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FMguru posted:He is absolutely kicking himself for not thinking of "character sheet NFTs" first. "If your character dies in the game, your character dies on the blockchain." "Daniel, I don't think that's how the blockchain works." "That's what they said about zweihander, too!"
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Apr 15, 2022 23:19
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Roadie posted:The last few Discworld books get really rough and unengaging. Fortunately, The Shepherd's Crown (the very last one) is quite excellent, though I'd assume given the contrast between it and Raising Steam that someone from Pratchett's circle of friends acted as a secret co-writer. I always assumed The Shepherd's Crown was written shortly after his diagnosis and held as the last.
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Apr 15, 2022 23:23
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Man, reading those excerpts, I knew Zweihander was already 'Warhammer but with any fun ideas or creativity removed' but it's worse than I ever thought.
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Apr 16, 2022 14:08
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“What if Warhammer but orcs are way more racist and gross on average and Slaanesh is worse in every respect” is, in fact, impressively awful and more folks should know that’s Zweihander.
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Apr 16, 2022 14:13
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There's certainly something when the guy thinks 'WAAR' is a replacement for 'WAAAAGH.'
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Apr 16, 2022 17:11
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Tbh I read the Zweihander guy joining the NFT discord as him hoping to embed himself and run off with some dirty laundry he can air for clout or to dunk on them. It's still dumbass because I think he prioritizes his personal "brand" and "image" as the smart guy who's always on the right side (so buy his stuff) above being normal because he's a marketing reptilian from start to finish. He's already demonstrated he'll go back and revise and remove "problematic" things in Zweihander as they're noticed because he has to keep it appealing, but it wasn't developed upfront with any care or awareness of the issues baked in.
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Apr 16, 2022 17:57
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Mystic Mongol posted:That's their origin. JRR Tolkien, an avowed Catholic, made the orcs as a race born without parents and without a soul, to have an antagonist that it was OK to kill without thinking too hard. But again, devout Christian. So when fans would ask him questions like, "What about an orc raised by humans as a baby" or "Is God truly incapable of saving them" he'd fold and admit that, fine, maybe there isn't a race, real or fictional, it's OK to genocide. That's a reading that takes what you're told over what you are shown. You're told that about orcs. What you are shown every time orcs get a voice is a group of people with their own ambitions, goals, and factions - and who talk like the people Tolkien served with at the Battle of the Somme. They've been dehumanised both by their evil overlords and by what the great and the good tell the hobbits about them. But anyone who thinks that Tolkien's elves are automatically the good guys needs to read The Silmarillion. Tolkien's orcs aren't soulless so much as people who are being dehumanised by both sides.
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Apr 16, 2022 18:06
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Night10194 posted:Man, reading those excerpts, I knew Zweihander was already 'Warhammer but with any fun ideas or creativity removed' but it's worse than I ever thought. Good news, he recently rebranded it as “fantasy horror” and it’s just as lazy and bad as before but a step or two away from Warhammer (and directly toward grifting off Dark Souls instead) 
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Apr 16, 2022 18:46
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Nuns with Guns posted:Tbh I read the Zweihander guy joining the NFT discord as him hoping to embed himself and run off with some dirty laundry he can air for clout or to dunk on them. I did wonder that, but his follow-up tweets where he lied through his teeth about cryptocurrency and the people involved with Gripnr made me abandon all presumption of good faith. He's backpedalling frantically now, but in the moment he was very much trying to keep the NFT option open. Also, he claims to be a man with his finger on the marketing pulse but somehow didn't notice everyone in tabletop anything giving Kickstarter infinite grief over blockchain when he thought he could get in on NFTs -- or, more likely, he figured no-one would notice and he could play both sides.
