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theironjef posted:I mean, I certainly didn't personally like that, but it wasn't something that I think I'd say backfired. It didn't backfire from a sales perspective, but the "no funny business" approach absolutely lowered the ceiling on the game's interactions between players. The whole philosophy of an encounter engaging the party got dumpstered. There you go edition warring seems like a hard reaction to a creative decision that lets players tune out / scroll Facebook until their initiative comes up. E: I'm charitably assuming a design goal was to make d&d more interesting to play. Otherwise stripping out player interaction didn't backfire. moths fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 23, 2022 |
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Mar 23, 2022 20:29
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A more verisimilitudinous approach would be to use a battletech-style system of hit points by hit location, with armour hit points, meat structural hit points, and organ slots. You could also up the realism by tracking heat buildup in heavier armour! wait, no, sfb.
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Mar 23, 2022 20:31
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NC Wyeth Death Cult posted:I honestly didn't know there were edition wars which is 100% on me because duh but I am only a tabletop miniature and board game grognard now. I worked in book, gaming/comic book and hobby stores throughout the early and mid 90s when second edition was queen and White Wolf was the domain of the dorky goth kids who'd come in and spend hours copying info out of the books. It felt like there was a period in the 80s and early 90s when the idea was to offer the tools for open world adventure through a couple books (but you COULD buy the second monster manual or GURPS CyberWar supplement) and the comment about little buckets reminded me how TSR suddenly released books that had subgroups of bards, etc. dozens of boxed world sets instead of a book. I saw the thread getting away from the early history and I guess I was trying to steer it back. So thank you everyone, I appreciate the knowledge. People have always been able to play the game with just the core books + errata, then and now. As a general rule, all D&D editions after the first have (1) released more setting (i.e. world-building) content and (2) given all characters more mechanical options (races, classes, subclasses, skills, feats, proficiencies, gear, and and and), and for non-spellcasters that's a huge increase in choice. The 4th edition of the game extended those choices into its centerpiece change, which was the introduction of uncharacteristically robust rules for combat on a map grid. D&D was always theoretically on a grid, though not in practice; 4e expected there to be a grid for the encounters, and it expected the encounters to be "fair." Everyone was angry about the change, angry about the often-baseless reactions to the change, and/or angry about the rancorous fighting itself. The D&D player base fractured. And so now we have 5th edition, the best 3rd edition and the third-best edition.
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Mar 23, 2022 20:32
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full battletech style HP for all, and when you lose your armor every hit you take has to end with you going 'ugh, my meat points!' like a video game character in an old beat em up
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Mar 23, 2022 20:37
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MockingQuantum posted:I was barely on the tailing edge of 2e so I sort of missed that wave anyway, but I'd say that was true of my group too once 3e came out (or 3.5e, can't remember exactly when we started playing). Everybody was pretty lukewarm on bog-standard fantasy, but the Eberron campaign setting got everybody fired up to play. I don't think I'd have ever gotten as deep into RPGs if it hadn't existed. 3e's publishing history is kind of weird and spasm-y, honestly. Basically WotC knew they didn't want to split themselves into a bunch of setting "buckets" and they were always kind of flailing around trying to find the most profitable thing to sell more of. That most profitable thing was player options, which started at a low hum (there's a series of 3.0 class splatbooks that starts in mid-2001) and then kept going throughout the edition until eventually petering out about a year before the end (with the last ones being I think drow of the underdark and complete champion). There was a definite publishing edict that EVERY book have new player options, including things that "should" be DM-only, like Monster Manuals or adventures. Adventures in particular didn't sell, and WotC stopped producing them as new products for years, from about 2001 until I'd guess 2005 with the release of Eberron. (I'm not checking exact dates for this post, just going off memories.) They expected third-party publishers would take up the slack, and the results were not what WotC wanted, so they got back into first-party adventures midway through 3.5 and they kept going from there. 3e also had more settings published by WotC than most people remember: there's Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Oriental Adventures (Rokugan), Ghostwalk, Eberron, and Dragonlance. The difference was that they didn't do prolonged support for any of these except FR and Eberron - the other ones got handed off to other companies or just died in the case of Ghostwalk. So WotC actually got to sell the most profitable book that sold the most (the core campaign setting) and wasn't responsible for the whole bucket. The year when everything felt like Eberron is mostly true. Basically, WotC didn't want to actually spam a bunch of actual Eberron supplements all at once so instead they did a number of core-line D&D books that were effectively Eberron books. Races of Eberron, despite the name, is actually a core line book with that trade dress that belongs to the pre-existing Races of series and straddles the line between fleshing out Eberron's races and also letting you add warforged to Faerun or a homebrew setting. The Monster Manual III is called "the Eberron Monster Manual" because it has the stats for a lot of variant and new monsters that were mentioned in the Eberron Campaign Setting but not given actual statistics, as well as containing new sections placing monsters in Eberron written by I believe Keith Baker (there's similar sections for the FR, but far less.) homullus posted:yikes People often forget to look at the 2e-3e transition/edition war stuff, but that's actually pretty interesting seeing how the culture of D&D's player base was dramatically changing and it's also pretty well documented. Check out the issues of Dragon from about May 1999 to December 2000, and then Google Groups or other places will have records of the old newsgroups.
