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Subjunctive posted:You aren’t paying to play-test, you’re paying to have the materials sent to you. (But, having paid for to get them, many people will then value them more highly and be more likely to follow through and use them than if the rules had been provided for free.) When you go to the store, do you also give them ten bucks for the privilege of taking out their trash and mopping the floors? You’re already paying in your time and energy to volunteer for a company, bare loving minimum is everything needed is at cost.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:When you go to the store, do you also give them ten bucks for the privilege of taking out their trash and mopping the floors? I don’t know what the cost of printing and shipping it is, but doing it for zero means you get an unbounded number of people ordering because why not. You aren’t compelled to send them your feedback, if you don’t feel that you’ll benefit from doing so. As regards janitorial services, I don’t find them as interesting as seeing games and other productions before they’re complete, so I don’t seek out “bring your own mop” experiences like I do opportunities to be part of a testing group, I admit.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:17
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Making people pay for the privilege of doing the work of making their product has been The Marvel Method for decades, but normally they just don't give you health insurance. Glad to see them innovating as they enter new markets.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:19
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So you pay them. Just like all social scientists do when they want to collect data. You don't invent artisanal boots to lick.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:19
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When did buying a pre-release book become boot licking? What’s going on here?
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Dec 23, 2021 04:23
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Subjunctive posted:When did buying a pre-release book become boot licking? What’s going on here? ARCs are usually given for free to select readers for review, rather than sold at a markup.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:26
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And that makes it “boot licking” to buy something you want to have? I’m sure there’s an interesting conversation to be had about people’s enjoyment of getting to see something early and in the process benefiting A Corporation, but I’m not going to find out because XD’s tone and aggression is utterly off-putting.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:29
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Sorry if I'm coming off as hostile (it's certainly not directed at you), it's just utterly baffling. Play-testing is fundamentally a job. It's a job that you might have fun doing, sure. But it's a job. It's something that the company wants/needs to get done (at least if they want a good product, although that's frequently skipped). Imagine if an author asked their fans to proof-read their book. It's insane.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:37
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My hunch is this "play testing" is more akin to video games early access, than actual play testing unless something completely wild shows up that they missed.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:43
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Ah yes, paying to participate in the farce of pretending to do a job for a company. Much better. Now I totally get why I'd pay extra for this. Now my corporate janitor cosplay can have like a little rhinestone bowtie too, as I pantomime sweeping. It'll be so festive. Am I really the only one here who thinks this is completely bug nuts insane as an idea?
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Dec 23, 2021 04:48
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Xiahou Dun posted:Am I really the only one here who thinks this is completely bug nuts insane as an idea? No, it’s pretty wild to sell your playtest and it’s pretty wild to buy a playtest. I can also understand that the company could see it as a way to generate buzz around the game and make money off selling people what is essentially a promise that you’ll listen to their laundry list of ideas. As we know, people would love to pay to send designers their suggested changes.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:
Can I just take a moment to express how sick to death I am of the whole "Grim and gritty" fantasy aesthetic? There's nothing wrong with it in and of itself, I just feel like the market is completely oversaturated with it.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:58
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Cyberpunk also charged I think $10 for a PDF of the beta, and it just sort of came and went without comment.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:10
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I think playtests should be free (digitally, and limited to a certain number of signups) but I'm fine with charging for a pdf beta if it includes an equal discount on the final version as a way of self selecting. Also fine with charging near at-cost for a print copy. It's not a job or work unless you have an obligation to playtest and provide feedback. If you're just playing an early copy for fun around the table and nothing else I don't see how that is labor.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:26
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Bottom Liner posted:I think playtests should be free (digitally, and limited to a certain number of signups) but I'm fine with charging for a pdf beta if it includes an equal discount on the final version as a way of self selecting. Also fine with charging near at-cost for a print copy. It's not a job or work unless you have an obligation to playtest and provide feedback. If you're just playing an early copy for fun around the table and nothing else I don't see how that is labor. This I'd grumble about but it's the kind of annoyance we deal with. I'm talking about the god drat bespoke tome.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:31
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Out of curiosity, I will regularly pay upwards of $20 on itch for a PDF, that isn't illustrated, that clearly hasn't been playtested, and looks like the layout was done on Word. Should we expect more from the Walt loving Disney Corporation? Absolutely. But as a consumer, $10 for a trade paperback with full color illustrations from a veteran designer? That doesn't sound to crazy to me. Edit: But yeah, the variant covers are hilarious.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:41
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Outsourcing stages of your product development to your own customers has been a thing for a long time now and honestly my surprise is only that it took this long for RPGs to catch on to the trend. The print book is the part that's still an aberration (and it is such because RPG players are sentimental about printed books): the ability to release an unfinished product and then endlessly patch it post-release was enabled by widespread internet access in the early to mid 1990s. With the advent of social media, journalism has also bought into this model by leaning on twitter to provide the research that used to cost money, putting a generation of serious journalists out of work too. Wikipedia pioneered the model for encyclopedia and reference. There's plenty more examples. I know there's game writers here: pay attention. If you switch to a pure digital delivery model, you can provide the bones of a product, and then get your customers to pay a premium to finish it for you, and then maintain it for you.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:58
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FishFood posted:A really tightly designed tactical RPG with high but fair difficulty and abilities you lose on death (maybe on cards?) would be super rad but difficult to pull off and I would be truly shocked if anything like that was released.