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Apr 16, 2022 19:06
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potatocubed posted:I did wonder that, but his follow-up tweets where he lied through his teeth about cryptocurrency and the people involved with Gripnr made me abandon all presumption of good faith. He's backpedalling frantically now, but in the moment he was very much trying to keep the NFT option open. The "playing both sides" thing seems most likely to me. He embeds himself and get a read on how viable the whole project is. If it's embarrassing he can doc dump for attention on Twitter. If there's something there, he gets to be on the ground floor. In the meanwhile he'll keep tweeting vaguely negative things about NFTs in between posting pics of himself with a D&D rainbow pride shirt, talking about the great miscarriage of justice the woman who wrote the Ravenloft adventure isn't recognized enough in D&D history, and re-pitching every new "Zweihander innovation" he can. And now that I've been scrolling his recent timeline I can also stop to lol at this poo poo which I think reveals quite a bit about his mentality: https://twitter.com/ZweihanderRPG/status/1514251607051018241
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Apr 16, 2022 19:43
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Ah yes Venture Capitalism, the most ethical kind of capitalism.
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Apr 16, 2022 21:10
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Bottom Liner posted:Good news, he recently rebranded it as “fantasy horror” and it’s just as lazy and bad as before but a step or two away from Warhammer (and directly toward grifting off Dark Souls instead) It's not even "toward," he's already there. I was getting ads on Facebook a few weeks ago for some recent Zweihander Kickstarter that was promoting the game by explicitly calling it "the Dark Souls of" tabletop games.
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Apr 16, 2022 22:03
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What I love about that tweet thread in particular, and by love I mean 'loving detest' is that by ending every tweet with an ellipsis it looks like he's got more to say but he doesn't! Literally all he has to say about venture capitalism is that a) it "is ... a way to square the circle ... when we talk about ethics in tech" and b) it's "driven by goodwill, but its intent doesn't always match its results". Point a doesn't mean anything and wouldn't mean anything even if we were talking about ethics in tech, which nobody is, and point b is obviously prima facie false. What's even better ('better') is that he prefaces it with 'my first point' and then he never makes a second point. Arguably he never makes a first point either, since it's just an assertion. But it's all just rhetorical nothing designed to make him look like a mighty thinkman without actually having to commit to any positions or make any sort of point. The whole thing makes me unreasonably angry and I'm not sure why. Possibly because it reminds me of Tory-style 'lie about everything all the time and trust no-one will take the time to check your assertions' media manipulation.
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Apr 16, 2022 22:07
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potatocubed posted:What I love about that tweet thread in particular, and by love I mean 'loving detest' is that by ending every tweet with an ellipsis it looks like he's got more to say but he doesn't! Literally all he has to say about venture capitalism is that a) it "is ... a way to square the circle ... when we talk about ethics in tech" and b) it's "driven by goodwill, but its intent doesn't always match its results". Thank you for externalizing my feelings. Did Zweihänder actually bring anything to the table? I don’t remember anything different or interesting about either mechanics or fluff that wasn’t WHFRP 2e but as written by an edgy child. It seemed to have a mandatory coating of poo poo but took out any nuance* that let you actually explore an adult topic. But then again I only read it once with a bottle of wine and admit it didn’t leave much of an impression so take that as you will. *And took the racism/sexism levels from “not great” to “loving egregious”.
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Apr 16, 2022 22:56
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Dawgstar posted:There's certainly something when the guy thinks 'WAAR' is a replacement for 'WAAAAGH.' maybe he's a big, big baseball fan
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Apr 16, 2022 23:05
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No, Zweihander basically adds nothing and removes plenty.
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Apr 16, 2022 23:06
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Night10194 posted:No, Zweihander basically adds nothing and removes plenty. His Revolutionary War era rpg is at least something more unique.
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Apr 17, 2022 00:02
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potatocubed posted:But it's all just rhetorical nothing designed to make him look like a mighty thinkman without actually having to commit to any positions or make any sort of point. The whole tweet thread is him saying what amounts to "I get a Pavlovian drool response at the idea there is 'money on the table' in the TTRPG space, but I know I can't say so out loud because NFTs currently can't be 'sustainably commodified,' so instead I'm going to shrug and say this is a land of contrasts."