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Mar 23, 2022 20:44
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90s Cringe Rock posted:A more verisimilitudinous approach would be to use a battletech-style system of hit points by hit location, with armour hit points, meat structural hit points, and organ slots. You could also up the realism by tracking heat buildup in heavier armour! You can do that with GURPS, too!  quote:[1] An attack that misses by 1 hits the torso instead. It's actually a remarkably elegant system, in that not using the hit location table at all is mechanically identical to attacking the torso, and in the same way the critical hit tables referenced here are designed to work both with and without actually using hit locations. But what if you want to use this system with a mech, you ask? Well, that's easy, you use the Vehicle Hit Locations table instead. 
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Mar 23, 2022 20:52
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GURPS 3e vehicles design sequence but it's a human fighter ok so let's start with the skin, what kind of square footage are we talking here
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Mar 23, 2022 20:57
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90s Cringe Rock posted:GURPS 3e vehicles design sequence but it's a human fighter If you want something slightly more modern, GURPS 4e Spaceships has had so many doodads and gewgaws added to it that (mecha systems, things to represent biological space monsters, etc) you can basically do the same thing there. You might have to extrapolate down to SM+0, but that shouldn't be too hard.
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Mar 23, 2022 21:17
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Arivia posted:3e's publishing history is kind of weird and spasm-y, honestly. Basically WotC knew they didn't want to split themselves into a bunch of setting "buckets" and they were always kind of flailing around trying to find the most profitable thing to sell more of. That most profitable thing was player options, which started at a low hum (there's a series of 3.0 class splatbooks that starts in mid-2001) and then kept going throughout the edition until eventually petering out about a year before the end (with the last ones being I think drow of the underdark and complete champion). There was a definite publishing edict that EVERY book have new player options, including things that "should" be DM-only, like Monster Manuals or adventures. There were actually two different waves of classbooks. There were "X and X" books that had two classes smashed together that were the 3.0 content (Sword and Fist for fighters and monks, tome and blood for wizards and sorcerers, etc) then after 3.5 they came out with the "Complete" Stuff. The "Complete" series started out... bad, but got better as it went along until it got *Much* worse with complete Psionic and complete champion.. i think there was a complete scoundrel and complete..wilderness? or something?
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Mar 23, 2022 21:36
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Kurieg posted:There were actually two different waves of classbooks. There were "X and X" books that had two classes smashed together that were the 3.0 content (Sword and Fist for fighters and monks, tome and blood for wizards and sorcerers, etc) then after 3.5 they came out with the "Complete" Stuff. Nope, no Complete Wilderness. The "wild classes" got Masters of the Wild in the 3.0 wave as you're calling it, and then ranger and barbarian were in Complete Warrior, and druid was in Complete Divine/Champion. The biggest omission was a second Complete book for martial/fighter-y types, which added to existing accusations of 3e being super biased in favour of spellcasters among the player base.
