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Leperflesh posted:I think a great deal of inspiration for this new direction is coming from magic: the gathering: arena's success. Arena is making gobs of money... and at the same time, paper magic continues to make gobs of money. I struggle to imagine the exact same branch of the exact same company somehow thinking that killing off "paper D&D" would be a good idea in any way. I think they just want to make gobs of money on digital D&D offerings that can both serve players who genuinely have little interest in playing tabletop pen and paper games, and, help pen & paper players spend money during the middle of the week when they're in between live games. There's Magic whales who play paper magic every friday at the game store and then also drop fifty bucks a month on Arena, there's players who have no interest in Arena (or only play free and never deposit money), and there's players who would never have played any form of magic before Arena lowered the bar to entry to its absolute minimum ever. I'm not saying they're going to cancel paper D&D for this. I'm saying that MtG Arena is designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And Secret Lairs are designed to Hasbro executives a lot of money. And the constant release schedule of new MtG products is designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And this system is going to be designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And when things are designed for making Hasbro executives a lot of money, they aren't being designed for things like "properly compensating people" or "not exploiting addictive personalities". (The problem is capitalism and profit seeking, to be completely clear.) EDIT: This virtual tabletop system, to be clear about that too. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Aug 20, 2022 |
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Aug 20, 2022 07:09
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Roll20/Foundry are going to lose significant portions of their userbase the minute DnDB:VTT drops. D&D players are going to go right to the vertically-integrated source. Whether or not they can weather those losses is unknown, but given that they both knew this was coming and I haven't seen either one make any major moves/announcements in... well, ever, really, I don't think either is likely to fare well. The.unfortunate sided effect of this is that it'll mean less support for smaller games as they won't be subsidized by D&Dbucks.
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Aug 20, 2022 07:13
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This D&D thing sure seems like capitalist innovation at its finest to me 
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Aug 20, 2022 08:23
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My attitude towards fully integrated beyond will depend on how they handle stuff that's in both beyond and the real world. If me buying a physicsl book means I still have to pay full price to be able to use that content digitally then gently caress those guys.Leperflesh posted:But I've pushed that out a couple weeks because as was pointed out here and in the D&D 5e thread, it might be good for a new thread to at least establish that it's got any legs at all, and also there's more news coming in two weeks apparently that could give more grist for that mill.
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Aug 20, 2022 09:11
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Toshimo posted:Roll20/Foundry are going to lose significant portions of their userbase the minute DnDB:VTT drops. D&D players are going to go right to the vertically-integrated source. Whether or not they can weather those losses is unknown, but given that they both knew this was coming and I haven't seen either one make any major moves/announcements in... well, ever, really, I don't think either is likely to fare well. I feel like Foundry makes for a bad point of comparison here, when a substantial part of the draw of Foundry for its target audience of GMs is the incredible customizability of it.
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Aug 20, 2022 10:47
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A big determination for me is handling little smaller customisations and house rules that I imagine many other tables apply something akin to. If it's too locked down (such as my house rule of changing hit die for healing to just a 4e style hitpoint pool) or using potions as a bonus action, then it becomes a huge barrier to running anything. If it's easy to fiddle with stuff like that then it's easy for people to jump in for.
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Aug 20, 2022 11:04
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It is inevitable it will go the way of Netflix- a cheap subscription will become a thing you need to pay extra for individual figures/content/maps/modules to eventually you pay THEM for the privilege of getting ads in your face and your first born child. And you will learn to love it. That's just capitalism.
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Aug 20, 2022 11:45
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Comstar posted:It is inevitable it will go the way of Netflix- a cheap subscription will become a thing you need to pay extra for individual figures/content/maps/modules to eventually you pay THEM for the privilege of getting ads in your face and your first born child. And you will learn to love it. So the end goal here is for wotc to bankrupt themselves funding adam sandler comedies and garbage standups?
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Aug 20, 2022 13:17
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kingcom posted:So the end goal here is for wotc to bankrupt themselves funding adam sandler comedies and garbage standups? Well, the recent brand management shameless trashfire that is MtG has become has been pretty funny.
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Aug 20, 2022 13:18
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Magnetic North posted:Well, the recent brand management shameless trashfire that is MtG has become has been pretty funny. I know nothing about MtG and I'd love to know more.
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Aug 20, 2022 13:51
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Leperflesh posted:Rather, we are talking about getting a thread link in the biweekly admin announcement that Athanatos has been doing recently. What's this now? I've never seen this announcement.
