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Ghost Leviathan posted:Generic and boring is about the worst that RPG art can be, whether traced, AI generated or just lazy and unoriginal. Surely it can't be that hard to get some halfway competent artists nowadays, the whole cottage industry has never been more thriving, and they're probably cheaper than Pinkertons. Ignoring the more recent issue of AI art, I think a big part of the problem is the concept of visual brand identity and the way it plays out in a big company like WotC. There's an official house art style they hold to, and the style they picked is super bland action realism--a safe style that makes it pretty easy to swap out artists interchangeably but that makes my eyes absolutely glaze over. I think it's possible to have a decent brand art style with a big property--Warcraft looks pretty charming and stays distinctive. D&D is bound to a boring horse, though. Strong agree on it being more important for RPG art to be evocative than technically competent, too. I love all the old OD&D scribbles, and I more or less started on 3e.
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Aug 6, 2023 08:20
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I have seen my 'artwork'; I'm actually overvaluing it. As someone who "can't draw" to another, it is because you haven't found a technique or teacher or medium or method or style that will resonate with your brain to produce what you want. What I mean is that I genuinely believe that, under the right circumstances, anyone can create appealing vidual art and that giving up too early and/or not finding right medium/method/etc is the actual biggest hurdle in learning how to create art. I think that you have a pessimistic view of your own potential and I hope that one day your skills improve so you can be satisfied with the quality of the art you produce.
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Aug 6, 2023 08:20
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Hey, maybe some people aren't good at art and it's okay rather than being a personal failing.
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Aug 6, 2023 08:37
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WotC's current house style is bad for both Magic and D&D. Usually artists who break the house style are either good or at least distinctive while being bad. This art is bad by looking like the most generic stable diffusion are possible.
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Aug 6, 2023 09:36
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Even the Pokemon card game has lots of fun with the art because that's what gets people excited to buy the latest picture of Pikachu but this time he's in a really badass pose or doing the electric slide or has a really silly hat.
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Aug 6, 2023 10:10
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Roadie posted:I see basically this same explanation every time poo poo like this happens and I still find it bizarre that apparently nobody in the industry, including Wizards, which has a gigantic pipeline for art for Magic cards, has bothered to do anything to fix the processes that lead to it. The entire thing might be different depending on the company, for example, apparently THIS art has been sitting somewhere for a year and WotC never noticed it was dogshit, which is actually fairly impressive. I honestly am kind of surprised at how WotC can consistently demonstrate practices that completely work opposite of what a functional company of it's size should be doing. However, for the specific example I gave from Paizo, what you need to remember is that these are for products that were being produced on a monthly subscription schedule with set dates for getting things to the printer so that products could be shipped on time. Just from a purely functional standpoint, copy will tend to be written faster than art. But also, copy can be turned in as rough drafts and then edited and sent back for revision during a development period, where art will tend to be maybe a rough sketch but not much other warnings that things are going wrong. One of the issues they would run into would be an artist that was radio silent for the whole period and then would send them beautiful art on the day it was due, so basically they'd get all the anxiety of someone who might be flaking only for everything turning out okay. The solution was basically to only work with artists they found dependable and to rarely risk trying new artists because they didn't want to get burned. For the example from the Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5e book, it was just pure utter betrayal by the artist. None of the art "looked" bad, but it was unsolicited and unattributed photographs of real people, and it took the artist copying a really distinctive set of people for fans to realize that ALL of the art might be more of the same, and by the time that happened Gen Con was 1.5 months away and there was no chance to fix the problem. You basically had all the eyes of the fanbase looking at those pictures and not immediately seeing the problem, so even a really on the ball art editor probably was going to miss it. EDIT: TL;DR Most companies have to meet publication schedules, so they can't sit around looking at every picture and since pictures come in last they will just miss poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2023 10:53
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Anonymous Zebra posted:However, for the specific example I gave from Paizo, what you need to remember is that these are for products that were being produced on a monthly subscription schedule with set dates for getting things to the printer so that products could be shipped on time. Something else to note here is that in addition to any self-set publication and shipping date, a lot of the printers that TRPG publishers use have big queues of companies lining up to have books published, and so you when you make arrangements with them they give you a block of time during which they'll be able to work on your stuff, and if you have to cancel for whatever reason they can't just hold your reservation open indefinitely. So there are multiple levels of time pressure at work for physical printed books. My admittedly extremely limited experience in the field of "writing some RPG stuff and handling art direction responsibilities for it" has been that: 1). Art definitely does seem to be the stuff that winds up arriving last. 2). The way for this to not matter seems to be to only publish digitally and/or have a release date of "when it's done." If the stuff I worked on had hard set street dates then I can imagine it would be a lot more stressful wondering if X or Y art piece would be done by then and if it would need revisions if so. I've been fortunate that my own experiences have been much more relaxed and I've been able to go over the art with the artists throughout the process in a more leisurely fashion. That said, WotC is also a significantly bigger and wealthier company with an actual art department and stuff, so while there are absolutely factors to consider with the process of making an RPG for publication, "we sat on this dogshit piece of art for a year and nobody said anything" feels like more a product of poor management practices than some last-minute nailbiter they had to pull the trigger on.