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Mar 23, 2022 21:42
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I think they were supposed to have been addressed in complete adventurer, which had more of a roguey or multiclassing bent than others. It did suck though because the 2nd arcane book was actually real good, the 2nd divine book was not.
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Mar 23, 2022 21:46
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Don't forget how the errata/FAQ for Tome of Battle stopped midway through becuase some clown had copy/pasted text from Complete Mage instead.
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Mar 23, 2022 21:46
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Didn't one of the fighter books enrage a lot of the player base for the reason it gave fighters stuff to do other than stand in the way and hit things?
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Mar 24, 2022 00:22
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Dawgstar posted:Didn't one of the fighter books enrage a lot of the player base for the reason it gave fighters stuff to do other than stand in the way and hit things? Book of Nine Swords gave Fighters cool techniques and disciplines and some people couldn’t handle “sword magic”
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Mar 24, 2022 00:24
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Yeah, that's the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, AKA, the "book of weeaboo fightin' magic" being talked about. It wasn't even stuff directly given to fighters (without spending feats to get very limited access), it was a set of three new classes that were various flavors of stab-magic guys.
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Mar 24, 2022 00:26
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KingKalamari posted:The incongruity I always like is the segment of AD&D grogs who cite Conan as the tone they're going for in their game while also being really insistent that slow healing over time is essential to the experience. Because we all remember the stories where Conan was laid up in traction for six weeks after getting stabbed, right? The thing is that AD&D was never gritty. You could recover from 1hp in a month and that if you had a ridiculous number of hp; it takes a marathon runner about a month of light activity to recover. And at 1hp you were at full competence. D&D has always been the case of no wound consequences, automatic healing, easy magic, and resurrections happening. All more recent versions do is move it more towards the extreme it was already at. And 5e does one thing really well, but it's an important one for popularity. People can, with almost no system mastery (and thus minimal barrier to entry), make a massively diverse range of characters while almost never being buried in options and while being able to lean in to archetypes. Subclasses allow for a massive amount of variety while not overwhelming by top level choices (i.e. extra classes); it's excellent chunking.
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Mar 24, 2022 04:29
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neonchameleon posted:The thing is that AD&D was never gritty. You could recover from 1hp in a month and that if you had a ridiculous number of hp; it takes a marathon runner about a month of light activity to recover. And at 1hp you were at full competence. D&D has always been the case of no wound consequences, automatic healing, easy magic, and resurrections happening. All more recent versions do is move it more towards the extreme it was already at. The problem is that since 3.5-style multiclassing is a thing again, classes don't get their neat poo poo until levels 17 and up. Unless they're spellcasters. Green Intern posted:Book of Nine Swords gave Fighters cool techniques and disciplines and some people couldn’t handle “sword magic” https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/kurieg/tome-of-battle-the-book-of-nine-swords/ I reviewed it here a while back if anyone is curious about it.
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Mar 24, 2022 05:19
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theironjef posted:What developments do you think I was referring to? I meant hiring Zak and Tarnowski as consultants, which has resulted in some embarassed backpedaling as they scrambled to pull their tarnished names out of printings. I found it darkly funny when they pulled the names from newer printings as if that fixed the problem. If someone wrote a scientific paper based on some racist crap like "The Bell Curve," they would not improve the article by simply removing that citation from their list of sources. The paper is still racist and they are just trying badly to cover it up.
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Mar 24, 2022 07:27
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theironjef posted:Every version of D&D has so far been the most financially successful version of D&D. Not strictly true; 5e outsold 4e which outsold 3e which outsold 2e, but as far as I know, 5e hasn't yet outsold 1e. And of course nothing ever came close to the various iterations of the D&D Basic Set, which collectively sold almost three million copies from the original late-70s Red Box through the early-90s Black Box. I don't doubt that D&D as a brand is bringing in more money now than it ever did in its 80s heyday, but the rulebooks themselves are only a fraction of that.
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Mar 24, 2022 11:16
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This is a hot take that no one asked for, but honestly I think talking about sales numbers of various editions only serves to further Edition Wars. I don't conflate profitability with quality and you shouldn't either.
