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Arivia posted:Do you mean how much less material has come out for 5e? Both 3.5 and 4e had a lot of official material. yeah i meant to type 5e
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Jan 17, 2023 08:10
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dwarf74 posted:Oh wow. I just want to take a sec to comment on this because I had a couple board game kickstarters/preorders fulfilled by funagain. I'm not at all surprised by this announcement. It seemed like every fulfillment they were in charge of had really weird state-by-state restrictions, such that they wouldn't even ship to certain states, and I had fulfillments and pre-orders straight up cancelled because I was in the wrong state. No way can a fulfillment company last long when they can't consistently fulfill a big chunk of their orders. They were a joke, and I feel bad for the job losses this will cause.
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Jan 17, 2023 09:06
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Wait, state as in US state? That's ridiculous - I mean. I know the post office got gutted by Trump and whatnot and there's probably issues, but not posting to some states seems an outright untenable way to run a business in the world of mail order.
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Jan 17, 2023 10:25
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Finster Dexter posted:I just want to take a sec to comment on this because I had a couple board game kickstarters/preorders fulfilled by funagain. As someone who’s outside the US, shipping being restricted to the “contiguous” or “continental” US states is pretty common. Or do you mean they restricted more than AK and HI?
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Jan 17, 2023 10:37
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Chatbot GMs are the kind of thing that theoretically might work and as AI improves, could become viable. Also: “Watching the players with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Mercator would never stop GMing, it would never bail on them... it would always be there. And it would never TPK them, never forget a rule or take a hard day of work out on them, or say it forgot to do session prep because it was too busy and it would die to protect our profits. Of all the would-be GMs who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”
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Jan 17, 2023 10:45
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I'm sure some people will look at this breeding ground for hoaxes about what terrible thing WotC will do next and blame it on the community for being hysterical. I think that is the incorrect lesson to from this. This environment only exists because of WotC's completely inability to get in front of this story. It could also be unwillingness to do so but I dunno; this is so big comparative news media normies like Forbes and Fox Business are talking about this story.
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Jan 17, 2023 12:04
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Magnetic North posted:I'm sure some people will look at this breeding ground for hoaxes about what terrible thing WotC will do next and blame it on the community for being hysterical. I think that is the incorrect lesson to from this. This environment only exists because of WotC's completely inability to get in front of this story. It could also be unwillingness to do so but I dunno; this is so big comparative news media normies like Forbes and Fox Business are talking about this story.
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Jan 17, 2023 12:39
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I mean arguably, the first hit to their credibility came from that exec saying the brand was 'undermonetised.' Literally anything that follows that is going to be interpreted as fleecing the customers.
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Jan 17, 2023 12:44
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In response to WotC's lovely OGL decision, I've decided to lower the price of my game, DEAD IN THE WEST, by  . The game is a hoot and a holler and I'd love for folks to check it out. Here's some pretty artwork from the book:      Pick up the digital version here! There are reduced physical copies too but shipping these chunky boys is so expensive I wasn't able to lower the price as much as the digital copies. Anyway, hope folks enjoy my game! Feel free to contact me directly at deadinthewestwill@gmail.com for any questions about the game, system, books, or anything else!
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Jan 17, 2023 12:48
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The first attempt, that I know of, to do adventure subscriptions for money was Living City, when they sold it to Organized Play, run by... Ryan Dancey. It promised for your subscription (which I think was a relatively low yearly fee, based on the previous membership fees for the RPGA) I think one Living City mod per month, possibly two? It utterly failed to deliver on this, killed the campaign, and fans gave it a proper ending at a later gencon. Living Greyhawk took a lot of its later principles from MMORPGs, and was run in part by... Jason Buhlman and Erik Mona, who were also behind Paizo's adventure paths, when they started in Dungeon magazine, and who definitely thought that Organized Play's attempt to run a subscription TTRPG was a great idea. It's not remotely surprising that Paizo made a successful subscription service, and it's also not surprising that WotC would attempt the same thing, the question is really if they can deliver enough material consistently enough to make it worth it. Which realistically, they probably could, for people who enjoy D&D. At least at first. Then capitalism will kick in and the price will be increased repatedly while the content level is decreased repeatedly, because capitalism cannot refrain from killing a golden goose.
