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That Old Tree posted:I'm skeptical that this will amount to any meaningful sea-change to the industry. The OGL thing and the lesser scandals like some AI art popping up are niche concerns that will be remembered by weirdos on Something Awful and other places that consistently give a poo poo about these subjects for one reason or another, but it's just not going to matter all that much, especially not when it's a year+ past when the new version of D&D comes out. There would be bloviating doomsayers and people digging up all the sins of WotC and Hasbro regardless if anything big or recent had actually happened, because a new not-an-edition is coming out and that happens every time. If anything imperils D&D it's going to be the thing that usually imperils stuff like this: expectations of infinite profit and growth meeting the cold hard reality that infinite profit and growth don't exist. I can easily see a world where Hasbro sets expectations for D&D to do eleventy gorillion dollars of profit and when that fails to happen they panic and start pulling plugs and putting plans on hold, this is the same thing that's happened in plenty of other industries and companies. Square Enix for example was and/or is infamous for setting absurd goals for games to reach and then decrying them as failures for merely performing objectively very well.
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Jan 4, 2024 05:05
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As we all know, literally every system not named "D&D" is a barren tree, which cannot bear fruit. So this Apocalypse World kickstarter didn't even crack $200k, and well, that's got to be the limit of anything derived from it, right? What was Magpie Games thinking, trying to use it for what must have been an expensive license with that Avatar game? Let me look at its kickstarter page for the first time and simultaneously take a big sip of this water. (standard disclaimer: again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. All is vanity, Qoheleth.)
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Jan 4, 2024 06:30
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Glazius posted:As we all know, literally every system not named "D&D" is a barren tree, which cannot bear fruit. So this Apocalypse World kickstarter didn't even crack $200k, and well, that's got to be the limit of anything derived from it, right? What was Magpie Games thinking, trying to use it for what must have been an expensive license with that Avatar game? Let me look at its kickstarter page for the first time and simultaneously take a big sip of this water. In fairness (to be clear I don't really care about being fair to this guy, he seems like a dipshit) his argument is less that other games can't have successful kickstarters but that in a post-D&D-centric industry these successful kickstarters will inevitably balkanize into a bunch of insular little fiefdoms and then die out without the same sorts of "network externalities" that D&D uses to perpetuate its market share. Basically, he's positing that even a successful non-D&D game will inevitably fade into obscurity because it won't have the secondary networks of third-party creators and podcasters and livestreamers and etc constantly keeping them fresh in peoples' minds.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:13
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Kai Tave posted:In fairness (to be clear I don't really care about being fair to this guy, he seems like a dipshit) his argument is less that other games can't have successful kickstarters but that in a post-D&D-centric industry these successful kickstarters will inevitably balkanize into a bunch of insular little fiefdoms and then die out without the same sorts of "network externalities" that D&D uses to perpetuate its market share. Basically, he's positing that even a successful non-D&D game will inevitably fade into obscurity because it won't have the secondary networks of third-party creators and podcasters and livestreamers and etc constantly keeping them fresh in peoples' minds. This feels like the plague of infinite growth but applied to sociology. People are just going to stop thinking about/playing/buying RPGs because there isn't enough third-party Content made about them? hwhat?
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Jan 4, 2024 07:32
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admanb posted:This feels like the plague of infinite growth but applied to sociology. People are just going to stop thinking about/playing/buying RPGs because there isn't enough third-party Content made about them? hwhat? That's more or less his entire argument yeah, and I'm not even being reductive. His "golden age" is one where everyone is making D&D content, talking about D&D, making D&D-compatible games, and his vision of a collapse is everyone making not-D&D games because they won't be compatible. His examples of this are how Matt Colville's upcoming game uses 2d6 instead of 1d20, or how Pathfinder no longer uses alignment.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:42
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Kai Tave posted:In fairness (to be clear I don't really care about being fair to this guy, he seems like a dipshit) his argument is less that other games can't have successful kickstarters but that in a post-D&D-centric industry these successful kickstarters will inevitably balkanize into a bunch of insular little fiefdoms and then die out without the same sorts of "network externalities" that D&D uses to perpetuate its market share. Basically, he's positing that even a successful non-D&D game will inevitably fade into obscurity because it won't have the secondary networks of third-party creators and podcasters and livestreamers and etc constantly keeping them fresh in peoples' minds. Well, yes, that's my point, that Avatar Legends is a pretty clear derivative work of Apocalypse World (or, if you'd rather, Masks: A New Generation) but it absolutely did not make less money than either of them, which according to his argument should not be possible without a D&D-sized external network.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:59