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Dec 23, 2021 06:04
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Kai Tave posted:I agree that there's a lot about The Dark Souls Experience both gameplaywise and storywise that does not translate well to the usual TRPG experience, which is why I expect it to basically be a thematic reskin. I admit I'm not even really sure what a Dark Souls RPG campaign even looks like...the games all feature you as a single mute blank slate just wandering around and piecing together fragmentary lore while fighting monsters, which is simultaneously so barebones I'm not sure what you hang an entire TRPG off of and so generic as a concept you could do it with hundreds of existing RPGs. Yeah, you're right, and like everyone was saying before me, I don't expect any interesting work to be done out of this. It'll be a D&D alike or a straight 5e clone where you resurrect with some penalty when you die and there's an estus-like reusable healing system, and maybe they'll pay out for someone to draw some spoopy-looking mutants and zombies for the monster section of the book. There's room in pen and paper games for the high concepts the Dark Souls games play with: memory, decay, entropy, and repetition, but it's not something I'm betting a random licensed game doing much on. KingKalamari posted:Can I just take a moment to express how sick to death I am of the whole "Grim and gritty" fantasy aesthetic? There's nothing wrong with it in and of itself, I just feel like the market is completely oversaturated with it. I'd say that the Souls games themselves have a particular kind of dark fantasy aesthetic that's rooted in Berserk's visuals and other Japanese horror and fantasy in a way that's distinct from American/British takes, but it gets missed a lot when it gets adapted. For instance, I like most of the visual updates to the Demon's Souls PS5 remake, but a lot of the monster designs just feel... off in how they were translated. There's something unconventional about the original designs that was lost. This isn't me saying the Souls visual style is better or anything, just that it's going for something different than like Warhammer Fantasy.
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Dec 23, 2021 07:45
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The closest I've seen western dark rpg came to emulating Dark Souls visuals would likely be Symbaroum. But it's less about similar art style but more about it evoking the feelings of loneliness, melancholy, passage of time and so on.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:00
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The best way to emulate Dark Souls is to have the player's read a page from the dictionary every time they die, before they can get back to playing. This perfectly emulates the corpse runs which the "git gud" types claim is core to the experience. But really a lot of what makes Dark Souls work is just gear porn, so pump out a lot of equipment with a paragraph or two of flavour text each, this would probably also help sell it to the bathroom readers too.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:06
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A Dark Souls RPG should in theory work similarly to a Monster Hunter RPG. The focus should be 90% on cool boss fights with big monsters, and various upkeep things in between. Are there any RPGs that do that? I'm following Relic which heavily leans towards Monster Hunter/Shadow of the Colossus.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:23
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Bottom Liner posted:A Dark Souls RPG should in theory work similarly to a Monster Hunter RPG. The focus should be 90% on cool boss fights with big monsters, and various upkeep things in between. Bosses are only a part of the appeal of souls games though (and personally, the much lesser part of the appeal)
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Dec 23, 2021 08:36
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Hel posted:The best way to emulate Dark Souls is to have the player's read a page from the dictionary every time they die, before they can get back to playing. This perfectly emulates the corpse runs which the "git gud" types claim is core to the experience. Strong disagree. With a few exceptions of some endgame weapons, soulsgames are usually opposite of gear porn, you find the weapon with the animations and stat scaling you like/need and then upgrade and keep it. Armor is largely the same with staying in your weight class/swapping between fights. But it's not about going out and finding that +1 sword.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:39
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Bottom Liner posted:A Dark Souls RPG should in theory work similarly to a Monster Hunter RPG. The focus should be 90% on cool boss fights with big monsters, and various upkeep things in between. See this is the thing, Dark Souls means different things to different people: I would say that a DS game would be 90 dungeon crawler, avoiding traps and ambushes and looking for secrets with only rarely having big boss fights. Because it's basically action-Wizardry which was a way to do dungeoncrawls on computers. Doing a DS TTRPG is just coming back to the origin point but with several generations of copy decay. It would be better to do what people say and look at what inspired the things you care about in DS, whether that's Berserk, mythology or giant robot anime.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:39
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Fragged Aeternum exists. Although it's more Bloodborne than Dark Souls.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:41
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Andrast posted:Bosses are only a part of the appeal of souls games though (and personally, the much lesser part of the appeal) Yeah, I just don't know how much of the atmosphere and exploration can translate to a TTRPG in ways that don't already exist and mostly fall on the GM to make work.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:45
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Coolness Averted posted:Strong disagree. With a few exceptions of some endgame weapons, soulsgames are usually opposite of gear porn, you find the weapon with the animations and stat scaling you like/need and then upgrade and keep it. Isn't tons of meticulously described weapons with only minor variations within each class that allow the players to pick which one they think is the coolest, the definition of gear porn. Sounds like Dark Souls to me. I'm thinking of the Shadowrun/Cyberpunk catalogues that were 60 pages of weapon lists and their fake brands and history.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:47
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Speaking of video games turned into TTRPGs, Mike Pondsmith/R Talsorian recently did a full Witcher adaptation. Was it any good? Did it capture the nature of the books/game/concept?
