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Toshimo posted: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. Yea, this is the issue. If a game doesn’t use a tactical map, Roll20 can’t really do that much more than Discord. And since most Roll20 groups use Discord or Zoom on top of Roll20 already because of Roll20’s janky voice chat, and Discord can make things worse by adding art dependence. And there aren’t that many current indies that use tactical maps; even mid-level games are tending to use zone positioning. So what can Roll20 focus on? PF2e maybe, but Foundry is making inroads in that. Level Up, maybe? Soulbound? Fragged? All games that are barely a blip in the Orr Report at the moment.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:02
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Astral had a feature where you'd start with a pdf of a sheet, then drag and drop some UI boxes on top of it to make it a functional sheet, with formulas and text boxes and stuff. It was useful for systems that don't have a proper implementation in the other VTTs.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:04
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Kai Tave posted:It could go nowhere, but if it does happen to take off then I would expect it to have the effect of even further distancing D&D from the rest of the hobby as well as putting additional pressure on smaller publishers who don't have the wherewithal to either create or pay to have someone else create their own digital integration stuff. Might be that we'll see more of an uptick in platforms like Role working out deals with such publishers whereby Role does the heavy lifting of VTT stuff and in exchange they get the exclusive storefront rights to your game, which is a hypothetical future I can't say I'm super stoked about from a standpoint of creator control over things, to say nothing of how hard it is already to carve out a niche for yourself in the industry if your name isn't Dungeons & Dragons or maybe Pathfinder. I think this is going to be one of, if not the biggest, shakeups with the new D&D stuff. Physical products won't disappear, but D&D is becoming wholly integrated into its own system, moving into a space it had been ignoring or leaving to third parties to satisfy, and now they're bricking it off as their own. The D&D players will jump ship immediately. The D&D online platform won't be the only place to play D&D, but it's the one that will have all the first party support, easy integration of supplements, errata, and probably even options for DMs Guild fan splat rules. They'll still sell physical things because those make them money, too. However, they're making an online ecosystem that doesn't need to compete for attention or even hear vague whispers of other games on DriveThru RPG or Roll20 discussions. What they can't supply through direct supplements, someone will throw up mods on the DMs Guild for to "easily" turn D&D into a mecha game, or a wizard school game, or a space opera, or a noir crime thriller, or a pastoral comedy of manners and courtly intrigue. And it means that people who were not using the DMs Guild before and made 5e supplements independently are even less likely to find interested buyers unless they're willing to opt into that ecosystem.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:42
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hyphz posted:Yea, this is the issue. If a game doesn’t use a tactical map, Roll20 can’t really do that much more than Discord. And since most Roll20 groups use Discord or Zoom on top of Roll20 already because of Roll20’s janky voice chat, and Discord can make things worse by adding art dependence. And there aren’t that many current indies that use tactical maps; even mid-level games are tending to use zone positioning. So what can Roll20 focus on? PF2e maybe, but Foundry is making inroads in that. Level Up, maybe? Soulbound? Fragged? All games that are barely a blip in the Orr Report at the moment. Definitely not Fragged, Wade was posting that Roll20 didn't want his business.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:48
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Roll20 is currently the best option for CoC (some people like Foundry's implementation, but I think it's pretty bleh atm) and it's 1/5 of 5e, which is better than it could be.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:51
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zerofiend posted:Definitely not Fragged, Wade was posting that Roll20 didn't want his business. Is there more to this story?
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Aug 20, 2022 18:52
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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.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:58
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Tarnop posted:Is there more to this story? Not that I saw, he just posted in the VTT channel of the Fragged discord saying they didn't want his business.
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Aug 20, 2022 18:58
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zerofiend posted:Not that I saw, he just posted in the VTT channel of the Fragged discord saying they didn't want his business. His business? He wanted to pay them to write VTT integration for him?