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Jan 17, 2023 14:16
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i had no idea paizo had a monthly sub and poo poo do they release a ton of stuff, wow
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Jan 17, 2023 15:41
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I subscribe to two of the Paizo lines (unless we’re talking about another thing I didn’t know they offer), it’s not really a normal “subscription”. It’s just a standing order to buy all the products in that line as they release with the advantage that it gets you the pdf and the hardcover for the same price of just the hardcover, you don’t get charged in a month with no releases.
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Jan 17, 2023 16:06
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CottonWolf posted:I subscribe to two of the Paizo lines (unless we’re talking about another thing I didn’t know they offer), it’s not really a normal “subscription”. It’s just a standing order to buy all the products in that line as they release with the advantage that it gets you the pdf and the hardcover for the same price of just the hardcover, you don’t get charged in a month with no releases. True but there are at least two lines that promise monthly releases.
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Jan 17, 2023 16:15
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The Pathfinder Adventure Path is kind of like a very-thick magazine and is basically a successor to Paizo's old version of Dungeon magazine. The bulk of it is devoted to that month's adventure, but there's always a couple of articles that give a deep dive into parts of the setting, monsters, etc. It's the most subscriptiony thing they offer but it's still pretty substantial.
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Jan 17, 2023 16:35
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Opening Arguments podcast released another episode addressing the feedback/hatemail they got. They doubled down on being critical about the Gizmodo article because that was kind of the point: the article was inaccurate and framed to be purely "Wizards BAD!" and the intent of their first episode on this was to address these inaccuracies and to explain why the article was wrong and written in bad faith. They feel justified/vindicated on this because they claimed to have received no feedback refuting the factual truths they have laid out. This matters because that article was the nexus of everyone being outraged. They believe that there were indeed parts to be outraged over in the OGL 1.1 draft, but the article did not point them out and everybody was outraged for the wrong bad-faith reasons. The second point they made was that contract law doesn't give a loving poo poo about what the intent was, only what was written. It literally does not matter what the person who drafted the original OGL intended as given in interviews and whatnot. They thought that this point was obvious but apparently it wasn't. (I thought it was obvious too and I'm not a lawyer.) Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 16:58
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FishFood posted:The Pathfinder Adventure Path is kind of like a very-thick magazine and is basically a successor to Paizo's old version of Dungeon magazine. The bulk of it is devoted to that month's adventure, but there's always a couple of articles that give a deep dive into parts of the setting, monsters, etc. It's the most subscriptiony thing they offer but it's still pretty substantial. This looks cool as hell. Monthly curated campaigns that slowly get put out to a theme seems like a really smart "subscription" service I think Hasbro execs are seeing this stuff and not realizing they need to actually put the work into cranking out monthly content to charge for it.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:00
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Boris Galerkin posted:
This is a useful way to think about contracts you sign--plan for the deal to be only what was written--but it's not true. Contracts can be voided due to mutual mistake, and parol (i.e. outside) evidence can sometimes be introduced to determine the intent of the contract.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:16
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w00tmonger posted:This looks cool as hell. Monthly curated campaigns that slowly get put out to a theme seems like a really smart "subscription" service You're not wrong but also Paizo has been doing this forever. They cut their teeth on cranking out content on a monthly basis because they used to run Dragon + Dungeon, on top of "Pathfinder Society" as a series of adventures that used Golarion as its setting but 3.x as its gameplay rules. WOTC / Hasbro is going to have a lot to learn if they're only realizing this now.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:You're not wrong but also Paizo has been doing this forever. They cut their teeth on cranking out content on a monthly basis because they used to run Dragon + Dungeon, on top of "Pathfinder Society" as a series of adventures that used Golarion as its setting but 3.x as its gameplay rules. WOTC / Hasbro is going to have a lot to learn if they're only realizing this now. Also in an echo of the poo poo Hasbro/WOTC is realizing now, Paizo's subscription model (while not without its issues, I believe during the pandemic shipping got so hosed up at one point subscribers got part 5 of an adventure path before they got parts 3 and 4) is reliable monthly user income. Paizo has been pretty upfront over the years about the subscriptions making them much, much more financially stable than if they just released products solely as individual sales.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:26