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Apr 17, 2022 00:06
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disposablewords posted:It's not even "toward," he's already there. I was getting ads on Facebook a few weeks ago for some recent Zweihander Kickstarter that was promoting the game by explicitly calling it "the Dark Souls of" tabletop games. I mean, it is basically the Dark Souls of RPGs, in that he won’t shut the gently caress up about it.
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Apr 17, 2022 00:26
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Nuns with Guns posted:And now that I've been scrolling his recent timeline I can also stop to lol at this poo poo which I think reveals quite a bit about his mentality: lmao you gotta be fuckin kidding me, his marketing brain is just leaking out more and more lately. This is also why people were clowning on him with that earlier screenshot of him in the GRIPNR discord where he talks about "downshifting" into TRPGs. Xiahou Dun posted:Did Zweihänder actually bring anything to the table? At one point WFRP2E was out of print and it was unclear what the direction was going to be since WFRP3E was busily being derided as "too boardgamey" (my personal take is that it was kind of emblematic of FFG's later TRPG obsessions with funny dice as well as their love of fiddly tokens and other bits, but did some pretty interesting stuff that even other funny-dice games like Star Wars never really took advantage of), but then the 4th edition came out which is apparently rather well regarded and so no, Zweihander doesn't really bring anything to the table because the die-hard Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Grognard fanbase isn't nearly as robust as the same demographic for D&D, and it's not hard to find a modern version of the official game rather than needing to lean on a lovely knockoff version.
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Apr 17, 2022 04:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:The "playing both sides" thing seems most likely to me. He embeds himself and get a read on how viable the whole project is. If it's embarrassing he can doc dump for attention on Twitter. If there's something there, he gets to be on the ground floor. In the meanwhile he'll keep tweeting vaguely negative things about NFTs in between posting pics of himself with a D&D rainbow pride shirt, talking about the great miscarriage of justice the woman who wrote the Ravenloft adventure isn't recognized enough in D&D history, and re-pitching every new "Zweihander innovation" he can. I'd say that'd totally get the chuds to turn on him, but the chuds were never supporting him in the first place were they Speaking of terrible awful games, the WoD thread just had a pretty harrowing but informative discussion over the publishing process of Beast. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Apr 17, 2022 |
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Apr 17, 2022 05:27
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I'd always assumed Zweihander did the OSR thing of "this familiar-feeling game exists, now you have a basis to publish your own material with that framework" but they have one of those Drivethru community program "you get 60%" setups, which would be fair enough if Zweihander was a setting people had investment in and wanted to play with but feels... let's say out-of-place for a retroclone that has to specify "you can't use this license to make WRFP stuff" on its own website.
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Apr 17, 2022 08:05
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1st Stage Midboss posted:I'd always assumed Zweihander did the OSR thing of "this familiar-feeling game exists, now you have a basis to publish your own material with that framework" but they have one of those Drivethru community program "you get 60%" setups, which would be fair enough if Zweihander was a setting people had investment in and wanted to play with but feels... let's say out-of-place for a retroclone that has to specify "you can't use this license to make WRFP stuff" on its own website. i dunno how true this is, but didnt he actually delete some major WFRP fan forum or whatever?