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Aug 20, 2022 19:19
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Also, to reiterate the dumb Secret Lairs that are Stranger Things or Walking Dead crossovers aren't "canon" to the MtG multiverse setting. They're meta-playable in Commander format and a cynical crossover cash grab that are also designed to be mechanically appealing for the formats they're playable in. They're naked, greedy fanboy whale bait that fire off your FOMO synapses and make you want to rush to buy them from the only source (the WotC online storefront, gently caress you local game stores.) These are all the things that are bad about Secret Lair crap in general. They don't drag down the MtG setting with their bullshit. The actual current stories do that instead.  And since Strange Things keeps being brought up in discussions about D&D... I honestly don't know if Stranger Things as a show tempts anyone into playing D&D much nowadays. The first season had them playing some D&D to start with (B/X Basic.) The play board becomes key in an explanation Eleven gives for how the Upside Down works, and they borrow a name of a monster to help them identify the thing they're fighting. Seasons 2 and 3 I don't even recall if they play any D&D at all in the show. At best, they jam a few awkward references to D&D classes. The big bad monster of season 2 gets labeled "the Mind Flayer" but it's a big evil smoke cloud and the name is super forced. Season 3, the main monster is a continuation of the Mind Flayer, so the big monster at the end doesn't even get a special name. Season 4 came out a couple months ago, and it's like they finally realized they should do more with D&D. The Satanic Panic becomes a running background tension that motivates some of the antagonists. There's an extended D&D game sequence at the start. And the main villain is called "Vecna" and has a design that at least seems reasonably inspired by Vecna in D&D stuff, so you'd understand why kids would start calling him that. And this is all with huge gaps between the seasons. This is all a lot to say... I don't know I wonder if Rick and Morty or general Dan Harmon promotion of D&D hasn't done more to raise interest in D&D in the past few years than Stranger Things after season 1.
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Aug 20, 2022 19:27
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Isn't Pickle Rick already a planeswalker if I remember how that works?
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Aug 20, 2022 19:37
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Nuns with Guns posted:And since Strange Things keeps being brought up in discussions about D&D... I honestly don't know if Stranger Things as a show tempts anyone into playing D&D much nowadays. The first season had them playing some D&D to start with (B/X Basic.) The play board becomes key in an explanation Eleven gives for how the Upside Down works, and they borrow a name of a monster to help them identify the thing they're fighting. Seasons 2 and 3 I don't even recall if they play any D&D at all in the show. At best, they jam a few awkward references to D&D classes. The big bad monster of season 2 gets labeled "the Mind Flayer" but it's a big evil smoke cloud and the name is super forced. Season 3, the main monster is a continuation of the Mind Flayer, so the big monster at the end doesn't even get a special name. Anecdotal, of course, but the Stranger Things D&D intro box sells much better in my store than the similar Morty tie-in they did that I stopped ordering because it took forever for the first one to sell and no one ever asks about it. And the R&M one is cheaper. I think Stranger Things just has a much deeper cultural impact at this point; I barely hear anyone talking about R&M anymore whereas Stranger Things dialog kept up even in the hiatus. But again, not really a scientific sample size.
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Aug 20, 2022 19:41
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Ultiville posted:Anecdotal, of course, but the Stranger Things D&D intro box sells much better in my store than the similar Morty tie-in they did that I stopped ordering because it took forever for the first one to sell and no one ever asks about it. And the R&M one is cheaper. Yeah, I guess that could be people seeing a Stranger Things thing and buying it because it has the thing they recognize on it. Maybe it is a mutually-beneficial agreement? D&D gets the Stranger Things branding to use on products. While Stranger Things suddenly remembering to pay attention to D&D in this last season means it can be linked harder to a product for merch sales? It felt weird for a few years there with how Stranger Things = D&D in a lot of ways when the show was moving away from it. There was a whole plot point in the third season that nobody wanted to play D&D with Will anymore because the others were too busy being teenagers.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:02
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Also anecdotal: I know two people who had displayed negative interest in D&D until Stranger Things got big, one of whom recently got a group together for that Stranger Things 5e boxed set, while the other has been asking about how to get into the hobby. It absolutely did work.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:12
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KingKalamari posted:I mean, they can't do it now due to the previously-mentioned implications it would create, but they really would have been better off using Mystara's Shadow Elves as their "evil underground Elf" template and made them all albinos... Nuns with Guns posted:Also, to reiterate the dumb Secret Lairs that are Stranger Things or Walking Dead crossovers aren't "canon" to the MtG multiverse setting. They're meta-playable in Commander format and a cynical crossover cash grab that are also designed to be mechanically appealing for the formats they're playable in. They're naked, greedy fanboy whale bait that fire off your FOMO synapses and make you want to rush to buy them from the only source (the WotC online storefront, gently caress you local game stores.) I teach at a middle school in the middle east and our roleplaying club is by far the largest club in the k-12, about half the people in the club mentioned stranger things as the reason they got curious about DND.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:12
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Kestral posted:Also anecdotal: I know two people who had displayed negative interest in D&D until Stranger Things got big, one of whom recently got a group together for that Stranger Things 5e boxed set, while the other has been asking about how to get into the hobby. It absolutely did work. That’s pretty different though, because that property prominently features D&D as a hobby the kids play, so it at least makes sense unlike all the other Ready Player One level nonsense.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:16
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I teach at a middle school in the middle east and our roleplaying club is by far the largest club in the k-12, about half the people in the club mentioned stranger things as the reason they got curious about DND. That's really neat. Did any of them say what parts of D&D looked appealing from the show?