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Arivia posted:Also in an echo of the poo poo Hasbro/WOTC is realizing now, Paizo's subscription model (while not without its issues, I believe during the pandemic shipping got so hosed up at one point subscribers got part 5 of an adventure path before they got parts 3 and 4) is reliable monthly user income. Paizo has been pretty upfront over the years about the subscriptions making them much, much more financially stable than if they just released products solely as individual sales. yeah, there's a lot of ill-will towards everything turning into a "subscription service" of late, but Paizo is old-school (and better) in that it's a thing you get once per month and then it's yours forever (i.e. a magazine subscription) as opposed to something you have to pay for every month just to be able to retain access
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Jan 17, 2023 17:29
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homullus posted:This is a useful way to think about contracts you sign--plan for the deal to be only what was written--but it's not true. Contracts can be voided due to mutual mistake, and parol (i.e. outside) evidence can sometimes be introduced to determine the intent of the contract. I'll believe what a lawyer who specializes in this stuff says, unless you can provide proof otherwise.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:34
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Boris Galerkin posted:I'll believe what a lawyer who specializes in this stuff says, unless you can provide proof otherwise. When a contract is ambiguous enough then they will look to outside parol evidence. The question is "what is ambiguous enough" because that varies from court to court.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:42
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Boris Galerkin posted:the article was inaccurate and framed to be purely "Wizards BAD!" and the intent of their first episode on this was to address these inaccuracies and to explain why the article was wrong and written in bad faith. They feel justified/vindicated on this because they claimed to have received no feedback refuting the factual truths they have laid out. So they have factual evidence that the article was written in bad faith? Since they seem so big on evidence based argumentation?
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Jan 17, 2023 17:48
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Arivia posted:As someone who’s outside the US, shipping being restricted to the “contiguous” or “continental” US states is pretty common. Or do you mean they restricted more than AK and HI? Almost certainly not, that sounds like a made-up excuse for loving up fulfillment. You can't ship alcohol or certain kinds of weaponry to some states or between some states, and there are some fairly specific restrictions on certain kinds of batteries and flammable products, but other than that AK & HI are the only ones I've ever run into shipping issues with. It's possible if it was all print material and they were trying to fulfill it through US media mail postage (which I haven't seen done much on KS but it's not out of the question) they might have run into weird snags, but even then I've never seen that happen, at worst media mail is just very slow because it's not prioritized. It IS possible that they were handling all the end-to-end shipping themselves, as in they were receiving shipments directly from freight forwarders, and trucking the shipments themselves from their warehouse(s) out to individual distribution hubs or end servicers (like USPS/UPS/Fedex here in the US) and they were running into some state-by-state freight shipping headaches (which, speaking from experience, have increased in somewhat unpredictable ways in the last 3 years) but if you can't predict and account for those, you're kind of failing to offer the main service provided by fulfillment companies. People pay fulfillers specifically to avoid dealing with those problems directly. It's not really shocking if that's the case though, by all accounts Funagain was sort of comically bad at what they did--grossly understaffed for the scale of freight they were handling, incapable of providing timely updates either to their customers or the backers, terrible at customer service (another one of the big things you pay fulfillment companies for, if you're, say, an RPG designer with a staff of 3 full-timers trying to finish an international Kickstarter). I remember back during the Gloomhaven kickstarter an employee said they were shipping out 500 copies of the game a day, out of something like 20,000 copies. I know Gloomhaven is a huge box but that's a pretty glacial pace.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:53
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Ultimately, looking at it from a legal perspective is weird because the OGL in its current form is kind of unnecessary from a legal perspective in the first place. It was basically a "we won't make your life harder" promise, and now the promise is broken. Like, "is this even legal for Wizards to do" is an interesting question, but also not really the core of the whole argument. The Bee fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 18:00
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I suspect an AI-DM would be similar to these apps/games at launch https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nationssoftware.endlessrpg&gl=US https://store.steampowered.com/app/1090930/Endless_RPG/ Doing procedurally generated dungeons was coded back in the 70s-80s, and Roguelikes have been handling them since forever. Who needs things like "Descriptions" and "Narration" when you could just have a dungeon forever?
