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dwarf74 posted:Oh did PFO finally get the plug pulled? It was supposed to be shut down in November, 2021. I can't verify that because the shutdown announcement links to the PFO website, which my browser is currently flagging as a security risk, so presumably it's for real dead now. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Feb 24, 2022 |
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Feb 24, 2022 15:15
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:It was supposed to be shut down in November, 2021. Did many people go for the buy-in level where they'd own their own (apparently destructible) bar?
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Feb 24, 2022 15:33
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Dawgstar posted:Did many people go for the buy-in level where they'd own their own (apparently destructible) bar?  $30,000 worth of beautiful fake real estate, lost like tears in [CONNECTION TERMINATED, RETURNING TO LOBBY]
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Feb 24, 2022 16:32
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That Old Tree posted:$30,000 worth of beautiful fake real estate, lost like tears in [CONNECTION TERMINATED, RETURNING TO LOBBY] Wow! FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS to hang on the virtual wall!
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Feb 24, 2022 16:33
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See this is what I mean when I say there's a stupid amount of money people are willing to dump into the hobby. An unobscured channel to deliver whale-money to creators would probably do wonders for the hobby. Imagine if designers didn't have to worry about how they'd pay for gas to get home.
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Feb 24, 2022 16:41
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Yeah if only Fellowship had pitched an MMO
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Feb 24, 2022 16:50
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I just noticed that six months of upkeep costs were included. Did the game expect you to pay in-game resources to keep your $5000 tavern maintained or what?
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Feb 24, 2022 17:01
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Leraika posted:I just noticed that six months of upkeep costs were included. Did the game expect you to pay in-game resources to keep your $5000 tavern maintained or what? "In-game resources"? No, you'd pay actual USD cash rent for the place.
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Feb 24, 2022 17:09
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Cassius Belli posted:"In-game resources"? No, you'd pay actual USD cash rent for the place. is this actually true or speculation
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Feb 24, 2022 17:23
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IIRC failing to pay your upkeep means your building would not be protected against destruction or theft. You could just lose your big fancy house because you were a day late on your mortgage. Immersion!
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Feb 24, 2022 17:30
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admanb posted:It's kind of impossible to guess since one of the big reasons 5E is as popular as it is is because of Critical Role, but I do feel like if they had stuck with Pathfinder they would've hit the point where even managing their very normally built characters and enemies would be way too complex to make a good show. Even with 5E I'm surprised by how much viewers engage with combat-focused sessions, but 5E combat (with players that are active and know their rules) is speedy compared to Pathfinder. I do feel like being associated with D&D's very recognizable brand helped with CR's marketing. It's definitely not an even symbiosis as I feel like CR did a lot more to boost 5e than 5e did to boost CR, but at the same time I think associating itself with the most recognizable name in the tabletop industry was a contributing factor in CR hitting the big time.
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Feb 24, 2022 17:55
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KingKalamari posted:I do feel like being associated with D&D's very recognizable brand helped with CR's marketing. It's definitely not an even symbiosis as I feel like CR did a lot more to boost 5e than 5e did to boost CR, but at the same time I think associating itself with the most recognizable name in the tabletop industry was a contributing factor in CR hitting the big time. I don't know if it's about 5E per se as much as it is by Dungeons & Dragons, the multimedia, decades-old brand, that WotC owned. Had synergy with Stranger Things, and other vectors it wouldn't have had otherwise.