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Mar 24, 2022 11:56
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Froghammer posted:This is a hot take that no one asked for, but honestly I think talking about sales numbers of various editions only serves to further Edition Wars. I don't conflate profitability with quality and you shouldn't either. While I agree with you in principle, sales are a decent stand-in for popularity, which does matter somewhat for a social activity like RPGs.
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Mar 24, 2022 12:23
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gtrmp posted:On top of that, most of the material they were producing at the height of campaign setting I guess a similar principle worked in the 3.X OGL glut, except Wizards realised that instead of taking up all the space themselves they could let third parties take the space up with shovelware.
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Mar 24, 2022 12:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Nah, things like TSR West, TSR's utterly disastrous attempt to form a comics company spinning out of their desire to monetize Buck Rogers, happened under her watch. (The RPG sold abysmally as well, regardless of its quality.) As a similar example: sure, the content code came in under Williams, but TSR already was drawing up plans to tone down their content in response to religious objections before she even joined the company. (Peterson documents this in Game Wizards.) I'm not saying Williams made no mistakes, I am saying that the mistakes she made are more or less literally the exact same sorts of mistakes that TSR was making before she was even in the company, so blaming her for the death of TSR but acting like the Blumes or Gygax or anyone else in TSR management would have done differently is a stretch.
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Mar 24, 2022 12:49
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Just as D&D created a template for games which we're still struggling to get away from, TSR created a template for game designers running companies incredibly badly which we're etc etc
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Mar 24, 2022 13:15
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Warthur posted:There were definitely a good many products which could have happily been slim books but were bloated out into being boxed sets (with all the extra production costs that entails). I do wonder if it was a policy of monopolising shelf space and literally crowding out other games by making bulky boxes. Too many of the actual boxes were far larger than their contents really merited, leading to a lot of empty space inside the box which makes storing them a pain to stop them collapsing too. I stash a lot of other books inside my Planescape/Ravenloft/Dark Sun boxes to save space on my own shelves, and it literally halves the amount of space that stuff takes up, but obviously game shops don't have that option - so anyone stocking the full D&D line (as most shops would be expected to) would have to scale back on space for competitors.
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Mar 24, 2022 13:29
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Box sets also, theoretically, could be sold in toy stores - which is how D&D originally got such massive market penetration in the first place.
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Mar 24, 2022 14:21
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but also they're not books and you have to pay vat
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Mar 24, 2022 14:22
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From the Debate & Discussion TTRPG thread:90s Cringe Rock posted:Hey so you know Fabled Lands, a cool series of open-world gamebooks? By the guy who wrote Heart of Ice, which I thought was the best gamebook ever written? 
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Mar 24, 2022 14:49
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Mors Rattus posted:Box sets also, theoretically, could be sold in toy stores - which is how D&D originally got such massive market penetration in the first place. And there were more bookstores with game sections in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I bought all my D&D books and my first Warhammer Fantasy and Nick Lund's Fantasy Battle box sets at the B Dalton's I worked at and there were two bookstores and a hobby store at the mall I worked at + they added a comic book store later. So four outlets selling AD&D in one suburban wasteland.
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Mar 24, 2022 14:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:From the Debate & Discussion TTRPG thread: What thread?