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Glazius posted:Well, yes, that's my point, that Avatar Legends is a pretty clear derivative work of Apocalypse World (or, if you'd rather, Masks: A New Generation) but it absolutely did not make less money than either of them, which according to his argument should not be possible without a D&D-sized external network. There's a germ of an argument to be made that the existence of these blockbuster kickstarters doesn't really say one thing or another about the industry and/or hobby as a whole. Like, is the existence of a wildly successful Avatar The Last Airbender kickstarter a product of how much people love Apocalypse World or a product of how much people love Avatar? I know I would be more likely to place my money on the latter, since there have been a ton of PbtA kickstarters and only the Avatar one made a gazillion dollars. Matt Colville's fantasy D&D-alike is not exactly a wildly new concept, but all those other games that came before it weren't made by Matt Colville, etc. I think it's risky to look at these outlier kickstarters, many of which are buoyed by popular IPs or popular e-celebrities, and go "clearly this is a sign that the indie TRPG market is thriving." That is to say, I don't think it's actually inherently contradictory for two things to be true at once, that with the right IP/popular backing and some lightning in a bottle you can win the Kickstarter lottery and that this may not be any sort of indication of longevity, popularity as a game (as opposed to an Avatar-branded collectable, for example), and so on. That said, I still think this guy's premise is massively flawed because nobody has ever ponied up any material evidence that other TRPGs have their fortunes tied to the rise and fall of D&D in any meaningful sense, we're all just supposed to take it as a given that obviously this is true, but it's as much of a wild shot in the dark as anything else. His prediction is also that D&D is headed for some sort of catastrophe despite one of the few things we do know about the industry being that every edition of D&D has sold better than the previous one, and this prediction is based (as far as I can tell) on a mix of people experimenting with their own games/licenses in the wake of the OGL debacle and twitter discourse. Like, he suggests that WotC "doesn't know what to do with D&D" citing some dumb starter set he doesn't care for as an example of this, but is that really true? For all their corporate stumblefucking over this last year alone, I would say they have some pretty clear ideas of what they want to do with D&D. Those plans might be lovely in a "we want to make a walled garden for maximum brand monitization" sense, but they have plans, and I would argue they seem more sound than whatever Gleemax was supposed to be. Basically, this guy is catastrophizing over something that seems highly unlikely to happen in the first place (the collapse of D&D), and the examples he uses of these fracture points set to balkanize the industry are extreme outliers that I would argue bear as little resemblance to the wider industry as D&D itself does, which simply distorts whatever points he's trying to make even further.
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Jan 4, 2024 08:34
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dwarf74 posted:Ben Riggs Holy poo poo. I think even Stalin was less worried about factionalism than this guy.
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Jan 4, 2024 12:28
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Kai Tave posted:I distinctly remember that Dan used to do this thing back when he was really pushing for the Trove to come down where he would tag in other game publishers on twitter threads going "hey, did you know these guys are pirating YOUR game huh????" I know he did it with Massif Press (the Lancer publisher) and I remember being unimpressed with what was basically him going "let's you and him fight." He tagged me at some point with some poo poo like this, and it's like... dude, no. "They're pirating YOUR game!" "It's Creative Commons by-nc-sa, you thick gently caress."
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Jan 4, 2024 12:36
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poop chute posted:It's also like four layers of obfuscation down and decentralized and much harder to hit than a website calling itself The Trove. last i saw they also had a "dont share zweihander (also microscope and some other niche things)" rule and i assume he immediately stopped caring once it stopped mattering to him personally because he's a dumb rear end in a top hat
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Jan 4, 2024 13:18
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Kai Tave posted:If anything imperils D&D it's going to be the thing that usually imperils stuff like this: expectations of infinite profit and growth meeting the cold hard reality that infinite profit and growth don't exist. I can easily see a world where Hasbro sets expectations for D&D to do eleventy gorillion dollars of profit and when that fails to happen they panic and start pulling plugs and putting plans on hold, this is the same thing that's happened in plenty of other industries and companies. Square Enix for example was and/or is infamous for setting absurd goals for games to reach and then decrying them as failures for merely performing objectively very well. It'll be the exact thing that imperils every Hasbro property. The finance goons demanding number go up, leading to cutting 'costs' and putting out poorly considered and sub-par product.
