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https://youtu.be/lj3esbC29bE https://darringtonpress.com/candela/ Critical Role previewed their new game/system and to great shock it's not a 5e clone but a simplified Blades in the Dark game. They're taking some big liberties with core systems (removing Effect basically kills my interest in their whole system) but this will have positive fallout for the hobby at large.
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May 26, 2023 04:27
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Bottom Liner posted:https://youtu.be/lj3esbC29bE I would have cut position before effect, knowing how you're going to mechanically affect the clock is super important to decision-making in BitD (even though I personally have to admit I have trouble smoothly adjudicating both in play).
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May 26, 2023 04:44
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BinaryDoubts posted:I would have cut position before effect, knowing how you're going to mechanically affect the clock is super important to decision-making in BitD (even though I personally have to admit I have trouble smoothly adjudicating both in play). I agree with cutting position not effect. I always teach it as risk and reward though, those terms just click for most folks a lot better.
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May 26, 2023 04:48
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https://twitter.com/SpenserStarke/status/1661857619496308736?t=sgfItazdZH90Rc00NZZnWg&s=19 https://twitter.com/john_harper/status/1661828610850947074 For anyone wondering about credit / inspiration from Forged
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May 26, 2023 06:05
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So in the Twitter discussion on the D&D book price rise, one of the points someone made - though without sourcing it - is that recently Wizards increased the margins and text size in their books for better accessibility. Which, as far as that goes, is a good thing - but they haven't upped page counts to compensate (according to this person), so the price rise means that customers are going to be paying more money for less content. Is anyone in a position to confirm/refute? (I'm really interested to see what effect the price hike has long term. It makes the ol' sunk cost fallacy "but it's too expensive to get into another game" argument even more tenuous if sticking with D&D becomes notably more expensive. And if it teaches customers that big glossy hardcover books crammed with art are super-expensive, it might nudge people to either a) pay indie producers producing such things what their products cost to make or b) stop being led by the nose by glitzy production values and think about content more.)
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May 26, 2023 15:23
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I generally think that thinking of projects as money per page/content is a bit silly. Most people don't think of tabletop games as being too expensive to get into another game, as far as dollars, it's more time investment and futzing around and internalizing the rules. Or like I guess there is a sunk cost thing where if you've spent a ton on a game, it's kinda human nature to want to justify those dollars spent and keep using that. Sure you have assholes complaining about some indie dev "charging too much" for their PDF ignoring the cost of art and time spent iterating and playtesting the rules. Like Pathfinder 2e is literally free. You can go to Nethys and get all of the rules and character creation info, and then go to pathbuilder and pretty much play legally without spending a dollar. And it's not like WotC doesn't know that people use 5eTools, and other less than legal sources/character tools to play their game. Stuff is either good and worth it or it's not, and that's just kinda up to whoever's 60bux it is. If the Art and tactile feel of the book is worth it, or if they'd rather just use like Beyond, and pay like 30 bucks for everything digitally. It feels like printed books in general are moving towards becoming far more niche. Maybe that's just my weird anecdotal brain as at this point I mostly only play online, but even when in person at a lgs I used Beyond/Nethys. And Online, I definitely just use PDF's. I still buy books from time to time, like the Lancer Book, and I backed the physical copy of that avatar game because I like the art, and almost view them explicitly as an art book. But rarely ever play from them. Dexo fucked around with this message at 15:47 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 15:39
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Ryan Dancey posted an update on his dumbass tweet btw: https://twitter.com/rsdancey/status/1661409374735327235 quote:Yesterday I engaged in a discussion about the lack of representation of women as designers in the gaming community. It was not my finest moment. I’m embarrassed and mad at myself for the tone and content of my contribution to that discussion. It doesn’t reflect my views and it certainly doesn’t reflect the views of the company I work for. So... "oops my bad, I promise to do better, please wait a year to yell at me further."
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May 26, 2023 16:30
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BinaryDoubts posted:I would have cut position before effect, knowing how you're going to mechanically affect the clock is super important to decision-making in BitD (even though I personally have to admit I have trouble smoothly adjudicating both in play). In the quick start, they don’t describe position or effect or clocks. It’s unclear how much will be added back in for the full game.
