Kestral posted:Exactly, the whole point of this next phase of D&D's life-cycle is to make it Dungeons & Dragons As a Service: the same game, but now with patch notes and slowly being made into a walled garden. Edition changes create competitors like Paizo, but you can boil the frog quite readily. Can someone explain to me what a walled garden is? I've seen a lot of explanations and uses of the term and I don't get it. It's either: - A highly pretentious term for "this is a rich person thing" like playing competitive warhammer - Term for geek subcultures that name themselves like Whovians and Trekkies - Specifically a highly niche thing that's highly niche by being expensive or can't really be enjoyed solo like going to gaming conventions (and I say niche as in, millions of people play DnD, 100k~ or so people go to conventions yearly)
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:06 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 19:56 |
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A walled garden is basically a way for a brand to control your experience with them/their products. It usually involves setting up a store and have all purchases related to that brand go through that store and nowhere else. Apple App Store and the various consoles over the last few decades are good examples. You can only use apps from the App Store on your iOS products and you can only run signed-by-console-manufacturer games on the consoles. No home brew allowed without brand approval.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:14 |
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Can someone explain to me what a walled garden is? I've seen a lot of explanations and uses of the term and I don't get it. in this context, I'm fairly sure "walled garden" refers to playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as an experience that is very tightly controlled by WOTC itself that is, if you play it through their VTT, then it's difficult-if-not-impossible to tinker with the rules and/or make up things yourself
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:15 |
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Dawgstar posted:We live in the Critical Role world where one of the characters was really good with guns so it's not surprising they're introducing firearms as standard. Mercer's rules for them are better but still have issues. They do have equivalent stats to ranged weapons, usually one die type nicer or an improved max range. They cost a lot more gold and have the misfire rule which is a lot better then the old "explode on a one" but still can be frustrating as hell in play. quote:Misfire. Whenever you make an attack roll with a firearm, and the dice roll is equal to or lower than the weapon’s Misfire score, the weapon misfires. The attack misses, and the weapon cannot be used again until you spend an action to try and repair it. To repair your firearm, you must make a successful Tinker’s Tools check (DC equal to 8 + misfire score). If your check fails, the weapon is broken and must be mended out of combat at a quarter of the cost of the firearm. Creatures who use a firearm without being proficient increase the weapon’s misfire score by 1. https://www.critrolestats.com/blog/2017/2/20/gun-attack-rolls
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:20 |
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The thing about their VTT is that it's not rules enforced, like you have 30 movement you can move wherever you want and it's on the GM to limit it. It's a walled garden in the sense it will only work with things for Dungeons and Dragons. But other than that you can do whatever. Like you could probably use it for anything, but there just wouldn't be built in support for running it so you'd need to like manually roll the dice or whatever for other systems. But like you could run a Pathfinder game in it but it obviously wouldn't have Pathfinder sheets.and you'd have to manage those elsewhere, and just use the 3d VTT for the map. Well, depending on how good the creation and mod tools are I suppose. I wouldn't be shocked if people mod in other systems.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:23 |
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Dexo posted:The thing about their VTT is that it's not rules enforced, like you have 30 movement you can move wherever you want and it's on the GM to limit it. It does seem like it'll be doing some assistance, though--like, I think I saw something in the video about them highlighting what tiles are within your 30' movement but not limiting your movement to those tiles? Honestly, that's probably the best way for them to handle it That type of stuff will cut against using the VTT for non-D&D, though. Everything helpful becomes obnoxious as soon as you start using it against its intended purpose, and there are plenty of VTTs out there that will work better for other systems.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:32 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:in this context, I'm fairly sure "walled garden" refers to playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as an experience that is very tightly controlled by WOTC itself Doesn’t that make every MMORPG a “walled garden”? Is Solasta a “walled garden” because it enforces 5E SRD rules, or is it just a 5E CRPG? Can anyone develop a “walled garden” for 5E or is it only Hasbro that can do that? Is the current DM’s Guild a “walled garden” and if so, how much more “walled” do things become if they shift that content into D&D Beyond? WotC tried to do a walled garden and the backlash was so bad that their rules are now Creative Commons in perpetuity. I don’t think anyone opposes them having a mechanism to sell third party content for their VTT. And if they pull all their content from other VTTs nothing prohibits the sale of third party content there.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:33 |
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Narsham posted:Doesn’t that make every MMORPG a “walled garden”? Yes. You can't add your own content/mods into WoW. It's contentious because a TRPG generally is not that. One might say that organized play like Pathfinder Society is a "walled garden" in that rules interpretations are supposed to be fairly consistent and/or strict, and that the content you play through is fairly set, but that doesn't make the Pathfinder books themselves a walled garden, and you do get value out of subjecting yourself to this model by having a group and a DM that you can generally count on always being available, the same way that WoW is a walled garden in exchange for all the content that you get.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:37 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Yes. You can't add your own content/mods into WoW. WoW’s a bad example. You can’t add your own content but modding the game is a surprisingly important thing when you get into it.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:43 |
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The worry is that WOTC will create a "right way" to play D&D that mostly-requires us to use their VTT, and house rules will be difficult or impossible to set up. So if you would rather do side initiative, or want all your to-hit rolls to be 3d6 instead if 1d20, or want a weapon that does 2d30+3d5 damage, you'll be SOL.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:45 |
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Adding guns to the PHB makes sense, both Critical Role and Spelljammer have characters that are fairly dependent on guns being available, and Artificers want to have them too. That said I can't imagine going back to D&D having managed to free myself from its shackles. I suppose I might do so as a player but I'm definitely not giving them money (unless they make more movies, I'll grudgingly pay for those).