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Aug 6, 2023 11:19
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Thanlis posted:That’s awful. I think the core problem is using “infestation” to refer to sentient beings; that’s a classic nativist trope. From their perspective, if they used "colonization" or "settlement" it would confuse the base. Also "ethically solving" an "infestation" of sentient beings is some seriously chilling verbage. Like, does history contain a single instance of one people ethically displacing another? E: "Chill out, we're just ethically cleansing "
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Aug 6, 2023 14:23
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Nuns with Guns posted:Speaking of racisms, there's also some bizarre phrasing in the preview text for the giant book too: Yeah, I *get* what they're trying to say, but that is some awful word choice. The worst thing is that you can completely cut the sentence, and nothing is lost from the paragraph. It reads as someone who was trying to be clever and witty but needed one editing pass for someone to go, "What the gently caress, dude? We're cutting that." So, you know, it all boils down to terrible quality control. Again.
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Aug 6, 2023 15:31
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Nuns with Guns posted:Speaking of racisms, there's also some bizarre phrasing in the preview text for the giant book too: even without the weird fantasy racism angle the authorial voice here is poo poo. "looking for that sweet, sweet vengeance" sounds like a reddit post about D&D circa 2008
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Aug 6, 2023 15:40
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Ernest Cline presents: The Monster Manual
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Aug 6, 2023 15:42
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It's never really made sense to me why always evil sapient creatures are so pervasive in RPGs. Humans do terrible poo poo all the time, why not just like, have the goblins hire you to hunt down goblins doing terrible poo poo? kidnapping people or whatever. Like a fantasy A Team
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Aug 6, 2023 15:47
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Improbable Lobster posted:As someone who "can't draw" to another, it is because you haven't found a technique or teacher or medium or method or style that will resonate with your brain to produce what you want. What I mean is that I genuinely believe that, under the right circumstances, anyone can create appealing vidual art and that giving up too early and/or not finding right medium/method/etc is the actual biggest hurdle in learning how to create art. I am 60 years old. I know I can not draw because I have spent fifty of those years trying to, using all different styles. I can use Photoshop like a digital Man Ray and I can craft AI prompts that produce what I want, so I will use digital collage as a technique.
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Aug 6, 2023 15:48
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Nuns with Guns posted:Speaking of racisms, there's also some bizarre phrasing in the preview text for the giant book too: Well, here's your problem. You've got frost giants. Now you're gonna want me to fix this 'ethically', if you know what I mean. Sure, it'll cost you a little extra, but you don't want to see what happens if we do it the other way.
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Aug 6, 2023 16:48
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Lamuella posted:Hey, maybe some people aren't good at art and it's okay rather than being a personal failing. It absolutely is not a personal failing and I apologize if I came off as saying that it is. I was trying to communicate that I believe it is a goal that anyone can reach, rather than something that some people can or can't do, inherently.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:25
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Generic and boring is about the worst that RPG art can be, whether traced, AI generated or just lazy and unoriginal. Surely it can't be that hard to get some halfway competent artists nowadays, the whole cottage industry has never been more thriving, and they're probably cheaper than Pinkertons. Yeah, that better captures my problem with more recent D&D art. It's just boring! It doesn't make me care enough to look into any of its specifics to find particular flaws.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:46
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DalaranJ posted:Well, here's your problem. You've got frost giants. Can't you just capture them under a really big glass and release them at a nice Glacier upstate?
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Aug 6, 2023 17:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah, that better captures my problem with more recent D&D art. It's just boring! It doesn't make me care enough to look into any of its specifics to find particular flaws. There is an unfathomably large audience for just the most generic fantasy possible. 800 page doorstops whose only appeal is an exhaustively thought out magic system.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:05
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Lumbermouth posted:800 page doorstops whose only appeal is an exhaustively thought out magic system.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:07
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FMguru posted:..that still doesn't work. I figured it was a dig at Sanderson, who makes it work as well as it needs to.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:09
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If people wanted a good working magic system, Ara Magica would have replaced D&D by now. The shameful state of the industry sickens me.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:11
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I'll make the obligatory post that everyone hates, but which I will make anyway because it's an echo chamber otherwise: Frost Giants are axiomatically evil monsters defined by how much they love to enslave and murder everyone weaker and smaller than they are, and who "respect only brute strength." If they were human, they'd be just about the worst humans you can think of, and you would cheer on whoever was making them go the gently caress home. Fortunately, they're literally not human, and it is okay to have stories wherein you kill them just because saw someone them coming over the hill - because when frost giants come over the hill, they're here to burn your village and kill everyone who raises a hand to them and make everyone else chattel. The only way it should get weird is if you do the stupid "Oh no, here's frost giant baaaabiiiiiies, what nooooow paladin???" gotcha trick. There are other games, games which are not heroic adventure stories, where the genre and the setting change these things enough that you might want to not immediately kill something who lusts for slavin' and raidin' 24/7, but D&D is not that game unless you hack it. But we've had this argument a thousand times before (except it's normally about orcs or drow) and everything that everyone is going to say from here on out is pretty much scripted, so let's just get it over with. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 6, 2023 18:58