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Dec 23, 2021 08:49
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CitizenKeen posted:Yeah, that I totally get. But I find "we slapped a different .jpeg on the cover" to be a very comic-book kind of thing to do. Yeah, this is a huge part of the business model for them. Pretty harmless, just pre order the cover you prefer!
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Dec 23, 2021 11:41
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Variant covers also just result in more comic book artists being paid. Unless you're someone obsessive who just has to collect every variant of every issue (why?), it's really not a negative practice.
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Dec 23, 2021 12:04
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Magpie made a Dungeon World supplement that makes no bones about being Dark Souls with the serial numbers filed off. Its called The Cold Ruins of Lastlife. I haven't had chance to play it but it has some pretty good and very Soulsy ideas in it, as well as a broad cast of antagonistic forces that you can mix and match to make different campaigns each time. They're all trying to destroy or further ruin the world in suitably over the top ways. Each one brings a specific locale into the game and it leans hard into the Dark Souls 2 thing of the world fitting together in ways that don't necessarily make sense. I have zero interest in a Steamforged RPG because (1) lol at their board game version of Dark Souls and (2) gently caress them for killing Guild Ball and blaming the players for it.
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Dec 23, 2021 12:17
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Tarnop posted:(2) gently caress them for killing Guild Ball and blaming the players for it. Wait what? I thought Guild Ball had been retired because they felt it had run its course. What happened?
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Dec 23, 2021 12:52
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Ego Trip posted:Fragged Aeternum exists. Although it's more Bloodborne than Dark Souls. yeah pretty much take any given tactics-focused RPG and make sure it actually has good rules for a) solos, b) traps, c) defensive Interrupt-style powers and you're 90% of the way there the only reason this is difficult at all is that they all loving use D&D instead
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Dec 23, 2021 13:07
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They sent out an article saying that the reason why the game was not popular was due to how competitive players played the game: “ Be careful what you wish for. We set out to make the cleanest, most balanced miniatures game you could play at that time. And we achieved this hands down, flat out, nailed it! Guild Ball truly was a competitive player’s dream. It rewarded player skill and experience, with a very flat probability curve to minimize variance. The competitive scene grew and grew. But this ended up hurting the lifespan of the game. Guild Ball became the type of game where you win your first game (demo) and then lose the next 100 games. When matched against a lesser skilled or inexperienced opponent, a better player would simply win the vast majority of games. As the competitive scene began to dominate, the design space for wilder, more ‘fun’ elements began to shrink. New minis were either ‘OP’ or ‘trash-tier’ the second they were announced. Why take a new model when model XYZ already filled the role? The style of gameplay changed to low-risk, ultra-conservative play where the ball was often deliberately side-lined.” They deleted that article now btw after the backlash.
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Dec 23, 2021 13:09
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I thought Bleak Spirit did a good job at emulating the Dark Souls "lone traveler drifting through broken ruins on a nebulous quest" feeling in a storygame format.
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Dec 23, 2021 13:30
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Wait, the Dark Souls RPG people are the Guild Ball guys? lmao yeah that's a double write-off, no thanks.
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Dec 23, 2021 13:44
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Antivehicular posted:I thought Bleak Spirit did a good job at emulating the Dark Souls "lone traveler drifting through broken ruins on a nebulous quest" feeling in a storygame format. This is a cool sounding game that I'd never heard of, thanks for mentioning it
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Dec 23, 2021 13:46
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Dark Souls RPG will be 5e with "XP loss on death" and permanent stat drain attacks.
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Dec 23, 2021 14:02
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Dark Souls RPG will be 5e with "XP loss on death" and permanent stat drain attacks. 5E plus Blighttown.
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Dec 23, 2021 14:03
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