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Feb 24, 2022 17:58
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't know if it's about 5E per se as much as it is by Dungeons & Dragons, the multimedia, decades-old brand, that WotC owned. Had synergy with Stranger Things, and other vectors it wouldn't have had otherwise. Yeah, that's what I meant: Being associated with Dungeons & Dragons, as a brand, is what helped the series hit it big. The actual edition of the game they're using is immaterial, but given the symbiotic relationship between WotC and the CR people they were going to gravitate to teh most recent edition regardless as that's the one WotC wants to push.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:03
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moths posted:See this is what I mean when I say there's a stupid amount of money people are willing to dump into the hobby. Yeah, except I would say most individual people simply wouldn't be able to create the comical cult of personality/branding needed to get consistent whale money especially on the design side. I think a show I like FatT does extremely well at like 4k patrons and ~25k a month. They seem like an outlier, and then you have CR is an outlier among outliers as far as making absolute poo poo tons of money. And those two are entertainment companies first. Which at the very least there are proven models for consistent income when doing stuff like streaming and personality and entertainment based podcasts nowadays, their gimmick just happens to be based around using ttrpgs as the medium. And the Design side is more dire. It's doable, as there are plenty of Patreons for like art assets, and content for games but it's just that that the people who actually would pay for and use those resources or games is just such a much smaller pool than people who would listen to a fun well done podcast. Like I generally GM for my various friend groups, And I'm probably the only person who would ever end up buying a game, or resources to run those games out of the like 5 or 6 people who are sitting at that table, vs others who might be interested in people telling them a good story. It's so hard for designers artists etc etc to get popular enough to be able to sustain creation and writing on their own from just people supporting them on Patreon, without going hard into becoming a "personality", and not everyone is built for that. The problem on the design and creation side at large companies is generally like it is everywhere else. So much overhead from CEOs and shareholders who don't do anything creatively other than own the IP, and they are just about maximizing and making money for themselves, not the people working for them, who they just view as a cost to them. Bleh this post ended up rambly as gently caress.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:04
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't know if it's about 5E per se as much as it is by Dungeons & Dragons, the multimedia, decades-old brand, that WotC owned. Had synergy with Stranger Things, and other vectors it wouldn't have had otherwise. Yeah I would say it being D&D made it easier for people to instantly grasp what was happening on a basic level, but the main draw of CR was the fact that it had very popular and well known and beloved voice actors telling a story. It being D&D something that almost everyone has probably at least heard of even if it was through things making fun of it, cleared the hurdle of "what the gently caress is going on" Critical Role also predates Stranger Things, But yeah Critical Role, Stranger Things all massively increased D&D's mainstream appeal to wildly different audiences than would usually be looking into tabletop games from like 2016 when Stranger Things came out and CR had a year under it and started to really take off.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:26
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One of the bigger things to mainstream D&D was ironically 4e. The edition war was partially over the influx of new, young and diverse players into what stereotypical grogs considered "theirs."Dexo posted:Yeah, except I would say most individual people simply wouldn't be able to create the comical cult of personality/branding needed to get consistent whale money especially on the design side. Yeah that's definitely an issue. Plus nearly nobody outside of this subforum gives a gently caress about design quality. At best you get people happy about a game's politics - stuff like diversity and representation. Which is cool and good, but leads to the notion that since 5e shaved off some racism it's even more the best way to RPG than ever.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:40
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It was impressive how almost all of the people in my scene who got into 4e through Encounters and Lair Assault just abandoned D&D completely during the "D&D Next" development process.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:03