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Aug 20, 2022 14:16
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kingcom posted:I know nothing about MtG and I'd love to know more. It is too long and shitposty to get into in depth, but basically they spent over 20 years crafting elaborate stories and lore and game experiences and products, but then the suits decided they wanted MtG to be a Fortnite-like multiversal product engagement engine instead of a loving game, so now they have to let brands spray their chunky diarrhoea all over the game. Some examples are below: https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=set%3Asld+%28%28cn%3E%3D428+cn%3C%3D435%29+or+cn%3A675%29&unique=prints https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=set%3Asld+%28%28cn%3E%3D477+cn%3C%3D483%29+or+cn%3A696%29&unique=prints https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=set%3Asld+%28%28cn%3E%3D340+cn%3C%3D348%29+or+cn%3A609%29&unique=prints https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=set%3Asld+%28%28cn%3E%3D143+cn%3C%3D153%29+or+cn%3A581%29&unique=prints
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Aug 20, 2022 14:18
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Magnetic North posted:Some examples are below: I haven’t played MtG since the 1990s, please tell me those are fanmade photoshops and not actual cards? 
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Aug 20, 2022 14:30
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oh boy do I have news for you
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Aug 20, 2022 14:30
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Comrade Koba posted:I haven’t played MtG since the 1990s, please tell Those are real, actual Magic: The Gathering cards. For the record, that website Scryfall is a fan project to make a useful MTG DB and is not run by WOTC. However, those cards are genuine. This is not a shitpost or a prank or a joke. Those cards where you have The Walking Dead and Stranger Things characters in Magic: The Gathering are completely real. I am not loving with you.
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Aug 20, 2022 14:35
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Magnetic North posted:Those are real, actual Magic: The Gathering cards. For the record, that website Scryfall is a fan project to make a useful MTG DB and is not run by WOTC. However, those cards are genuine. This is not a shitpost or a prank or a joke. Those cards where you have The Walking Dead and Stranger Things characters in Magic: The Gathering are completely real. I am not loving with you. I know you just said this but I just need to recheck. Thats a stranger things card right. Can I use that in standard play? Is it only for like a gimmicky one game mode thing? Are the planeswalkers showing up in that universe? Does Sorin Markov fight the walking dead or Rick? Is Jace a streetfighter?
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Aug 20, 2022 14:53
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Magnetic North posted:It is too long and shitposty to get into in depth, but basically they spent over 20 years crafting elaborate stories and lore and game experiences and products, but then the suits decided they wanted MtG to be a Fortnite-like multiversal product engagement engine instead of a loving game, so now they have to let brands spray their chunky diarrhoea all over the game. Most of these are kinda neat, tbh. I dunno. I don't see how having a bit of fun like that hurts anyone.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:02
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kingcom posted:I know you just said this but I just need to recheck. Thats a stranger things card right. Can I use that in standard play? Is it only for like a gimmicky one game mode thing? Are the planeswalkers showing up in that universe? Does Sorin Markov fight the walking dead or Rick? Is Jace a streetfighter? They are legal in Eternal formats only, so no Standard or Modern (Type 1 and Type 1.5, not Type 2, if you're old school). However, it just so happens the most popular format by a huge margin is Commander / EDH, which is an Eternal format. So someone might just sit down with a Negan deck and I'm going to loving vomit so it's a good think we all double sleeved. Also, better hope none of these cards don't become format staples, because they were initially sold directly my Wizards (no game store support) for a limited time only (gotta weaponize that FOMO) at a huge loving mark up. Now, some will be getting "in MTG universe reprints" but only after they sell their branded merch and only deigned to do this after an absolutely unprecedented level of backlash from fans. It wasn't enough to get them to stop strip mining their player base for every ducat, but enough they felt they had to do something. You can kind of see this in the Arcane set, where the cards have their 'real' name under the normal name, which is what is called 'The Godzilla Treatment' based after some Ikoria Godzilla variants. It predates Universes Beyond and was met with only a little controversy since those are essentially promos or official alters since the card is still an in-universe card. Of course, we have Warhammer 40k and Lord of the Rings sets coming around too, but I don't believe much has been spoiled for those yet. And who knows what'll be next? They just announced Doctor Who. I do not believe any of these universes have engaged in any reciprocity so nothing like Jace in Street Fighter. MTG is the receptacle in this relationship.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:18
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There's already a brand imprint for giving the secret lair universes beyond cards the Godzilla treatment. It's called universes within. The stranger things cards got reprinted in innistrad lore friendly versions in the midnight hunt collectors boosters and at such frequency that even the rarest card only costs like two bucks.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:31