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Kestral posted:I'll make the obligatory post that everyone hates, but which I will make anyway because it's an echo chamber otherwise: If posting in this thread is such a burden for you, you always have the option of not posting.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:01
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Did you know it’s an option to not decide to explicitly start a fight by declaring actually axiomatically evil races and extermination of them are good and a staple of heroic adventure that should go unquestioned, especially since you’re, again, explicitly trying to start an argument you are saying you don’t even care about because something something echo chambers Like, you can just not do that It’s free
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Aug 6, 2023 19:06
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I have written plenty of 'heroic adventure stories' where the antagonists are not axiomatically evil. You can just do that. It's not hard.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:08
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Kestral posted:I'll make the obligatory post that everyone hates, but which I will make anyway because it's an echo chamber otherwise: were you mad that the "discussion" in here about ai art didn't turn out the way you liked or something so you decided to poo poo up the thread instead? anyway this is pretty disingenous, since the bigby's book and storm king's thunder before it were all about fleshing out giants and their culture (based on work from a 2e FR book, giantcraft). even the frostmourne monster in question is "this comes back to haunt you if you don't kill it honourably according to giant tradition" so there's a specific moral code for frost giants being described in the game system and the players are directly urged to interact with it.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:10
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Infestation is just a weird word to use for a creature bigger than a human. A whole lot of bears wouldn't be an infestation.Kestral posted:I'll make the obligatory post that everyone hates, but which I will make anyway because it's an echo chamber otherwise:
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Aug 6, 2023 19:17
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Kestral posted:Fortunately, they're literally not human, and it is okay to have stories wherein you kill them just because saw someone them coming over the hill - because when frost giants come over the hill, they're here to burn your village and kill everyone who raises a hand to them and make everyone else chattel. Sounds like video games might be more your speed.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:20
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Terrible Opinions posted:Infestation is just a weird word to use for a creature bigger than a human. A whole lot of bears wouldn't be an infestation. Grafton, NH would disagree.
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Aug 6, 2023 19:35
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Lumbermouth posted:Grafton, NH would disagree. Libertarians on the other hand...
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Aug 6, 2023 19:54
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Night10194 posted:I have written plenty of 'heroic adventure stories' where the antagonists are not axiomatically evil. You can just do that. It's not hard. Or make them some pathological offshoot like neonazis or something, not a whole culture of of evil. Also, your reminder that WOTC exists for MTG and licensing IPs, competency in their D&D division is not essential to their task. This is another symptom of that.
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Aug 6, 2023 20:47
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Lumbermouth posted:Grafton, NH would disagree. As someone who lives near Grafton, we like our bear friends, actually. Hostile V posted:
This, though... yeah. 3 Action Economist fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 22:23
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I love a good Thermian argument
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Aug 6, 2023 23:59
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MonsterEnvy posted:Well that’s some staff writer for beyond, the actual entry in the book does not mention ethics or anything like infestation. I was playing BG3 last night and forgot to look back at this thread until it seemed like things were moving on, but since it's come up again I appreciate the context about this just being a website blurb that is stupid. It's still dumb and it sounds like it's undermining the whole point of the book a bit, but it's amusing to see what's not getting much scrutiny.
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Aug 7, 2023 01:11
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Tarnop posted:I love a good Thermian argument
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Aug 7, 2023 06:18
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Name Change posted:The AI barbarian posted in this thread looks like three different figures glued together, and not seamlessly. OtspIII posted:Ignoring the more recent issue of AI art, I think a big part of the problem is the concept of visual brand identity and the way it plays out in a big company like WotC. There's an official house art style they hold to, and the style they picked is super bland action realism--a safe style that makes it pretty easy to swap out artists interchangeably but that makes my eyes absolutely glaze over. The characters themselves tend to look like screenshots from Skyrim, in the specific technical sense of being made up of pieces that don't fit together perfectly. In particular, I remember a picture of a tiefling magician whose glowing eyes were burning through the fabric of his hood. Many artists struggle with hands and feet, but that sticks with me because it's the kind of mistake a real artist would almost certainly never make.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:01
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Stable diffusion is just the particular AI used to make the pictures. Each of the commercial AIs have stylistic tells because of their individual stolen source libraries and methods of collaging those pictures together into a final product.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:10
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Averting my eyes from your reply because, as I said, I won't be learning that.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:12
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i know "early MTG cards with more distinct and less constrained artstyles are cooler" is like the most basic-rear end possible opinion but it's also kind of true for all the people who hate the crossover stuff for WOTC/MTG it'd be so much cooler if like, the upcoming Fallout cards were done in a variety of artstyles instead of what it'll probably look like, which is "video game concept art"
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Aug 7, 2023 17:12
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They do have a variety of art styles, just only in the secret lairs and weird promos you have to pay more for. WotC knows their current house style is bad, it's on purpose so they can charge you more for better art.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:13
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