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May 26, 2023 16:44
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I like having physical books to reference/read in the bathroom but D&D's poo poo's getting expensive and there's less and less player facing stuff in them.
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May 26, 2023 16:46
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Warthur posted:So in the Twitter discussion on the D&D book price rise, one of the points someone made - though without sourcing it - is that recently Wizards increased the margins and text size in their books for better accessibility. As someone who wants fewer pages and honestly, more quick plot hooks than endless lovely adventures with terrible maps that I won't use anyway, I don't really get it, page count certainly doesn't equate to quality. But I'm an OSR guy, so my opinion on this isn't that valuable since I can literally just draw up a map, use my personal, memorized restock table(it's geared to my homebrew setting, so it includes monsters/treasure) to populate (or not populate) the rooms, step back, see what kind of narrative is going on in the dungeon, add flavor to said dungeon based on that narrative and then I will have a non-linear thirty room dungeon with factional play that will take like eight sessions to fully explore if the players care to. It took me a few years to be able to do it as easily as I can, since the process went from taking weeks to taking about half an hour. I have also learned that most people kind of don't really want to do that. Has anyone here noticed a lot of people sort of read dungeon adventures like some kind of weird-rear end comic book or novel and never run them or care about the utility at the table? I see a lot of stuff get praised and then I read it and it's like, a horrid overcomplicated mess that would be an actual nightmare to run at the table. There's an adventure in the WFRP line that requires the PCs to take the hook that they recognize a PC from a previous adventure that's an optional encounter and decide to go balls-deep chasing this lady across the entire Empire of Man because they're a little sketchy. There's a lot of nonsense like that in publishing. I understand buying adventures to steal ideas from, that's a great idea, but I have never in my life ran an adventure, published, without severe editing.
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May 26, 2023 16:52
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Kurieg posted:I like having physical books to reference/read in the bathroom but D&D's poo poo's getting expensive and there's less and less player facing stuff in them. you need physical books for the bathroom if you're going to have those d&d shits
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May 26, 2023 16:53
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"The D&D Shits" are what you call the morning after game night, when you have to confront all that pizza, cheese dip, and luridly-colored mountain dew you downed.
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May 26, 2023 17:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:Ryan Dancey posted an update on his dumbass tweet btw: Why do these lovely apologies always say that it's not their view/not who they are? Like the original message was not an ambiguous miscommunication. It used very specific language to make a very specific point that absolutely showed who he was. And obviously people are exactly who they are through a pr filter and definitely not in the heat of a moment.
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May 26, 2023 17:17
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GrandpaPants posted:Why do these lovely apologies always say that it's not their view/not who they are? Like the original message was not an ambiguous miscommunication. It used very specific language to make a very specific point that absolutely showed who he was. Exactly what I was going to say. "my long essay and responses do not reflect my views" is such a cop out.
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May 26, 2023 17:24
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GrandpaPants posted:Why do these lovely apologies always say that it's not their view/not who they are? Like the original message was not an ambiguous miscommunication. It used very specific language to make a very specific point that absolutely showed who he was.
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May 26, 2023 17:53
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Cessna posted:You know your poo poo, write a wargame! Not to send to this jackass, he doesn't deserve it - but some company does. I've been tempted to, but the Cool(TM) answer is that right now I'm already too busy writing a Vietnam War TTRPG. The slightly more honest truth is that that only takes up a fraction of my time, but I'm too scattershot to commit to big projects and actually complete any of them. Like my Phoenix Command firearms-and-tank-combat retroclone, and my game about playing hackers, and my game about fantasy Holy Roman Empire inspired by the cRPG Darklands, and its sequel set in Machiavellian Italy, and I kind of wanted to see if I could build a trade-focused RPG on top of Phil Eklund's High Frontier map or the core mechanics of Merchants & Maraduers... And I'm sort of also tinkering around in Unreal Engine 4 because I can't program worth a poo poo, but I have Ideas(TM) about Fallout and Deus Ex-inspired FPSRPGs set in Cold War-esque concrete installations... ...and I've also been getting really deep into 1989 Cold War army lists for Eugen System's Steel Division and WARNO? I have two books in German, a language I can't actually read, simply because they had some really good information about NATO's General Defence Plan 1988 and Volksarmee planning opposite NORTHAG, and just yesterday I found some very interesting documents about Hungarian People's Army planning for (counter)attacks against Italy and Austria...