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Apr 17, 2022 09:46
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Lord_Hambrose posted:His Revolutionary War era rpg is at least something more unique. And that’s not really his. It’s Richard Iorio’s Colonial Gothic, using the Zweihander rules. You can still get the third edition if you want the setting without quite so much of the rest of it
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Apr 17, 2022 14:46
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Thanlis posted:And that’s not really his. It’s Richard Iorio’s Colonial Gothic, using the Zweihander rules. You can still get the third edition if you want the setting without quite so much of the rest of it Oh definitely. I do like it more because I am a long time WFRP player, so the system is an improvement over Colonial Gothic in my opinion. WFRP 4th is also an incredible game with lots of good support now, so Zweihander doesn't serve any purpose at all now. Zweihander always felt like a cheap knockoff if you were a WFRP player but at least something like Colonial Gothic wasn't as big of a game so that genre has a little more room to be meaningful. The only interesting thing in the system is your job gives you a little bonus and a little penalty until you complete it and move to the next career. Then you lose the previous penalty and keep the bonus forever. It's not bad, but I think literally the only new thing the system does. Just get WFRP 4th, folks!
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Apr 17, 2022 15:37
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Kai Tave posted:At one point WFRP2E was out of print and it was unclear what the direction was going to be since WFRP3E was busily being derided as "too boardgamey" (my personal take is that it was kind of emblematic of FFG's later TRPG obsessions with funny dice as well as their love of fiddly tokens and other bits, but did some pretty interesting stuff that even other funny-dice games like Star Wars never really took advantage of), but then the 4th edition came out which is apparently rather well regarded and so no, Zweihander doesn't really bring anything to the table because the die-hard Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Grognard fanbase isn't nearly as robust as the same demographic for D&D, and it's not hard to find a modern version of the official game rather than needing to lean on a lovely knockoff version. I just want to emphasize that the only reason Zweihander had anything going for it was because 3e was cool but different and a pain to play online, and they weren't selling pdfs of 2e on Drivethrurpg. Ignore Warhammer Fantasy 4e coming out. Ignore better RPGs inspired by Warhammer Fantasy like Shadow of the Demon Lord coming out. Just giving people a legal way to obtain 2e would have been enough to make Zweihander irrelevant outside of Fox's marketing push. And now we have all three of those things, so now we have no reason to actually give this game the time of day.
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Apr 17, 2022 17:01
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I just want to emphasize that the only reason Zweihander had anything going for it was because 3e was cool but different and a pain to play online, and they weren't selling pdfs of 2e on Drivethrurpg. Ignore Warhammer Fantasy 4e coming out. Ignore better RPGs inspired by Warhammer Fantasy like Shadow of the Demon Lord coming out. Just giving people a legal way to obtain 2e would have been enough to make Zweihander irrelevant outside of Fox's marketing push. And now we have all three of those things, so now we have no reason to actually give this game the time of day.
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Apr 17, 2022 17:24
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I just want to emphasize that the only reason Zweihander had anything going for it was because 3e was cool but different and a pain to play online, and they weren't selling pdfs of 2e on Drivethrurpg. Ignore Warhammer Fantasy 4e coming out. Ignore better RPGs inspired by Warhammer Fantasy like Shadow of the Demon Lord coming out. Just giving people a legal way to obtain 2e would have been enough to make Zweihander irrelevant outside of Fox's marketing push. And now we have all three of those things, so now we have no reason to actually give this game the time of day. Hostile V posted:It was also embarrassingly easy to pirate 2e, the biggest obstacle was needing to navigate a Russian website where all of the text was in Cyrillic but all of the PDFs were still in English. I don't condone the kickass crime of piracy nor do I lament the fact that people don't look hard enough to know how to, I do agree that if it was easier to get for money it would've absolutely cut Zweihander down at the knees. The more I hear about the rocky past of WFRP, the more I think that Daniel Fox was somewhat foolish to build his business model on Game Workshop's apathy. Lord_Hambrose posted:Oh definitely. I do like it more because I am a long time WFRP player, so the system is an improvement over Colonial Gothic in my opinion. I've been running WFRP 4e since the summer and it's a great game. It's also super well supported, with tons of hardback releases which are mostly decent quality , I recently allowed a player to take the Ogre race without thinking of the implication of having a guy that does double damage to everything shorter than it. They sure as hell stopped the Ordo Septenarius's ritual with a pretty brutal smack to the face. I'm not complaining, I love it when players spike and end an encounter like, like when a lady (bard?) cast sleep on the Black Spider for the Phandelver adventure, rolled enough points to put him to sleep, at which point they locked him in a box and threw it in a river, which a bunch of stones tied to it. 