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Honestly i'm not sure people were really giving a poo poo about Jace or Chandra or their planeswalker super-squad, but it is super transparent. It's more of a laugh to see those kinds of cards than seeing something horrible that was lost. In fact, i'll go so far as to say no one has ever really cared about MTG lore.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:38
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In the interest of calming the mood down a bit, here's my personal take: when they announced that new crossover cards were going to have a MtG-flavored version of them added to future set boosters as part of the reprint pool they insert into those packs (like how the Stranger Things cards are functionally reprinted in New Capenna boosters), these cards became... fine. There's going to be a way to get them for way cheaper and in a more thematically-consistent way in three months and no format-staple cards are going to get locked in the vault because WotC lost a license. Aesthetic tastes aside, they're just alternate-art cards. It isn't really the problem. The problem is that the Secret Lair program is all about throwing several hundred dollars of limited-time alternate-art cards at the MtG fandom every month, and it both leads to a content cycle that's desensitizingly fast and (more importantly) is designed to exploit players' "oh god, I need to get that now or it's gone forever" collector's instinct. Alternate art is fine to good, but it's still an exploitative system.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:44
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Panzeh posted:Honestly i'm not sure people were really giving a poo poo about Jace or Chandra or their planeswalker super-squad, but it is super transparent. It's more of a laugh to see those kinds of cards than seeing something horrible that was lost. The fairly large response to War of the Spark would undermine this claim. People were hyped, and also people were fairly let down in the end. But we're doing the same thing again soon with the next Dominaria set, so we'll see if they stick the landing this time?
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Aug 20, 2022 15:52
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The crossover cards are not in and of themselves a problem and more of a symptom that Wizards is desperately turning MtG into a system designed to give them as much money as possible at the expense of humans being able to actually play the card game they pretend to make. Which is what Lurks with Wolves already posted but I'm more responding to someone having that visceral a reaction to the CG monster from the populat TV show being in the card game already fulla weird monsters.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:01
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The Deleter posted:The crossover cards are not in and of themselves a problem and more of a symptom that Wizards is desperately turning MtG into a system designed to give them as much money as possible at the expense of humans being able to actually play the card game they pretend to make. I don't think anyone had a problem with the Stranger Things cards because they straight up said at release that they would get non-stranger-things versions. Also the mind flayer card is upside down which amuses me to no end, as is "the upside down".
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Aug 20, 2022 16:13
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Yeah to be clear I’m not objecting to crossover stuff and the art is pretty neat, I just think it’s funny that someone apparently had the idea of forcefully jamming every single even vaguely nerd-adjacent brand into the same semi-generic fantasy game using a comically large crowbar. It’s…kind of like picking up the latest Forgotten Realms book and finding out Elminster is now an X-Wing pilot who teams up with Special Agent Bilbo Baggins and Cloud Strife to fight Cthulhu.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:21
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Comrade Koba posted:It’s…kind of like picking up the latest Forgotten Realms book and finding out Elminster is now an X-Wing pilot who teams up with Special Agent Bilbo Baggins and Cloud Strife to fight Cthulhu. “It’s the children who are wrong.” https://multiversus.com/en
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Aug 20, 2022 16:29
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CitizenKeen posted:“It’s the children who are wrong.” Cool game, which established setting did they place it in?
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Aug 20, 2022 16:36
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Toshimo posted:Roll20/Foundry are going to lose significant portions of their userbase the minute DnDB:VTT drops. D&D players are going to go right to the vertically-integrated source. Whether or not they can weather those losses is unknown, but given that they both knew this was coming and I haven't seen either one make any major moves/announcements in... well, ever, really, I don't think either is likely to fare well. I have to imagine this is a preemptive move based on the coming D&D VTT: https://gizmodo.com/roll-20-drivethrurpg-merger-dungeon-masters-guild-1849172643 If they're going to lose D&D players, making the integration better for a bunch of the other indie games should help some
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Aug 20, 2022 16:41
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But seriously, outside of the "haha, Ermakrul got hit by a car" stories you develop in play, these cards don't feel like active crossovers the way something like Smash or Multiversus is. Saying MtG is a crossover because you put Dracula, Godzilla and a Fortnite dance in your deck feels like saying your Funko Pop shelf is a crossover. There's no crossing over, you just have some references in your deck.
Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 20, 2022 |
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Aug 20, 2022 16:43
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Lurks With Wolves posted:But seriously, outside of the "haha, Ermakrul got hit by a car" stories you develop in play, these cards don't feel like active crossovers the way something like Smash or Multiversus is. Saying MtG is a crossover because you put Dracula, Godzilla and a Fortnite dance in your deck feels like saying your Funko Pop shelf is a crossover. There's no [i[crossing over[/i], you just have some references in your deck. You can make a car out of Emrakul's corpse right now with black bordered cards even.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:52
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It just occurred to me that since Spelljammer exists to tie together disparate D&D campaign settings, and Stranger Things is in Magic and Ravnica is a D&D setting, you can draw a straight, canonical line from Hawkins, Indiana to Waterdeep.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:53
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CaptCommy posted:If they're going to lose D&D players, making the integration better for a bunch of the other indie games should help some The problem is if those indie games have the resources to provide good online resources. The fact that you get a heavy upstairs/downstairs problem based on availability of art is a problem with unofficial support.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:53
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CitizenKeen posted:It just occurred to me that since Spelljammer exists to tie together disparate D&D campaign settings, and Stranger Things is in Magic and Ravnica is a D&D setting, you can draw a straight, canonical line from Hawkins, Indiana to Waterdeep. An even straighter line because there were two D&D themed magic sets.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:54
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Kurieg posted:An even straighter line because there were two D&D themed magic sets. Oh, yeah, I guess that, too.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:55
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hyphz posted:The problem is if those indie games have the resources to provide good online resources. The fact that you get a heavy upstairs/downstairs problem based on availability of art is a problem with unofficial support. Oh yeah, I don't think this totally solves the problem. I was mostly responding to the comment about how Roll20 hasn't made any major moves cuz they're tryin
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Aug 20, 2022 16:57
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Comrade Koba posted:Cool game, which established setting did they place it in? This person gets it. It's fine in ForkKnife because that never had a meaningful established world anyway; it was just a flimsy pretense to graft a microtransaction store to. Same reason why it's fine for something like the Universus card game; the point has always been the crossover. Lurks With Wolves posted:But seriously, outside of the "haha, Ermakrul got hit by a car" stories you develop in play, these cards don't feel like active crossovers the way something like Smash or Multiversus is. Saying MtG is a crossover because you put Dracula, Godzilla and a Fortnite dance in your deck feels like saying your Funko Pop shelf is a crossover. There's no [i[crossing over[/i], you just have some references in your deck. This person also gets it. Nerds don't talk about what if Batman fought Spiderman because they want to play with all their toys at once; they care because they are invested in these ideas and want to exercise their creativity. Funko Pops are the best example: it's pushing your brand through the Play-Doh factory until it is in the vague shape of the product you were already trying to sell. But anyway, I could complain about this literally forever. It's been two years and they clearly are not backing away from the sewage trough any time soon.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:59
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To me the much more telling thing about MtG's design these days is that they went from putting out like 500-700 new cards a year to more than 2,000 and show no signs of slowing down. That is untenable design burden, not to mention even more exploitative of an already super gross business model.
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Aug 20, 2022 17:00
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CaptCommy posted:I have to imagine this is a preemptive move based on the coming D&D VTT: I had not seen that, but just adding a window to pop-up pdfs in-browser isn't especially novel and I don't see anything in. The article or mock-ups that indicate that you'll be able to drag-and-drop or even click-to-roll with them, so it doesn't seem very useful.
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Aug 20, 2022 17:49
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They also aren't actually jamming these brands into MTG's universe. None of the crossover cards are in the story or anything like that. Not to say WOTC's recent behavior has been good, it absolutely worries me both from an LGS-owner perspective, because they're cutting us out even more than usual and making our stocking issues even more acute with the explosion of discrete SKUs, and from a long-term sustainability perspective because the release schedule has become an overwhelming firehose. But having cool cards referencing properties people like is not the problem IMO, especially now that they make alternate versions available that look like normal cards and have alternate names that fit in-universe for people who prefer.
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Aug 20, 2022 17:52
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Also that said, their story has been so bad lately that throwing open the gates of ridiculous crossover might be an improvement. Better than "oh look another existential threat that's going to corrupt and/or kill several fan-favorite neglected characters to establish their cred before getting clowned on by dumb plot things in a year or so."
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Aug 20, 2022 17:55
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