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Leraika posted:is this actually true or speculation Semi-informed shitposting, sorry. The initial intent with Pathfinder Online (per Goblinworks blog, 2012) was that you would pay your 'base rent' in coin (in-game currency), but premium upgrades to that (various building decorations and enhancements) would need to be in something they initially called "skymetal bits" (microtransaction currency). In 2013 they mentioned that building upkeep would "cost money" but didn't clarify further. Like any business (except Pathfinder Online itself, it seems) the tavern would take in some amount of income to help pay for itself - there were some development notes about this in 2017, but I don't know how it worked. In practical business terms, though, why wouldn't you charge real-dollar rent, or something adjacent to that? You have a customer who was willing to drop $5,000 on a virtual bar, based on at most a tech demo and a brand name. That player isn't going to want some nondescript, base-level building; they're going to want something special with upgrades (and their associated maintenance costs). You don't want to kill the goose but charging them a little bit keeps them invested and bringing other players in. As with all MMOs this probably evolved over the years. The interesting thing to me is how badly-managed some of the whale-farming looks. Some of the intermediate lore and world rewards (having various items designed and named after your character, statues placed, etc) did have their prices go up, but those six whales got exactly nothing special for their $5000 Kickstarter pledges that they couldn't have gotten a year and a half later at the same price when Goblinworks opened the premium shop. The $1000 "alpha tester" people got one month extra playtime over the $100 "early access" crew.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:04
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Green Intern posted:IIRC failing to pay your upkeep means your building would not be protected against destruction or theft. You could just lose your big fancy house because you were a day late on your mortgage. Immersion! Nothing says realism like my paladin of Iomedae having to worry about refinancing. Other MMOs are cowards.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:22
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Green Intern posted:IIRC failing to pay your upkeep means your building would not be protected against destruction or theft. You could just lose your big fancy house because you were a day late on your mortgage. Immersion! There's probably a fascinating book waiting to be written about the reoccurring obsession with this sort of "realism" in MMOs; so many games have had this fantasy of being some kind of all-immersive life simulator and almost all of them have failed, quite often hilariously and spectacularly. It's a well that designers can't seem to stop coming back to, no matter how many bloated corpses are lying around it.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:43
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Warthur posted:At the same time, the market increasingly demands hardcover rulebooks, full colour artwork, and all sorts of other trimmings. The OSR and Zinequest and small indie pamphlets do a brave job of carving out material with a more humble aesthetic, but such products don't get to sit at the top table. Adverse selection. Everyone's fine with the DIY-friendly ethos if it's producing Fragged Empires and Blades in the Darks, but for every one of those there's like five bland heartbreakers with generic rules and two or three Shadowrun Anarchies. And even some of those which might look promising on a read will then break immediately at the table because they haven't been playtested outside a small group. Of course, WotC love this, because every time a table tries a non D&D game and it flames out, that's one more set of players who feel D&D is the only safe bet. It doesn't even need D&D to be a good game. Its popularity breaks the ties and groups typically can't flame out of D&D because there's nothing to flame out to. And so you get the same effect as used car showrooms spending tons of money on fancy buildings. It has nothing to do with the quality of the cars, but you can't drive the cars before buying; you can see the building. There's literally no way I can really see around it, because while some RPGs do offer try-before-you-buy, many player groups don't. Tulul posted:There's probably a fascinating book waiting to be written about the reoccurring obsession with this sort of "realism" in MMOs; so many games have had this fantasy of being some kind of all-immersive life simulator and almost all of them have failed, quite often hilariously and spectacularly. It's a well that designers can't seem to stop coming back to, no matter how many bloated corpses are lying down around it. Ah, yes, The Space Game and The Character Game. How stuck both markets are on those.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:44
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Tulul posted:There's probably a fascinating book waiting to be written about the reoccurring obsession with this sort of "realism" in MMOs; so many games have had this fantasy of being some kind of all-immersive life simulator and almost all of them have failed, quite often hilariously and spectacularly. It's a well that designers can't seem to stop coming back to, no matter how many bloated corpses are lying around it. IIRC, some players in the early planning stages of PFO were clamoring to have spells like Time Stop apply "for real" and wanted it to arrest all movement in the game save for the caster's for the spell's duration. Yes, rather than speeding up your attacks or movement or whatever like a normal MMO buff, instead literally every other player and NPC on the server would be frozen until the spell wore off. As funny as it is theoretically to imagine a group of trolls chain casting Time Stop to prevent the game from being played by anyone, from a game design standpoint...