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Mar 24, 2022 14:55
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Warthur posted:But that is, again, an example of Williams repeating a pattern which was already established in TSR - the attempts to do spin-off companies to pursue other media started under Gary, and indeed was his pet project which he prioritised over the entire rest of the company. Yeah I was sleeping on that comment but seriously: TSR West - sure, bad, but they did put out a few products, unlike TSR's "media" division which was just them renting out a hollywood mansion and throwing parties. Burning bridges with Marvel/DC or whatever was really bad, but Gary also bending over backwards to burn bridges with literally every single other game company in existence and every game convention in existence (and writing OP-Eds where he basically told people who were sore over this poor treatment to eat poo poo and smile) was on the same level, honestly it was potentially worse. Randomhouse bullshit was really bad but Gary and the Blumes did it too Hiring dipshit family members who were utter failures at doing the basic job is also a pre-williams TSR thing There is not a single thing Williams did that was bad wasn't already being done by TSR, including the petulant legal threats and everything, people forget that Tim Kask smugly telling people that TSR "legally owned" the concept of character levels was a thing She also did some things that were good: - Dragon Magazine stopped being a platform for the president of the company to scream about things they had decided were personal slights against them, in general, TSR messaging became far more corporate, which is better since it's not like Gary was doing kindly fireside chats - she knew how to talk to the banks and put an end to the cartoonish levels of spending they were doing - she continued Kevin Blume's work at un-burning every single bridge there was wrt Gary's tantrums and grudges and was generally more successful - the blunting of DnD's edge meant that they could(and did) successfully get DnD into Scholastic book fairs(not so much profitable for them, but those will get kids reading dnd crap and thats by itself a great asset)
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Mar 24, 2022 14:59
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Splicer posted:It doesn't necessarily have to be a malicious sales tactic to still be a sales tactic. If things are being stacked side on then a big fat box (seemingly) full of stuff is going to be more eye catching than a slim book spine. Obviously doesn't apply if it's an entire shelf of book spines of the same book. Re: Dave Morris being a shitter - wow, that's some impressive head-in-sand burial. I love (by which I mean hate) the bit where he tries to excuse the Journal of Historical Review thing by saying "well, I was a contributing editor to White Dwarf, that doesn't mean I endorsed their editorial policies". Sure, Dave, but you probably wouldn't have been involved at all if you thought tabletop games were not a meritorious subject on some level. And since White Dwarf in your day was to tabletop games what the Journal of Historical Review was to Holocaust denial...
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Mar 24, 2022 15:03
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Absurd Alhazred posted:From the Debate & Discussion TTRPG thread: man I hope he doesn't get too much money from the computer game, I bought that like a rube on early access I liked the books, and it was on sale, and the coupla hours I played were very promising, but II guess you can never be sure
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Mar 24, 2022 15:03
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Warthur posted:True, but if it wasn't designed to nudge competition off shelves, then competition being nudged off shelves would have been regarded as a happy accident. Also I thought that thread was in this forum because I never actually check.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:06
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This makes me hate Barker even more, holy poo poo. Like regardless of whether you were only kidding writing your Nazi novel, motherfucker sold it to NATIONAL VANGUARD.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:09
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Lumbermouth posted:This makes me hate Barker even more, holy poo poo. "the very epitome of thought crime."
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Mar 24, 2022 15:11
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:She also did some things that were good: For those who've not read Game Wizards: Rose Estes was a TSR staffer who was responsible for kicking off the Endless Quest line, being the overall project lead and writing the earliest books. This was a bigger deal than you might think - it was a major earner for the company, was responsible for a big stack of annual revenue when she was in charge of the line, and one suspects that since the production costs were pretty slim compared to any of the game stuff that the profit margin on it was even better. Absolute goose-that-lays-the-golden-eggs situation, and this in a time when other people's pet projects are turning into money sinks. She asks to exercise her stock option. Management says "gently caress you", essentially because the Blumes regretted giving it to her and didn't like people outside the inner circle owning stock. She asked to negotiate some sort of better compensation from the company as a result. They rebuff her. She quits and sues them. Major example of pre-Williams TSR shooting itself in the foot - what happened there was absolutely Gygax and the Blumes' fault, and it was 100% within their power to make good and they dropped the ball. And if Estes had suffered that level of betrayal, and had ended up that hostile to the company, but then felt OK to stick around under Williams and do some novels, then that suggests that however bad Williams might have been in other respects, she at least was able to get some people who'd been alienated back onside. Basically, if someone who's been personally backstabbed by old-TSR decided that Williams-TSR was worth doing business with, I give that much more weight than the opinions of grogs who didn't like seeing a woman in charge.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:18
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CitizenKeen posted:What thread? Click the link in the quote.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:41
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Click the link in the quote. (A) I missed the linkable quote, thank you. (B) I did not know there was another thread where people yelled at each other about TTRPGs. Time to add some bourbon to my coffee.
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Mar 24, 2022 16:06
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CitizenKeen posted:(B) I did not know there was another thread where people yelled at each other about TTRPGs. Time to add some bourbon to my coffee. There are always more and they are always worse 
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Mar 24, 2022 16:07
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