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Jan 4, 2024 13:22
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Anonymous Zebra posted:The strange thing about that entire weird spiel just posted is that he's pointing at Paizo and PF as some kind of new thing. Paizo has been making its competing product since 4E, and yet both 4E and PF1 did well even though they were on the same market wavelength. I'm really not sure what the dude's actual point is. to him, D&D is roleplaying and roleplaying is D&D, so unless everybody in the community just agrees to play and publish material for the market leader's latest edition, they're tearing the community apart and forcing people to pick sides, because apparently nobody has the capacity to understand more than one TTRPG system in their lifetime
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Jan 4, 2024 13:53
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That Old Tree posted:I'm skeptical that this will amount to any meaningful sea-change to the industry. TTRPG, long united, must fracture, long fractured, must unite. That's just how it goes.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:19
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There's some benefit, as someone who writes and makes content, in having a TTRPG lingua franca, and D&D is kind of the most obvious choice for that. If you're trying to talk about it, you'd like everyone to at least be able to engage in whatever you're talking about, so having it be the thing is kind of useful. It's sort of the issue of talking about video games where "i like video games" can mean anything from War in the East II to Baldur's Gate 3 and there's almost no overlap in those experiences. This is probably an extreme example but i do think in the broader sense, culture is becoming more fractured like that. It's the same for movies, music- there's just far less of a common culture any more, and i think that's what's being lamented.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:21
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I often see the rising tide lifts all boats fallacy applied to D&D and I just don't think its true. The larger RPG industry does best when D&D shits the bed and people in desperation go out searching for something else to try out, when D&D is popular, everyone else is starving or making D&D compatible content. I came up in the mid to late 90s and the diversity of systems and settings available was awesome, that's partly nostalgia and a lot of them were bad games, but you had so many prominent choices back then. That was with D&D at a nadir. I just don't find the concept of "The RPG industry is at its safest only making D&D with freelancers earning 1c a word suckling at the teat of WotC forever" particularly appealing.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:33
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Panzeh posted:There's some benefit, as someone who writes and makes content, in having a TTRPG lingua franca, and D&D is kind of the most obvious choice for that. If you're trying to talk about it, you'd like everyone to at least be able to engage in whatever you're talking about, so having it be the thing is kind of useful. This is a really bizarre comparison to me, because regardless what's happening or not in TTRPGs, one of the most common refrains in bigger creative industries discourse for a whole decade or more is the mainstream's increasing fixation on Corporate Extruded Maximally Saleable Product. The "balkanized" nature of stuff like movies and video games has a lot more to do with the frankly greater variety within those creative pursuits, but also the overbearing presence of corporate control of the mainstream, not its lack of cultural hegemony.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:38
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That Old Tree posted:This is a really bizarre comparison to me, because regardless what's happening or not in TTRPGs, one of the most common refrains in bigger creative industries discourse for a whole decade or more is the mainstream's increasing fixation on Corporate Extruded Maximally Saleable Product. The "balkanized" nature of stuff like movies and video games has a lot more to do with the frankly greater variety within those creative pursuits, but also the overbearing presence of corporate control of the mainstream, not its lack of cultural hegemony. yeah, in light of that Riggs' essay comes across as if he's a cineaste who's upset at movie studios for putting out movies that aren't The Fast and the Furious sequels because everybody loves The Fast and the Furious and making other kinds of movies undermines the beloved movies that everybody wants, so they should just make Fast and the Furious sequels themselves since The Fast and the Furious is the ideal setting for all movies The Chairman fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 15:06
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The Chairman posted:yeah, in light of that Riggs' essay comes across as if he's a cineaste who's upset at movie studios for putting out movies that aren't The Fast and the Furious sequels because everybody loves The Fast and the Furious and making other kinds of movies undermines the beloved movies that everybody wants, so they should just make Fast and the Furious sequels themselves since The Fast and the Furious is the ideal setting for all movies To me, it's the writer's desire to write about a more hegemonic industry coming through and informing the predictions he makes rather than an actual belief in what will happen. It's more interesting to Riggs, the writer, if D&D is the main thing and that it's a general-access story as opposed to talking about fifteen different RPGs vying for a share.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:20
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Kai Tave posted:In fairness (to be clear I don't really care about being fair to this guy, he seems like a dipshit) his argument is less that other games can't have successful kickstarters but that in a post-D&D-centric industry these successful kickstarters will inevitably balkanize into a bunch of insular little fiefdoms and then die out without the same sorts of "network externalities" that D&D uses to perpetuate its market share. Basically, he's positing that even a successful non-D&D game will inevitably fade into obscurity because it won't have the secondary networks of third-party creators and podcasters and livestreamers and etc constantly keeping them fresh in peoples' minds. So basically Ryan Dancey’s argument that the OGL was necessary because non-d20 games hurt the hobby. Nothing is new under the sun.