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May 26, 2023 18:25
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Language is imprecise and especially in text it's very possible for you to say something and be badly misunderstood. Or you can say something that means what you meant in isolation, but in a larger context that you misunderstood or just weren't paying attention to it ends up meaning something very different. There's been more than one occasion where I've typed something on these very forums and then read it back later and thought "Oh wait no that's not what I meant at all!" When that happens though it's usually very easy to pinpoint where things went wrong and actually concretely state your position and how you messed up communicating it. You don't need to say "that's not me" because you can say "this other opinion is me" instead. Or if someone realises they have some previously unexamined opinions that they're not comfortable with then they will want to change that. You don't say "that's not me", they say "this is me, I don't like that, I'm going to work on it and make amends". But if everyone interpreted your words correctly, and you don't actually see anything wrong with your opinions, and you're too stupid or your audience too smart (e: or your exposure too unambiguous) for you to convincingly pull off a fake version of one of the above, and pivoting your power base toward the people who agree with you isn't an option... well the only thing left is "that's not me", because anything more specific is beyond you. Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:35 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 18:26
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LatwPIAT posted:I've been tempted to, but the Cool(TM) answer is that right now I'm already too busy writing a Vietnam War TTRPG. If I can help, let me know, even if it's just backing the hell out of a kickstarter.
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May 26, 2023 18:33
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Has anyone here noticed a lot of people sort of read dungeon adventures like some kind of weird-rear end comic book or novel and never run them or care about the utility at the table? I see a lot of stuff get praised and then I read it and it's like, a horrid overcomplicated mess that would be an actual nightmare to run at the table. There's an adventure in the WFRP line that requires the PCs to take the hook that they recognize a PC from a previous adventure that's an optional encounter and decide to go balls-deep chasing this lady across the entire Empire of Man because they're a little sketchy. There's a lot of nonsense like that in publishing. I understand buying adventures to steal ideas from, that's a great idea, but I have never in my life ran an adventure, published, without severe editing. That's been a thing since at least the 90's, see literally every WoD supplement. I agree with you on not running adventures as written, and have said as much in my various WoD book reviews, because I personally enjoy the work of tweaking and shaping the story to my own taste and ideas, and because there's often bits in the provided adventure I think are bad or just don't click with what I'm trying to do. As reading material? They're fun and can be a neat view into how the creators of a game see the way the game should be played, or the what tickles their brain as a good adventure plot. Which of course varies wildly from "Hey that's pretty good" to "Oh sweet Jesus, this person should be on a list somewhere"
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May 26, 2023 18:42
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Physical RPG sourcebooks have, if anything, generally tracked under inflation over the last 50 years. My only gripe is when there aren’t cheaper digital alternatives.
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May 26, 2023 18:44
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Lamuella posted:Unless I'm reading it wrong they've said they're using the Open Roleplaying Content license. The FAQ has been updated: quote:Great question! We're committed to making the classes and rules open license, and at the moment the ORC license is our leading choice. It does not use an SRD. We're also looking at Creative Commons, though from the Kobold perspective, the ORC is more tailored for tabletop. Only one confused misunderstanding about how the licenses work. Not bad by industry standards.
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May 26, 2023 18:50
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LatwPIAT posted:I've been tempted to, but the Cool(TM) answer is that right now I'm already too busy writing a Vietnam War TTRPG. The slightly more honest truth is that that only takes up a fraction of my time, but I'm too scattershot to commit to big projects and actually complete any of them. Like my Phoenix Command firearms-and-tank-combat retroclone, and my game about playing hackers, and my game about fantasy Holy Roman Empire inspired by the cRPG Darklands, and its sequel set in Machiavellian Italy, and I kind of wanted to see if I could build a trade-focused RPG on top of Phil Eklund's High Frontier map or the core mechanics of Merchants & Maraduers... There have been two-ish Vietnam RPGs (Recon and Savage Worlds Tour of Duty). Recon was complete rear end even before Siembada picked it up for Palladium, and Tour of Duty was not your typical small unit operations, so I really would like to see what you come up with.