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Aug 20, 2022 20:39
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Nuns with Guns posted:That's really neat. Did any of them say what parts of D&D looked appealing from the show? https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/comments/v1tz2p/stranger_things_to_a_dnd_outsider_seems_to_do_a/
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Aug 20, 2022 20:45
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Bottom Liner posted:That’s pretty different though, because that property prominently features D&D as a hobby the kids play, so it at least makes sense unlike all the other Ready Player One level nonsense. Agreed, and I wasn't addressing the rest of the MtG stuff, that comment was directed at Ultiville and Nuns with Guns.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:46
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I didn't mean to be saying I didn't think Stranger Things being a big deal made sense - it makes a lot of sense to me that it's had a big impact. It's an incredibly popular show and it's incredibly positive about D&D. It'd be shocking to me if it didn't have a strong ongoing effect.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:50
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Megazver posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/comments/v1tz2p/stranger_things_to_a_dnd_outsider_seems_to_do_a/ See, that post confuses me a bit. It says "As someone that has not not played/watched/read much of anything DnD related, Stranger Things seem to do a remarkable job of making the world, characters and monsters of DnD incredibly engaging. The Demogorgon, Mind Flayer and Vecna in the show were offcourse different from their DnD counterparts but it 100% made me read pages and pages of DnD wiki on them." I completely get how watching Stranger Things you'd get an idea of why people find playing the game exciting. The two major scenes where they're playing D&D do a good job demonstrating how kids would play it. Mainstream media around D&D has historically done a bad job actually presenting what playing D&D is like. There's the introductory scene from the first episode of season 1, where we meet the main kids for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4fwA4-yNkk And then in season 4, which came out this last May, there's the extended D&D sequence I mentioned before here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OENI3Lgytk But I don't follow what Stranger Things is doing to make D&D worlds, characters, or monsters engaging. Out of the Actual D&D Things the show mentions (Demogorgon, Mind Flayer, and Vecna) Vecna probably has the most interesting lore if you fall down a wiki hole looking up what the show is referencing, but the D&D monsters names used in the show are the kids giving labels to completely unrelated inter-dimensional monsters to help them make sense of them. It's not selling you on the actual D&D monsters or the worlds they're from, it's giving you a name to Google so you know what they're referencing. e- I guess it's also worth pointing out that Vecna is also a major big bad in Critical Role, so I suppose there is a ton of cross-promotion between between D&D, CR, and Stranger Things there. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Aug 20, 2022 |
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Aug 20, 2022 21:14
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On the subject of Roll20, one thing that kind of sucks about them is they seem to be very "walled garden" when it comes to making things with r20 integration, and to me that's a big turn-off when it comes to "how are these guys gonna figure out what to do going forward if D&D starts eating their lunch?" I can't even remember how long ago it was that someone on the Lancer discord made some character sheet stuff that was all set up for Roll20 integration, but in order to actually make that happen you have to submit a request for r20 themselves to approve things and do all the final stuff on their end, and they just...didn't. So that particular project stalled out, and I still don't think it ever went through.
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Aug 20, 2022 22:41
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Kai Tave posted:On the subject of Roll20, one thing that kind of sucks about them is they seem to be very "walled garden" when it comes to making things with r20 integration, and to me that's a big turn-off when it comes to "how are these guys gonna figure out what to do going forward if D&D starts eating their lunch?" I can't even remember how long ago it was that someone on the Lancer discord made some character sheet stuff that was all set up for Roll20 integration, but in order to actually make that happen you have to submit a request for r20 themselves to approve things and do all the final stuff on their end, and they just...didn't. So that particular project stalled out, and I still don't think it ever went through. Roll20 is the rare company that sits in a Venn overlap of a company that probably hasn't done anything horribly wrong, has a business model that is pretty consumer friendly, is a product I use, but that I'm almost actively rooting to fail. They're so loving bad at everything they should be good at to succeed.
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Aug 20, 2022 22:58
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Kai Tave posted:On the subject of Roll20, one thing that kind of sucks about them is they seem to be very "walled garden" when it comes to making things with r20 integration, and to me that's a big turn-off when it comes to "how are these guys gonna figure out what to do going forward if D&D starts eating their lunch?" I can't even remember how long ago it was that someone on the Lancer discord made some character sheet stuff that was all set up for Roll20 integration, but in order to actually make that happen you have to submit a request for r20 themselves to approve things and do all the final stuff on their end, and they just...didn't. So that particular project stalled out, and I still don't think it ever went through. I'm pretty sure D&D moving to their own VTT is one of the motivators for Roll20 to join up with DTRPG, so they can start cross-integration that way and get a leg up.