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Feb 24, 2022 19:58
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I'm not really sold on the idea that the market demands AAA production values, based largely on how eveything in historical wargaming has had the production of a church bulletin since 1972. There's a level of expected art, and bad art stands out, but black cover Traveler is still one of the best choices in the industry's graphic design.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:06
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Tulul posted:There's probably a fascinating book waiting to be written about the reoccurring obsession with this sort of "realism" in MMOs; so many games have had this fantasy of being some kind of all-immersive life simulator and almost all of them have failed, quite often hilariously and spectacularly. It's a well that designers can't seem to stop coming back to, no matter how many bloated corpses are lying around it. It's not just MMOs, it's all of videogames. An emergent life simulator where you can also murder anyone you want is a recurring theme of video game design from Ultima to Valheim. MMOs just tend to take that and focus in on the player faction/world alteration aspects, like New World.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:19
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moths posted:I'm not really sold on the idea that the market demands AAA production values, based largely on how eveything in historical wargaming has had the production of a church bulletin since 1972. I literally just got my copy of SWN offset in, and it's as high quality and shiny as any D&D or Pathfinder book I own. Crawford makes a small budget go a long way by using specific focus pieces of art for important ideas or concepts, and then using what look to be either public domain or easily licensed starfield pictures as the border, swapping them from chapter to chapter to make it easily usable as a reference tool. This book was like $80 USD, and he's sold them quite well and mostly profitably (I think some shipping rate increases during the KS cut into the profit) and they'd fit just fine on the shelf next to my WotC or Pathfinder books. And he's a one-man brand/shop, so it's not impossible, but he's been able to do this because of years of reliable, quality products both on and off kickstarter.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:19
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Plus you have a bunch of different zine aesthetics that aren’t doing Avatar money but pull down five figures a Kickstarter. Through Ultan’s Door is incredibly well put together for a homemade game supplement.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:22
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Halloween Jack posted:It was impressive how almost all of the people in my scene who got into 4e through Encounters and Lair Assault just abandoned D&D completely during the "D&D Next" development process. There was a pretty impressive amount of community support before then, with tons of material shipped to stores to support them running Encounters and Lair Assault. Next really started killing that off, if I remember right, with fewer and fewer materials shipped out and fewer enticements to get DMs.
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Feb 24, 2022 21:50
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Plus, at least the printing I have of Blades in the Dark is a premium hardcover. It might be A5 instead of A4 (or letter instead of legal? It's about one size unit smaller than the D&D books), but I wouldn't call it DIY.
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Feb 24, 2022 21:56
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I'm pretty sure that was working as intended. Mearls was exposing his brain-meat to lethal levels of OSR forums and operating under the assumption that what D&D really needed was to get back to the basement when mom would bring your pals PB&J and Tang. Part of his Making D&D Great Again was demonstrating loyalty to assholes like ZS and that other one, as well as publically endorsing poo poo lines like "shouting hands back on." It might not have been like a straight-up purge, but there was explicitly nothing in the Next playtest for the new 4e kids. I don't think Warlord even made the cut.
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Feb 24, 2022 21:59
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Tulul posted:There's probably a fascinating book waiting to be written about the reoccurring obsession with this sort of "realism" in MMOs; so many games have had this fantasy of being some kind of all-immersive life simulator and almost all of them have failed, quite often hilariously and spectacularly. It's a well that designers can't seem to stop coming back to, no matter how many bloated corpses are lying around it. It's a pretty reasonable first draft thought for persistent multiplayer spaces with upgrade mechanics in them. You have to find some way to drain constantly accumulating resources out of the player base. Like any reward-adjacent mechanism in games, of course it was taken over by gambling schemes.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:05
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Darwinism posted:There was a pretty impressive amount of community support before then, with tons of material shipped to stores to support them running Encounters and Lair Assault. Next really started killing that off, if I remember right, with fewer and fewer materials shipped out and fewer enticements to get DMs. Those programs were so great at bringing people in to LGS play, and can't possibly have cost all that much - most of the art was recycled and I know someone who wrote for them so I know the pay wasn't that high. Presumably everything looks bad in terms of ROI compared to "spend ten seconds applying an already-written alternate border filter to Magic cards and ship them to LGSes," and that's part of why they stopped, though even then I wonder if just the logistics on the MTG support don't cost basically as much as creating the encounters stuff and then letting people download it themselves.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:15
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In what way is this Encounters and Lair Assault stuff for 4E distinct from the Adventurers` League organized play they then set up for 5E, and still have running?