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May 26, 2023 20:46
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:There have been two-ish Vietnam RPGs (Recon and Savage Worlds Tour of Duty). Recon was complete rear end even before Siembada picked it up for Palladium, and Tour of Duty was not your typical small unit operations, so I really would like to see what you come up with. I'm co-writing the 2nd edition of PATROL. 
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May 26, 2023 21:25
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LatwPIAT posted:I've been tempted to, but the Cool(TM) answer is that right now I'm already too busy writing a Vietnam War TTRPG. The slightly more honest truth is that that only takes up a fraction of my time, but I'm too scattershot to commit to big projects and actually complete any of them. Sounds linke something that might easily pivot to a M*A*S*H themed TTRPG depending on the focus.
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May 26, 2023 21:34
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My totally unsolicited announcement of my opinions does not reflect my actual opinions.
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May 26, 2023 22:02
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I'm sure his friend s. Applecline was posting from his account by mistake.
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May 26, 2023 22:31
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:
I'm pretty sure this is just how the books are written. I've noticed some WotC adventure books will hide twists until they occur, not even setting it up for the DM in the early prep. So if the DM doesn't read ahead, they'll also be surprised that the character the party loves is actually Strahd in disguise. And since the DM didn't know that, a whole bunch of scenes may or may not suddenly make no sense. It really reads like some adventures are design to be enjoyed narratively and the play bits are tacked on because they remembered they're supposed to be selling a game.
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May 26, 2023 23:25
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Has anyone here noticed a lot of people sort of read dungeon adventures like some kind of weird-rear end comic book or novel and never run them or care about the utility at the table? I see a lot of stuff get praised and then I read it and it's like, a horrid overcomplicated mess that would be an actual nightmare to run at the table. There's an adventure in the WFRP line that requires the PCs to take the hook that they recognize a PC from a previous adventure that's an optional encounter and decide to go balls-deep chasing this lady across the entire Empire of Man because they're a little sketchy. There's a lot of nonsense like that in publishing. I understand buying adventures to steal ideas from, that's a great idea, but I have never in my life ran an adventure, published, without severe editing. I've been convinced for years that Paizo Adventure Paths are in many cases more like an Ideal Homes magazine than they are intended to be played. There's loads of material in them that looks great for a would be DM to read but in practice the PCs are only going to meet that NPC for one combat before killing them and giving them intricate page long backstories is fun, but irrelevant and therefore is a drag on the DM. (Paizo are far from the only ones, but the "New Adventure Path Section Monthly" is particularly egregious as is some of the fluff)
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May 27, 2023 01:52
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A lot of Adventures were pretty much intended as GM-reading that never actually makes it to the table and there have been some freelancers reporting that their editor told them the adventure they wrote was too branching and linear and it should follow a narrative plot. I think Paizo has gotten a little bit better at this one. They now have free Player's Guides for each adventure path to properly settle in players, and the very first adventure in the path gives the GM an overview of how the rest of the AP is going to play out so that the GM knows what to foreshadow and what to conceal. It's still mostly linear but that's just the cost of writing out 20 or whatever levels of narrative content.
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May 27, 2023 02:11
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm co-writing the 2nd edition of PATROL. 
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May 27, 2023 02:22
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm co-writing the 2nd edition of PATROL. Very excited for this
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May 27, 2023 03:07
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:There have been two-ish Vietnam RPGs (Recon and Savage Worlds Tour of Duty). Recon was complete rear end even before Siembada picked it up for Palladium, and Tour of Duty was not your typical small unit operations, so I really would like to see what you come up with. There was a good indie vietnam rpg called GRUNT iirc about the effects of fighting on the average soldier and how much ammo was wasted in just shooting bushes, not to mention hours of dread and minutes of death, or sitting at the camp later on with your buddies, trading war stories and cigarettes to survive.
