspect that without any paper magic in stores, the rest of the magic the gathering ecosystem would dwindle. There's still kitchen-table magic too, and people who only play kitchen-table maybe just buy direct/amazon to get bigger discounts? There's the aftermarket too, which is heavily online for buying singletons, don't know exactly how that'd factor in. I think however much money Arena makes, Wizards and Hasbro very much do not want to just dump the very profitable cardboard products. I believe they want to grow both product lines. I believe if they saw a serious falloff in sales of cardboard, they'd try many different things to try and rescue it rather than just shrugging and saying "welp I guess just digital now." A common and very silly fallacy is the notion that if a company has multiple products but one product or product line has a larger profit margin than another, the company should abandon the less-profitable product. That's dumb. The only product lines a company should abandon are the actually-unprofitable ones, and even then there are times when those products have a different value (a loss-leader, for example, or an aggressive push to claim market segment from competition, etc.)
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Dec 15, 2021 03:27
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There's a scenario where printing/shipping costs continue to increase, making it less and less profitable to keep the physical game in print. The tipping point is probably a long way off, but it's not impossible.
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Dec 15, 2021 03:37
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Magic has been pretty consistently setting record breaking years in terms of sales, so I don't think paper magic is going to go away any time soon.
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Dec 15, 2021 03:58
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Paper Magic (and Magic as a whole) is pivoting to focus on Commander, because people like commander and will drop big bucks on it (and this isn't just some commander curmudgeonery, MaRo's been quite open about it on his blog). The future of competitive magic is unclear, in that they've axed their current program and haven't said what's replacing it, only that they won't be offering flights or, less notably, the other benefits top pros used to get, and have explicitly said they're not interested in supporting comp magic at a level where it can be a job (not that it ever really was, but less so. That's another, now moot, kettle of fish). LGSs that depend on Magic are probably screwed, but that writing has been on the wall for a while now. Without grinders demand for singles (which was/is where the money's at) is going to fall off, except for Commander singles, and with WotC selling extra special prints directly they're pretty clearly much less content to let LGSs grab the margin available there. That said, being an LGS was never a good business model to begin with, those that haven't / wouldn't successfully diversify(ied) probably would have gone under anyways.
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Dec 15, 2021 05:46
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Splicer posted:Huh those pants don't leave much to the imagination oh wait those aren't pants I've got an old TSR catalog somewhere and that is absolutely standard for the art of the time. Like Lord of the Rings but on the wall of an old-school mechanic. I remember being particularly worried about a woman in the snow wearing only a skull on her lower half.
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Dec 15, 2021 07:02
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KingKalamari posted:I mean, they can't do it now due to the previously-mentioned implications it would create, but they really would have been better off using Mystara's Shadow Elves as their "evil underground Elf" template and made them all albinos... I love Mystara but Shadow Elves are 100x worse than drow, lol. 1) They are a people that wandered a desert for 40* years until they were lead to a promised land by their sole god 2) Given 14 commandments written on stone 3) Divided into tribes 4) Strict purity laws written in levitical style Except... 6) They have plans for world domination 7) As part of their plans for world domination, they manipulate societies by passing for members of other ethnicities and trying to attain high levels of power in the society through infiltration. 8) As part of their plan for world domination, they also manipulate "subhuman" races (orcs) into conflict with the majority elven societies, hoping that they can use the opportunity to seize power. Taken together... 
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Dec 15, 2021 08:36
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Wth were they thinking 
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Dec 15, 2021 08:51
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I'm more curious which horny dipshit came up with the "twin babies murder each other in the womb and this makes the mother orgasm and also this happens with every single drow pregnancy" fluff.