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Aug 21, 2022 03:32
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Tsilkani posted:I'm pretty sure D&D moving to their own VTT is one of the motivators for Roll20 to join up with DTRPG, so they can start cross-integration that way and get a leg up. Sure, but as long as Role20 maintains that walled garden approach then it still becomes an impediment to people doing their own stuff, and what DTRPG integration suggests to me is that now publishers will have to handle such VTT integration on their own end, which is additional time, effort, and money for them to stay competitive. Meanwhile, Foundry costs money up front and has a learning curve, but if you want to make poo poo for it then you can just make it, you don't have to send an email going "please Mr. Roll20 can I have character sheet integration" and get ignored.
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Aug 21, 2022 03:43
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hyphz posted:His business? He wanted to pay them to write VTT integration for him? "Roll20 has no interest in working with me." That's the extent of the info about it.
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Aug 21, 2022 04:08
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zerofiend posted:"Roll20 has no interest in working with me." yeah this is the confusing thing i've always wondered about. roll20 has a bunch of staff and seems to do...nothing??? with most of them. like there's not new client versions a lot, they release new content they made for 5e and occasionally pathfinder or other systems, other people submit marketplace stuff TO them. what are most of their staff DOING?
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Aug 21, 2022 04:13
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Son of a Vondruke! posted:What's this now? I've never seen this announcement. Ath has done I think two now. They'll be visible at the top of a forum view (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=234) or at the top of your User Control Panel or Bookmarked Threads view, I think for about 48 hours. They're just forums-wide announcements, admins do those from time to time. You could have missed previous ones if you never used any of the above types of views (e.g. you only ever visit SA from within threads), or if you didn't log in during that 48hr window. Maybe they also appear differently on the mobile app?
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Aug 21, 2022 06:09
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Leperflesh posted:Ath has done I think two now. They'll be visible at the top of a forum view (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=234) or at the top of your User Control Panel or Bookmarked Threads view, I think for about 48 hours. They're just forums-wide announcements, admins do those from time to time. Yeah on the Awful app you get a little bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds telling you there's an announcement. It's virtually identical to the little bar that for some reason pops up occasionally telling you "Forums updated." It's pretty easy to miss unless you specifically go to the announcements tab to check.
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Aug 21, 2022 06:23
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Arivia posted:yeah this is the confusing thing i've always wondered about. roll20 has a bunch of staff and seems to do...nothing??? with most of them. like there's not new client versions a lot, they release new content they made for 5e and occasionally pathfinder or other systems, other people submit marketplace stuff TO them. what are most of their staff DOING? they probably don't have as many devs as you think they do, also that code base is probably absolutely miserable to manage and deal with.
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Aug 21, 2022 07:02
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Dexo posted:they probably don't have as many devs as you think they do, also that code base is probably absolutely miserable to manage and deal with. I count 11 on LinkedIn, not including one manager. Not that many. They’re working on a mobile app, too, which means some of those devs are focused on work which won’t show up on the Web. They’re also doing at least a partial rewrite judging from this one guy’s experience section: “worked on implementing Roll20’s first Node.js microservice” and “converted key Roll20 compendium pages from legacy Erb/Haml code to modern JavaScript.” So that‘s also a big time sink.
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Aug 21, 2022 14:32
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Yeah Roll20's initial codebase is from the early 2010s a wildly different time in web applications.
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Aug 21, 2022 16:29
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Apparently Phoenix and Stone's KS updated today. BATTLE OF THE BARDZ posted:Playtesting: 2-3 months. Minimal help now, you say?
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Aug 22, 2022 01:49
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Wait, isn't that just a 5e campaign setting? That they kickstarted over a year ago? What the hell have they been doing?
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Aug 22, 2022 02:37
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Liquid Communism posted:Wait, isn't that just a 5e campaign setting? That they kickstarted over a year ago? loving over their contributors and waiting for contributions
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Aug 22, 2022 02:42
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Wouldn't shock me if like the people who were writing things for them just pulled their work and they have to redo almost all of it.
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Aug 22, 2022 02:43
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Liquid Communism posted:Wait, isn't that just a 5e campaign setting? That they kickstarted over a year ago? From the sounds of it, harassing everyone they work with.
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Aug 22, 2022 02:45
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Liquid Communism posted:Wait, isn't that just a 5e campaign setting? That they kickstarted over a year ago?
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Aug 22, 2022 03:10
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D&DOne Dollar Per Multiclass Feat
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Aug 22, 2022 03:11
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Stone and Phoenix's ability to write themselves as victim really is top tier. Jamison is so sad he can't even properly wear his bicep tassels I'll bet.
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Aug 22, 2022 04:28
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