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Feb 24, 2022 23:19
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Absurd Alhazred posted:In what way is this Encounters and Lair Assault stuff for 4E distinct from the Adventurers` League organized play they then set up for 5E, and still have running? Encounters was a steady feed of new exclusive content pushed out to LGSes that was designed around weekly play, structured around that kind of pacing and so forth. My recollection was that it was free to the LGSes, though I might be misremembering, it was a while ago. (I can't remember the details of Lair Assault exactly, other than that it was focused on the tactical challenge so the encounters were harder and opportunities for roleplaying less.) People also got stuff for participating and I think there was some kind of tracking on it? Unless they've seriously changed the AL organized play since last I looked into it, they provide nothing for it - you or the DM has to buy whatever it is that they want to run. It's also got a ton of restrictions on what character options people can use (again unless that's recently changed), something like PHB plus contents of a single book only, or the like. Also they stopped counting it towards store metrics or having any kind of player signup, so there's no reason from either the store perspective or the player perspective to prefer it (and from the player perspective, "your character is portable" is pretty useless whereas "you can't use all the options" is really annoying). As a result I never even bothered to run AL in my shop - the volunteer DMs all felt like there wasn't any reason to have the restrictions given there wasn't much reward for it, and no one even asks if my in-store play is AL or not, whereas people specifically wanted Encounters frequently.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:27
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moths posted:I'm not really sold on the idea that the market demands AAA production values, based largely on how eveything in historical wargaming has had the production of a church bulletin since 1972. I just picked up a copy of Avalon Hill's Waterloo and I can't believe how accurate that description is.
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Feb 25, 2022 01:37
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Ultiville posted:Encounters was a steady feed of new exclusive content pushed out to LGSes that was designed around weekly play, structured around that kind of pacing and so forth. My recollection was that it was free to the LGSes, though I might be misremembering, it was a while ago. (I can't remember the details of Lair Assault exactly, other than that it was focused on the tactical challenge so the encounters were harder and opportunities for roleplaying less.) People also got stuff for participating and I think there was some kind of tracking on it? Yeah, I remember the 4E DMs getting actual 4E books via DM rewards back in the day, compared to now where DM rewards lets you do stuff like.... start above first level, a thing 4E organized play just let people do.
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Feb 25, 2022 01:38
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Ultiville posted:
They did change the rules on Characters creation, like a year or two ago. DM still has to buy AL stuff tho.
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Feb 25, 2022 03:52
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Dexo posted:They did change the rules on Characters creation, like a year or two ago. Fair enough, everyone's been happy with not doing it so I wasn't sure about that. That said, the rewards for running it and the cool season feel were the big thing IMO. In 4E the store could report it through WER and get metrics value for it which was great, and the players got cool promo stuff for playing in it. Plus you had sort of a feeling of like following a TV show or something, since everyone was doing the adventure at about the same pace globally, which I thought was really cool. Now it's just you buy an adventure and you can run it but it's not at all the same feel, which I think is why it doesn't seem to drive in-store play the way the 4E era stuff did. D&D being bigger sort of counterbalances it, but I remember getting calls specifically asking if we ran Encounters/Lair Assault during that era, whereas now everyone just asks about D&D play in general.
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Feb 25, 2022 04:04
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Ultiville posted:Fair enough, everyone's been happy with not doing it so I wasn't sure about that. That said, the rewards for running it and the cool season feel were the big thing IMO. In 4E the store could report it through WER and get metrics value for it which was great, and the players got cool promo stuff for playing in it. Plus you had sort of a feeling of like following a TV show or something, since everyone was doing the adventure at about the same pace globally, which I thought was really cool. Now it's just you buy an adventure and you can run it but it's not at all the same feel, which I think is why it doesn't seem to drive in-store play the way the 4E era stuff did. D&D being bigger sort of counterbalances it, but I remember getting calls specifically asking if we ran Encounters/Lair Assault during that era, whereas now everyone just asks about D&D play in general. Do you think this is something someone else can steal away, or is having the footprint of THE D&D an important starting point? Like, Pathfinder has the Society, Free League started a new Organized Play of its own, are they anywhere closer to that?
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Feb 25, 2022 04:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Do you think this is something someone else can steal away, or is having the footprint of THE D&D an important starting point? I think it's a thing that requires a critical mass that no one has in my tiny town, but that they might have elsewhere. My feeling on organized play is that it doesn't bring in totally new people all that often, but it's very good at getting people who are interested to engage, if you can get a critical mass in any given space to run it. If you aren't big enough that you'll have that critical mass many places, though, it becomes a much more significant investment because the benefit isn't spread all that far. I do think that if you want your organized play to be good you need both good ways to find places running it (like the old event locator through WOTC) and reasons that people should be excited about the official program.
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Feb 25, 2022 05:16
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Interesting. Thanks for the LGS perspective!
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Feb 25, 2022 05:19
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