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Dec 15, 2021 09:05
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Wth were they thinking
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Dec 15, 2021 09:18
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I'm more curious which horny dipshit came up with the "twin babies murder each other in the womb and this makes the mother orgasm and also this happens with every single drow pregnancy" fluff. computer, erase the latest entries into my memory
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Dec 15, 2021 10:16
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Goa Tse-tung posted:computer, erase the latest entries into my memory Negative commander, you are now being horribly compelled to look up "Chad-Zak" and wonder why the actual loving hell this was ever a thing Lmao apparantly it was Robin D Laws. Jesus christ quote:The Ethics of Drow Killing TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 11:28
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Negative commander, you are now being horribly compelled to look up "Chad-Zak" and wonder why the actual loving hell this was ever a thing Uh, I mean, the orgasm thing is real bad, but 'these dark-skinned people are amazingly fertile and normally give birth in litters, they would easily outbreed us civilized races if they weren't backwards, savage murderers' is UHHHHHHHHHHHHH... idk if this is supposed to be from Mystara, but I found it on a Forgotten Realms site.
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Dec 15, 2021 13:57
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GreenMetalSun posted:Uh, I mean, the orgasm thing is real bad, but 'these dark-skinned people are amazingly fertile and normally give birth in litters, they would easily outbreed us civilized races if they weren't backwards, savage murderers' is UHHHHHHHHHHHHH... If you mean this link https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/drow1.shtml It's from dragon magazine in 2002, and is a generic D&D article. Dragon Magazine articles for generic D&D were semi-canonical, and were replaced by actual written books or setting-specific information if any came. For 3e, this was replaced by the Drow of the Underdark supplement in 2007 which says in a sidebar on page 24 "The drow are notably more fertile than are their surface-dwelling cousins. They become pregnant more easily and have a slightly shorter gestation period." (and includes none of the other stuff) So yeah, Robin let his edge shine through for a bit, but that's definitely not the last word on how drow babies are made.
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Dec 15, 2021 14:12
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Arivia posted:If you mean this link https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/drow1.shtml It's from here: https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/drow1.shtml Which I believe is a transcription of the Dragon article, but I can't really be sure. This was before my time, but even as a product of it's time it's pretty gross. EDIT: Wait, gently caress, it's from 2002? It's not from the 70s or something? Jesus loving Christ. GreenMetalSun fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 14:44
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I love Mystara but Shadow Elves are 100x worse than drow, lol. And that's why I focused on them being albino rather than...all that 
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Dec 15, 2021 16:10
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Ultimately this is just the problem of "evil races" filling the game's need for adversaries, when they could have just removed alignment years ago and designated Drow society as antagonistic. 40k is a game where every species is a different flavor of bad guy, but none are biologically predetermined as "Evil." Everyone has their own goals and motives, incompatible with anyone else's; They're each the heroes of their own stories from their own perspective. Even the daemons have an internally consistent reason for doing bad things, which is that they're the embodiment of vice. It's what they're made from, and could serve no other purpose.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:30
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KingKalamari posted:And that's why I focused on them being albino rather than...all that I mean even ignoring all that albino people are real human beings with a disability who already get discriminated against or even murdered in parts of the world due to prejudice, that's not really an improvement in terms of being problematic.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:44
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It ain't perfect but the D&D eu4 mod Anbennar does a whole lot better than most default D&D settings. Specifically in that every nation with any content at all considers itself the protagonist and has a reason to do what it does. Specificalyl I'm thinking of the trolls whose missions go from me-smash goofy descriptions to historians recollecting on the rise of their great nation more or less as soon as your build up the country enough to have a permanent written record.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:45
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moths posted:Even the daemons have an internally consistent reason for doing bad things, which is that they're the embodiment of vice. It's what they're made from, and could serve no other purpose. It could just fanon I've absorbed over the years, but isn't the Warp just a metaphysical reflection of reality? Like the Powers of the Warp only suck because reality sucks. If everyone in the galaxy woke up tomorrow and decided that war was hell and that they were to going to join Gay Communist Antifa (to use an extreme example). it would fundamentally alter the nature of the Warp/the beings who live there.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:50
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moths posted:40k is a game where every species is a different flavor of bad guy, but none are biologically predetermined as "Evil." Everyone has their own goals and motives, incompatible with anyone else's; They're each the heroes of their own stories from their own perspective. it's super apolitical when your protagonists are a fascist empire and your main antagonists are just ontologically diseased invalids, scheming manipulators, perverted degenerates, and violent thugs
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Dec 15, 2021 16:51
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