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May 27, 2023 06:26
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Oh yeah, GRUNT. I forgot about that one. There was supposed to be a Vietnam Supplement for FGU's Merc, but that never got published, and there was also the 'Here There Be Tigers' sourcebook/adventure for Hero Games' Espionage RPG, which was about recovering American POWs still held in Vietnam and was written by Kevin Dockery (Morrow Project).
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May 27, 2023 15:09
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Warthur posted:So in the Twitter discussion on the D&D book price rise, one of the points someone made - though without sourcing it - is that recently Wizards increased the margins and text size in their books for better accessibility. I recall wizards stating they planned to increase text size a bit, but but also make books bigger. Next years PHB is supposed to be like 40 pages longer than the current one.
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May 28, 2023 01:40
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bewilderment posted:A lot of Adventures were pretty much intended as GM-reading that never actually makes it to the table and there have been some freelancers reporting that their editor told them the adventure they wrote was too branching and linear and it should follow a narrative plot. Some of the more recent adventure paths also pretty clearly state if an NPC will be recurring, or is secretly a villain even if the next book isn't out. Quest for the Frozen Flame blatantly tells the DM "This dude is a bad guy later, and it's built in that he'll be back in the next books. Keep that in mind." They also seem to give more options for NPC's to come back later on, or how to work something like that in if the DM wants to.
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May 28, 2023 20:01
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seaborgium posted:Some of the more recent adventure paths also pretty clearly state if an NPC will be recurring, or is secretly a villain even if the next book isn't out. Quest for the Frozen Flame blatantly tells the DM "This dude is a bad guy later, and it's built in that he'll be back in the next books. Keep that in mind." They also seem to give more options for NPC's to come back later on, or how to work something like that in if the DM wants to. That goes all the way back to I think the second Dragonlance module. At least then they were more explicit: you were supposed to accept their death state as taking them out of the present module, but make sure that there's a soap-opera like opening so that they can plausibly come back alive, later.
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May 28, 2023 20:10
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Patrol led to one of the best campaigns I've ever had. Really excited to see what comes in 2e!
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May 29, 2023 01:52
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Magnetic North posted:Unrelated but wtf: Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is ranked 4.75 weight on BGG?? That's as complicated as The Campaign for North Africa aka the "Italians Need Extra Water For Pasta" meme game. https://boardgamegeek.com/image/5621583/campaign-north-africa-desert-war-1940-43 It's worth noting that the Pasta Rule is not based on history. The folks at BGG theorize that it's a joke by the designer, Berg. The bigger issue for the Italian army was that their logistical system was so dysfunctional that troops had to spend long times with no field kitchens or cooked food at all. As a rule to represent "Italian logistics were a wasteful mess and negatively impacted combat effectiveness" it works well enough, but the idea that Italian units required twice as much water as German units because of all the pasta boiling is just a myth based on taking a game designer in-joke as academic fact. Edit: The rule was indeed a joke, as admitted by the designer: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4025488/campaign-north-africa-desert-war-1940-43 Further edit: one point I just spotted in Knox's "Hitler's Italian Allies" is that apparently a lot of the field kitchens sent from Italy for service in the desert where old clunky WW1 pieces and... wood fired... Reality trumps fiction? PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 10:00
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Kinda lol the reality makes the Italians look even more ridiculous. Sounds like they managed to have even worse to nonexistent logistics than the Nazis.
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May 29, 2023 13:38
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This was coming up in the White Wolf games thread. When, and if y'all know, why, did it kind of seem to get decided at some point that physical books need to be hardcover with full color art? The context here was, of course, bouncing off of the recent repeated gently caress-ups with outright tracing dudes in the Werewolf 5th Edition previews, in addition to even the non-traced stuff just seeming bland and lovely compared to a lot of the genuinely tone-setting and memorable (I won't necessarily say good, of course) art in the original Werewolf books. They clearly still have these guys' phone numbers.
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May 30, 2023 13:56
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