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Jan 17, 2023 19:08
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Doing procedurally generated dungeons was coded back in the 70s-80s, and Roguelikes have been handling them since forever. Who needs things like "Descriptions" and "Narration" when you could just have a dungeon forever? I wouldn't be shocked if they saw some of the examples of people asking ChatGPT to "GM an adventure for them" and were impressed by the coherence of the structure. I played around with it a bit myself as part of a disruptive potential analysis thing for work, and my conclusion was that you could get a GPT-based tool to do a whole bunch of social tasks that are based on "listen, respond, remember past responses, come up with stuff on the fly", probably including GMing - if not with the current version then probably within the next two years of NLP development. Might be neutral to slightly positive for TTRPG gaming (especially for groups where nobody has the bandwidth for GMing), might be real bad (e.g., distorting people's expectations and messing with the kind of responsiveness and shared understanding that groups get by playing together for a long time, making an inclusive social activity a lonely one instead).
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Jan 17, 2023 19:35
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Boris Galerkin posted:I'll believe what a lawyer who specializes in this stuff says, unless you can provide proof otherwise. I am a lawyer. By the rules of professional conduct of the state of Maryland, I cannot describe myself as an expert in any practice of law (unless I was also a licensed patent examiner). I'm also not your attorney. I would recommend that, unless you have engaged legal counsel, whatever advice you're getting is worth the value you've paid for it. This is hardly a simple black and white question of law. They're right -- the words on the contract often mean more than the intent behind them. That's mainly intended to incent the parties to come to the terms that they want instead of fighting in courts. That's not the end of the analysis, as there are doctrines which ameliorate the harsh outcome of misunderstandings. This can include application of the parol evidence rule, analysis of unilateral or mutual mistake to contract formation, or scrubber promissory estoppel may dictate whether and how WOTC may deauthorize the prior OGL. I don't mean to besmirch my colleagues, but it's more complicated than they may present.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:37
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Eastmabl posted:I am a lawyer. By the rules of professional conduct of the state of Maryland, I cannot describe myself as an expert in any practice of law (unless I was also a licensed patent examiner). I'm also not your attorney. I just wanted to note how good bar associations have gotten at drilling this phrase into lawyers' heads. This is just classic boiler-plate "I'm going to invoke my expertise as a lawyer in this internet argument, but I don't want to hold myself out as your attorney."