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:46 |
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Mirage posted:The worry is that WOTC will create a "right way" to play D&D that mostly-requires us to use their VTT, and house rules will be difficult or impossible to set up. So if you would rather do side initiative, or want all your to-hit rolls to be 3d6 instead if 1d20, or want a weapon that does 2d30+3d5 damage, you'll be SOL. They specifically said they aren't doing that. You will be able to just roll die. It will probably be less automated but you can just roll die in the VTT without having it tied to some thing.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:54 |
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Yes but it was transparently what they were trying to do before. That's why people are saying it's a backpedal.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:58 |
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A walled garden is when an entity that controls a platform exerts a lot of control over what the platform can be used for. It’s why people talk about the App Store being more of a walled garden than Google Play. In the present case, WotC has moved toward the “walled garden” model with the Dungeon Master’s Guild, which offers writers more use of WotC’s IP in exchange for very strong and arbitrary control over what gets to be in the DMG and exclusive rights to whatever people upload there (you can’t, e.g., publish the same thing on both DMG and DTRPG). WotC’s desire to turn DNDBeyond into a digital content hub that supports third party content sales is a straightforward continuation of that model, and it’s what they’re trying to center people’s experience with the game around (according to their recent statements, “One” refers to how centralized the new game is going to be around this hub). The more WotC pushes people toward their own digital platform for obtaining new content the more control they’ll have over it and the more of a “walled garden” D&D as a brand will become. Or at least, that’s probably what they’re hoping for. This is by the way the likely reason the OGL debacle even happened. WotC was most likely going to deprecate the old OGL because they wanted people to use whatever license agreement is attached to their Beyond 3PP setup, which will likely look much more like the DMG deal than the OGL.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 15:58 |
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The point of their new VTT is not to limit what you can do INSIDE it, but to make playing in it so easy that you stop using the other 3rd party VTTs to play D&D. The D&D (and Pathfinder) support on Foundry, for example, is incredibly expansive, but there is still the hurdle of loading all the modules, assets, and learning how to do basic coding to make it all work. Currently that's one of the only options for really free-form "do what you want" online D&D play. They want to create a VTT that already has all the D&D rules hard-coded into the VTT, so DMs and players can just log on and press easy to use buttons to do things that Foundry can also do but takes a bit of getting used to. Once you're in that VTT though they are banking that you will be less likely to decide to suddenly change course and play CoC, since their VTT doesn't run it and you are not going to want to go through the trouble of remembering how to use Foundry (and moving all your players over there). On a side-note, this is why other gaming companies like Paizo or Chaosium are making deals with already existing 3rd party VTTs to become the "one-stop" product for that game. They realize what WotC is trying to do and are trying to put their flags down in certain regions so that there is a reason for players to stay there.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 16:07 |
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Once you're in that VTT though they are banking that you will be less likely to decide to suddenly change course and play CoC, since their VTT doesn't run it and you are not going to want to go through the trouble of remembering how to use Foundry (and moving all your players over there). Yeah I think this is a key part of it. It’s the whole embrace, extend, extinguish poo poo. Right now it’s mostly people’s attachment to their physical books and knowledge of 5e rules/world info that keep them tethered to the brand. WotC wants to add an account with digital purchases and familiarity with/preference for their house VTT to that list of attachments.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 16:15 |
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I’ve always just treated guns as crossbow rules. And I let them be interchangeable as long as you pick one. Like, I know a lot of folks like to go ‘ok but a gun is more powerful than’ yatta yatta. But as DM I want to provide that bringing a gun to a sword fight fantasy and still have it generally balanced. I’m not super concerned about realism when the elf can lob fireballs at a dragon.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 16:22 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:Yes but it was transparently what they were trying to do before. That's why people are saying it's a backpedal. Even before they turned back the actual game play portion was going to be the same in the VTT. The stuff outside the VTT was where they were attempting to exerting control.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 16:42 |
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Yeah, a walled garden has 2 parts: The garden: nice features that make you want to go there. The walls: Outside resources cannot be used with those nice features. Or even if they technically can be used, they are made intentionally difficult to use. So you end up just buying everything through the single source of the garden instead of a variety of sources that may have existed before. So in this case you get nice features: rules integration and good-looking built in resources, especially when using paid modules. The walls would be things like: You cannot (easily) bring in resources from modules you didn't buy through their system. You cannot (easily) add in rules handling for any content you didn't buy through their system. So homebrew, 3rd party content, older WotC content, and pirated content may be possible to use, but they will all be lovely and annoying to use and notably worse than anything you buy on their store.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 17:25 |
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Saxophone posted:I’ve always just treated guns as crossbow rules. And I let them be interchangeable as long as you pick one.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 17:33 |
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In GURPS, the advantage of guns is that they do a lot more damage for less investment in strength, since damage with almost all low tech ranged wepaons is based on strength. Even a 9mm pistol is as powerful as a very strong bow-user, and much less awkward. Crossbows don't use their user's strength for damage, usually, but often using a windlass requires a basline of strength anyway that can be costly. Of course, you'll never reload a windlass-using crossbow or an early firearm inside a practical combat in GURPS, and a bow is a lot of points to invest to be able to shoot every turn. Bows feel awkward in GURPS because the baseline is an AR-15, and not the baseline is a shortbow.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 18:06 |
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Arivia posted:It's also old and significantly culturally outdated. As much as I love my collection of rapidly aging FR novels, they ARE rapidly aging. We've now gone through a decade of just Drizzt novels and maybe two Ed Greenwood Elminster books. WotC had to be sued to get that new Dragonlance book printed. A pretty thorough analysis, thank you. I will be seeking it soon with a bunch of friends, it will be interesting to see how much repurposed lore it features
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 20:59 |
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https://twitter.com/danielhkwan/status/1643236985052725248 Here's a write up from someone there.