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Jan 4, 2024 17:00
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Kai Tave posted:or how Pathfinder no longer uses alignment. Man, I thought I'd seen all the dumb arguments possible due to that change. Guess not.
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Jan 4, 2024 19:26
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The official paizo forum had to make a rule against alignment arguments claiming slavery wasn't evil, because it happened so often.
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Jan 4, 2024 20:21
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So common that they do damage even on a miss.HidaO-Win posted:I came up in the mid to late 90s and the diversity of systems and settings available was awesome, that's partly nostalgia and a lot of them were bad games, but you had so many prominent choices back then. That was with D&D at a nadir. I just don't find the concept of "The RPG industry is at its safest only making D&D with freelancers earning 1c a word suckling at the teat of WotC forever" particularly appealing.
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Jan 4, 2024 20:36
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Terrible Opinions posted:The official paizo forum had to make a rule against alignment arguments claiming slavery wasn't evil, because it happened so often. Man if I was the one who had to make that rules post, I would hover over the “delete forum and incinerate backups” button for a long while making my mind up.
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Jan 4, 2024 20:40
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The Chairman posted:yeah, in light of that Riggs' essay comes across as if he's a cineaste who's upset at movie studios for putting out movies that aren't The Fast and the Furious sequels because everybody loves The Fast and the Furious and making other kinds of movies undermines the beloved movies that everybody wants, so they should just make Fast and the Furious sequels themselves since The Fast and the Furious is the ideal setting for all movies It really is funny when you consider the state of similar creative industries. Because Hollywood is doing so well disappearing further and further up its rear end to grab at any rebootable action property while people get more and more tired of superheroes. It's a corporate crisis with a lot of parallels to the post-Studio System era of of the 1950s/60s, with the crash of huge event movies like historical epics and musicals, the writers' and actors' guild strikes, and out of that emerged the New Hollywood movement. Will it happen again? Who knows, but mainstream movies are absolutely approaching a precipice brought about by aggressive homogenization and monopolization. You could say the same thing with video games. How people are getting tired of Ubisoft-style open worlds and Destiny-style live service stuff. A lot of the biggest games in 2023 were were remakes or sequels, but to "niche" genre stuff like survival horror, CRPGs, and fighting games. Not to mention a huge plethora of fantastic indie games out there. D&D isn't going to die, but 6e/5.5e is going to be a disruption. It always is. We've all lived through multiple D&D edition changes at this point. If there's any weird energy to it, it's from the comparatively HUGE mass of people experiencing this for the first time after being onboarded by 5e. I don't know... it reminds me of when Elden Ring broke into the mainstream bigger than any Souls game before it. Suddenly you had that burst of people doing all the Souls no-nos like attacking NPCs or falling for "try jumping" notes all over again. Amusing, but kind of amazing to watch how some things don't change. edit- Oh right, I was also going to add that Josh Sawyer had some really great comments on this dumb tweet thread that are way more interesting to contemplate, too:    He also posted the  image in response to the weepy tweets about Pathfinder changing alignment rules and Critical Role the MCDM game rolling things besides a d20.Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 21:05
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Unless you're using one of the more expensive VTTs that handle a ton of mechanics for you, you absolutely do need to learn the rules of the game. Doubly so if you're going to be doing any kind of off-the-wall improvising.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:22
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I can’t think of any VTT, even Roll20 for D&D, that removes any need to know the rules.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:23
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It can help automate out the need for moment-to-moment recollection of various rules in motion, but yeah that's not the same as not needing to know the rules.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:26
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BoardGameArena, a website where you can play board games online, is probably a fair comparison. It handles 100% of the rules enforcement, which is likely more than most VTTs. I have occasionally tried to play a game without knowing the rules ahead of time. It never goes well. Most board games are considerably simpler than most PNP RPGs, at least the ones where you'd want a VTT and not just a chatroom for. So, I think the idea of getting away with zero prior knowledge is unlikely. Though I guess we could argue the semantics of 'not knowing rules' to being between 'literally walked in off the street' and 'possesses no mastery but is familiar with the grammar.' What could change is a more video game-y interactive tutorialization that isn't present in most PNP RPGs or board games. Though I imagine those are typically for the VTT interface and maybe the raw basics of stats and rolls. But much beyond that and you're getting into a large enough scope someone will just say to make a video game.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:01
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hyphz posted:I can’t think of any VTT, even Roll20 for D&D, that removes any need to know the rules. It can definitely remove the need (or at least lighten the load) for all of the players to know all the rules, though the DM will still need to know what's what.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:05
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I see VTTs as more "makes sure you remember the rules" rather than "removes the need to learn the rules". Running some of the numbers in the background doesn't mean you don't have to know that wearing full plate gives you a speed penalty in PF2e, it just means you don't forget to apply it in combat. On the front of the death of all gaming due to 5e changing in some way, it feels like there are three groups of d&d players here: People who only play official d&d products, who won't be affected because WOTC will continue to make official d&d products People who are adventurous enough to try other systems, who won't be affected because they're adventurous enough to try other systems People who are adventurous enough to look for third party content but not adventurous enough to try another ruleset. Who will still be able to find loads of stuff, either because there will be a 5e/whatever version, or because it will be written to be compatible with multiple rulesets. People like Roll For Combat already put out bestiaries with different stat blocks for 5e and pf2e. I'm certain I've seen at least one company doing multisystem adventure modules. I just don't think the sliver of market share adventurous enough to leave the tranquil waters of the wizardly coast but not adventurous enough to try a new game is all that large.