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Jan 17, 2023 19:48
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Eastmabl posted:I am a lawyer. By the rules of professional conduct of the state of Maryland, I cannot describe myself as an expert in any practice of law (unless I was also a licensed patent examiner). I'm also not your attorney. Same, though nz and not a specialist in that area, and same. It was a rabble rousing sort of article, but I didn't think it was wildly wrong. Do opening arguments talk about the move from covering everything to only covering pdfs and printed matter? That seems to be a key change and legal eagle didn't touch on it at all.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:48
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sebmojo posted:Same, though nz and not a specialist in that area, and same. Not at all, which was very annoying because that was my main issue with their coverage
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Jan 17, 2023 19:57
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what I'm getting from this thread is that Eastmabl and sebmojo are giving me legal advice, acting as my attorneys, and should be held liable for anything that I do from this point onwards.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:58
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That is my interpretation as well.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:06
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Piell posted:Not at all, which was very annoying because that was my main issue with their coverage Well, people at the time were not really focused on what the change would imply for VTTs.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:13
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CitizenKeen posted:I just wanted to note how good bar associations have gotten at drilling this phrase into lawyers' heads. This is just classic boiler-plate "I'm going to invoke my expertise as a lawyer in this internet argument, but I don't want to hold myself out as your attorney." I would say it's less "bar associations" and more "malpractice lawsuits". edit: I also work in house and regularly have to give this kind of warning to our employees when their interests and those of my client (my employer) might deviate. I usually don't IAAL, but the post I quoted seemed to ask for one. Eastmabl fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 20:36
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Boris Galerkin posted:They feel justified/vindicated on this because they claimed to have received no feedback refuting the factual truths they have laid out. This right here would make me walk out on a content creator and not look back. The "u mad" defense in 2023? Come on! quote:This matters because that article was the nexus of everyone being outraged. They believe that there were indeed parts to be outraged over in the OGL 1.1 draft, but the article did not point them out and everybody was outraged for the wrong bad-faith reasons. Boris Galerkin posted:I'll believe what a lawyer who specializes in this stuff says, unless you can provide proof otherwise. That lawyer isn't working for you, and any lawyer worth their salt would tell you not to accept legal advice from a lawyer who isn't working for you. e: gently caress, promissory estoppel Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 21:10
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I'll promissory estop ur rear end
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Jan 17, 2023 21:23
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I do wonder if D&D Beyond "content" was envisioned to be stuff like shorter adventures produced more cheaply than their "headliner" books? Something more like what they're putting out for Adventurer's League, which I looked at briefly but noted involves GMs who are running open games at FLGS for WotC having to spend their own money to do that promotional work in exchange for their own AL PCs getting little benefits (that cost WotC zero dollars). From my limited exposure, some of the AL stuff looks better than most of their prestige releases, but that may just be the shotgun approach where the percentage of successes is low but the volume is much higher. I dropped off the Paizo subscription train when PF 1 ended. I assume PF 2 is operating pretty much the same way? Are they still doing that thing where their big splat-book releases end up featured in an adventure path that's all but unplayable unless you buy the new rules compendium or  or are they being more restrained with that cross-marketing? I admit it's a damned if you do situation, because releasing the Complete Psychic's Handbook and then never using that material in your adventures is going to irritate people who bought it, while using it might irritate people who didn't but might convince others to buy.If there's any truth to the high tier cost for a D&D Beyond subscription under their new system, I wonder how or if that relates to microtransactions? If there's lots of those and you can subscribe your way out of that ecology, that might be the "logic" behind such a high per-month cost. It's still really objectionable to me that they'd be planning the "licensed service" approach to their system in any respect. Why would I subscribe to something that holds my PCs and adventures hostage to my continuing subscription? The 4E platform means that I never purchased all the 4E print books and my PCs would have been locked behind the paywall if not for the work of the Trad Games thread and the people who updated the 4E character builder that ran on your own PC instead of the platform. That, in turn, means I will never play 4E again, because I no longer have access to all the rules. Why I'd convert to One to knowingly get myself into the same situation totally escapes me.
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Jan 17, 2023 21:55
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Narsham posted:Are they still doing that thing where their big splat-book releases end up featured in an adventure path that's all but unplayable unless you buy the new rules compendium or This is a bizarre question when the entirety of both PF1 and PF2 "big splat-book releases" are available for free.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:12
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 PF2e's Reddit page got a pretty big bump, whether that translates to more sales/players in the long-term who knows. When GW was making GBS threads the bed and cancelled Warhammer Fantasy, Mantic made noises about getting a big increase in players but either they didn't or no one stuck around. Not really the exact same scenario but 
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