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 22:04 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, people said the same things about crossbows that they said about guns, but fantasy games don't usually treat crossbows as an armor-piercing superweapon. I guess there's this idea that if a sling does 1d4 and a shortbow does 1d6 and a longbow does 1d8, a gun has to do more damage than that and a raygun has to do even more damage. One of my favorite things about Index Card RPG is that all damage is normalized so it’s just flat 1d8 with a weapon, period. You don’t have to worry about a bunch of other weird bullshit and you can just use the weapon that sounds cool or fits your character and that’s that. Plus it allows for some dope combat improv wherein folks are picking things up and bashing them into people or doing sweet kicks for their attacks, etc. n D&D so often I’m just like ‘I have that new sword I got! Oh wait, it’s a short sword. Sigh. Ok I swing with my axe.’
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# ? Apr 4, 2023 23:49 |
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Guns and goliaths in the phb? Oh boy I can't wait to hear what they said about the warlord! Hello? Hello? Anyone?
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 00:46 |
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Legit happy Goliaths are becoming core, they deserve it. Now, making orcs core and not goblins? That's some bullshit, could've cut the gnome.
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 14:18 |
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Azran posted:That's some bullshit, could've cut the gnome. They made that mistake ones before...
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 14:23 |
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Azran posted:Now, making orcs core and not goblins? That's some bullshit, could've cut the gnome. Woah hey now, there's only so much Pathfinder you can sneak in at once.
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 14:39 |
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Somewhere on the Coast, a Wizard just got inspired and scribbled down "4 action economy"
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 14:44 |
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Saxophone posted:One of my favorite things about Index Card RPG is that all damage is normalized so it’s just flat 1d8 with a weapon, period. You don’t have to worry about a bunch of other weird bullshit and you can just use the weapon that sounds cool or fits your character and that’s that. Yeah, I like that. One of my favorite hacks for BECMI is just having any weapon you use do damage equal to your hit dice.
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 14:44 |
Thanks for all of the answers
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# ? Apr 5, 2023 22:19 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNWrfLV_K0E Old guy complains about D&D and WoTC is woke and "filled with 90% left wokists with blue hair and use pronouns...They are the real racists!" He's complaining about a fantasy world is not his fantasy world anymore. Why yes, race does come up. And it gets worse and worse through the video. If you want to watch it, better be fast before it gets taken down. He complains that every module has gay people in it in every page. And demonic themed adventures too where you join with the devils every module too! He believes some of the writers have sold their souls to the devil. Then he complains about Tieflings are children of daemons but then wants half orcs still. I was originally not sure about removing half elves etc...well he's convinced me now. It needs to be removed. Make it someone's culture. Comstar fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Apr 7, 2023 |
# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:20 |
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I couldn't be more happy that we've made this pissbaby's hobby gay.
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:23 |
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Is the old guy anyone of importance? I generally don't watch rear end in a top hat's videos on the principal of "Don't give them the views," so I don't particularly want to click on it if it's just some rando.
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:40 |
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Eh gently caress ttaj Guy. Like you are souless and even Lip service toward this stuff Is fine too because at least Is something. And it's fine
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:41 |
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Comstar posted:He's complaining about a fantasy world is not his fantasy world anymore.
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:52 |
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The internet is filled to the brim with these types of losers deliberately trying to provoke a reaction.
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 15:55 |
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Halloween Jack posted:For an idea of what this guy's fantasy world is: He's doing a playthrough of Skyrim with a "chainmail microkini" mod. Imagining this on a male argonian
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 16:10 |
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I mean everyone should waer chailnail microkini tight, male and female enand sonk
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 16:18 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 19:56 |
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He sounds like the sort of guy who legit tries to build a Peasant Railgun and then cries for fifteen minutes when the GM says "uhhhh no."
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# ? Apr 7, 2023 16:22 |