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Jan 4, 2024 23:33
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dwarf74 posted:Ben Riggs, a guy who wrote the "Secret History" of D&D, has posted a very long and very... imo, overwrought, eulogy for what he's calling the "golden age of TTRPGs." Kind of feels like he's got a thesis for his next wee book that he's trying to sell.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:17
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Lamuella posted:I see VTTs as more "makes sure you remember the rules" rather than "removes the need to learn the rules". Running some of the numbers in the background doesn't mean you don't have to know that wearing full plate gives you a speed penalty in PF2e, it just means you don't forget to apply it in combat. I feel like it's meant to be taken on this level, yeah. A well-supported VTT tabletop doesn't mean you can forget about the rules or GM it without reading anything. It means you can hit a button that factors in all the floating +/- stuff to your rolls. Maybe it lets you pop up a description of the power you're using for everyone to see or auto-math the results of it for you. Maybe your GM helps code in some macros as needed so your common rolls are a button press away. I've run games where one or two players maybe don't remember every rule perfectly but you can tell them "pick one of the powers on your turn and click it to roll the attack" or "press the roll button next to that skill and add +5" and it does help a lot.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:24
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Lamuella posted:I see VTTs as more "makes sure you remember the rules" rather than "removes the need to learn the rules". That is a much better way to say what I was trying to say.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:56
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Terrible Opinions posted:The official paizo forum had to make a rule against alignment arguments claiming slavery wasn't evil, because it happened so often. I helped run a Neverwinter Nights server once upon a time, and this is an argument that kept coming up no matter how many times we GMs beat it down. There's something about this garbage idea that draws to it a certain small but persistent subset of D&D nerds like flies to honey. I'm sure it comes up in fandoms for other RPG settings, but I have yet to see it.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:25
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Falstaff posted:I helped run a Neverwinter Nights server once upon a time, and this is an argument that kept coming up no matter how many times we GMs beat it down. Back in the day there were a few people who would argue in defense of various atrocities in the Exalted setting, where such things were pretty clearly present so that the PCs could fight against them. There was a guy who would argue in favor of slavery as a practical necessity for rebuilding after an apocalypse, despite there being plenty of societies that rebuilt without slaves in the setting right alongside the slavers. I think it's inevitable with any critical mass of fans when they encounter some moral challenge to their thoughtless assumptions, and it's definitely exacerbated by D&D not just because it's the biggest property but also because alignment is an especially garbage idea that spurs garbage arguments.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:40
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Alignment loving sucks because it that objective morality exists with the same "rules" as armor, dragons, and hit points.
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Jan 5, 2024 15:22
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In the specific case of Pathfinder, I do think there were issues with the way the setting tended to treat slavery in relation to alignment. Basically, slavery was Evil, but primarily Lawful Evil, and opposition to it was primarily Chaotic Good, which had the effect of making Lawful Neutral implicitly pro-slavery.
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Jan 5, 2024 15:37
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Originally D&D alignment wasn't about actions or morality so much as which team you would fight for come the Apocalypse. Law was theoretically more "good" than Chaos, but you could still be a complete evil bastard and be on the side of Law. Adapting it to a moral judgement was one of the worse ideas in AD&D. Not that there was a shortage of those.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:25
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Originally D&D alignment wasn't about actions or morality so much as which team you would fight for come the Apocalypse. Law was theoretically more "good" than Chaos, but you could still be a complete evil bastard and be on the side of Law. Chaotic neutral was, of course, worse.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:32
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90s Cringe Rock posted:They actually made it even worse when 2e declared that true neutral meant you'd save an orphanage one day and burn it down the next. Hope you've got your trusty flipping coin!
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Jan 5, 2024 16:38
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