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Apr 18, 2022 03:58
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:The more I hear about the rocky past of WFRP, the more I think that Daniel Fox was somewhat foolish to build his business model on Game Workshop's apathy. To be a bit fair, even 5 years ago it seemed possible Games Workshop might straight up run aground thanks to oblivious, pigheaded management. It happened that the turnaround started almost immediately after Zweihander was first published in 2017, then Warhammer Fantasy 4e came out in 2018 and GW as a whole has really improved since then. Daniel Zweihander's response to all this seems to be to commit to Zweihander as a system for broader "dark fantasy roleplaying" after his first few attempts to trash talk 4e didn't pan out. Maybe starting up some other game lines would be a better idea, but I guess when you lash a game to yourself so strongly, it's hard to cut ties.
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Apr 18, 2022 04:18
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Nuns with Guns posted:Daniel Zweihander's response to all this seems to be to commit to Zweihander as a system for broader "dark fantasy roleplaying" after his first few attempts to trash talk 4e didn't pan out. Maybe starting up some other game lines would be a better idea, but I guess when you lash a game to yourself so strongly, it's hard to cut ties. lmao. I don't even know why he would poo poo on 4e. There was some grumbling (evidenced by the first few pages of the thread here) when it came out but most people like it. It's crazy well supported, it sells out all the time, its a good thing.
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Apr 18, 2022 07:45
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Roadie posted:The last few Discworld books get really rough and unengaging. Fortunately, The Shepherd's Crown (the very last one) is quite excellent, though I'd assume given the contrast between it and Raising Steam that someone from Pratchett's circle of friends acted as a secret co-writer. It was hard to read those having been to a couple talks he'd done at cons in the past where he described his writing process as a rough draft that he iterated on until it was funny. The decline made it really clear he no longer had the mental bandwidth, or time, to do that.
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Apr 18, 2022 08:44
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Liquid Communism posted:It was hard to read those having been to a couple talks he'd done at cons in the past where he described his writing process as a rough draft that he iterated on until it was funny. The decline made it really clear he no longer had the mental bandwidth, or time, to do that. For the last couple books iirc he wasn't even able to write anymore and had to dictate them.
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Apr 18, 2022 08:49
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In an interview, he talked about how he had to re-structure sentences he was dictating, because he flat-out couldn't find a word. Absolutely heart-breaking.
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Apr 18, 2022 08:54
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The big thing I noticed for Raising Steam was that everyone had the same voice. I liked the stuff until that one and generally didn't notice much of an issue.
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Apr 18, 2022 22:54
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Weren't people complaining about WOTC's Spelljammer April Fool's joke? https://twitter.com/Wizards_DnD/status/1517171720783867904
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Apr 21, 2022 17:11
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Planescape is better but I guess I'll take what I can get 
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Apr 21, 2022 17:20
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Goodness! The at this point known practice of using April Fools to gauge interest in a product was used to gauge interest in a product! Who could have foreseen this!
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Apr 21, 2022 17:29
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Kurieg posted:Weren't people complaining about WOTC's Spelljammer April Fool's joke? People know that sea shanties have more than one melody/meter, right? Wellerman didn't invent them.
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Apr 21, 2022 17:30
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Bruceski posted:People know that sea shanties have more than one melody/meter, right? Wellerman didn't invent them. Originality is not as important as market penetration.
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Apr 21, 2022 17:48
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disposablewords posted:Goodness! The at this point known practice of using April Fools to gauge interest in a product was used to gauge interest in a product! Who could have foreseen this! This is slated for an August release, there's no way it wasn't already in development well before April Fools.
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Apr 21, 2022 18:23
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