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one of the local shops moved from a really nice location to a former bed bath and beyond, didn’t even fill up half of it and it looked like poo poo. closing after five months. about a year ago the guy who ran their tcg program left to start his own store in the mall up the street, turns out he was still handling their orders, which coincidentally was causing issues where the bed bath and beyond store was getting maybe 2-3 boxes of magic and one piece while his store was getting plenty. their Facebook is blowing up with people talking about human poo poo being on the floor outside their bathroom, the owner doing the “hate the drama sick of the bull poo poo im a piece of poo poo” routine and now the guy who was doing their orders for them is posting joker gifs. wild stuff
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Jan 17, 2024 06:01
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John Romero posted:one of the local shops moved from a really nice location to a former bed bath and beyond, didn’t even fill up half of it and it looked like poo poo. closing after five months. about a year ago the guy who ran their tcg program left to start his own store in the mall up the street, turns out he was still handling their orders, which coincidentally was causing issues where the bed bath and beyond store was getting maybe 2-3 boxes of magic and one piece while his store was getting plenty. their Facebook is blowing up with people talking about human poo poo being on the floor outside their bathroom, the owner doing the “hate the drama sick of the bull poo poo im a piece of poo poo” routine and now the guy who was doing their orders for them is posting joker gifs. wild stuff This made me go looking for the time one of my local(ish) stores exploded so hard due to petty drama it wound up with D-tier national attention. The whole endeavor was wild, starting a decade ago when some presumably trust-fund backed guy opened three gigantic, overstuffed stores in three different cities with pretty clear intent of grinding the other long-term local hobby stores into the dust. I never went to the Manhattan location, but the one in Lawrence used to be a music store in a prime location, and it was enormous. It was obviously such a terrible financial decision to open a game store in that location, in that much floorspace. It also still had old abandoned speakers and amps lying around the entire time it existed, mostly in the dimly lit upstairs that constituted the majority of the come-and-play space. They did have a single tiny card table for a specific group of regulars jammed into the corner next to the shelf of RPGs. Also there was a weird alcove that was clearly intended to be a video game space at some point, but it was mostly just a dumping ground for empty boxes and packing material from shipments, piling up in front a 32" TV and Xbox 360 neither of which were plugged in possibly ever. The Topeka location was absolutely bizarre because they bought two storefront's worth of space in a strip, but it was still overstuffed with just a bunch of crap no one was buying like boxes upon boxes of ancient back issues of comics, so they had to buy the extra store space just to put in a few gaming tables. Then they started running out of money so they sold half their store space barely a year later, but hardly got rid of or rearranged anything, so there was just less room for all this crap no one wanted to buy. Then the Mike guy from the above linked story took over (?) and the store finally flushed itself down the toilet by the end of that year. Meanwhile Game Nut and Gatekeeper have each changed hands and locations a couple of times but are still surviving after close to 20 and 40 years respectively.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:18
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John Romero posted:one of the local shops moved from a really nice location to a former bed bath and beyond, didn’t even fill up half of it and it looked like poo poo. closing after five months. about a year ago the guy who ran their tcg program left to start his own store in the mall up the street, turns out he was still handling their orders, which coincidentally was causing issues where the bed bath and beyond store was getting maybe 2-3 boxes of magic and one piece while his store was getting plenty. their Facebook is blowing up with people talking about human poo poo being on the floor outside their bathroom, the owner doing the “hate the drama sick of the bull poo poo im a piece of poo poo” routine and now the guy who was doing their orders for them is posting joker gifs. wild stuff Reminds me of the job at a Spirit Halloween store I had back in 2020, we were situated in a former sporting goods store and the public facing portion of the store occupied maybe a quarter of the space max, was kind of silly
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Jan 17, 2024 08:28
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Spirit Halloween just wants enough retail space for their stock, they'll gladly pay for space they won't use just to have a space where they can sell their goods so you see them a lot in abandoned storefronts that are too big.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:35
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They probably get good deals from landlords since it's short term/temporary and it means they get some rent instead of nothing at all.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:38
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Yeah, I feel like it's much more understandable for a blow-through business that just needs to find a place to rent for a few months that meets minimum requirements, compared to somewhere with a long-term lease that also intends on creating a gathering space.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:40
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Kwyndig posted:Spirit Halloween just wants enough retail space for their stock, they'll gladly pay for space they won't use just to have a space where they can sell their goods so you see them a lot in abandoned storefronts that are too big. Oh definitely, just that once you get to see how the sausage is made it especially sticks out
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Jan 17, 2024 09:17
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BinaryDoubts posted:I know there's been some discussion of the game as a maybe-heartbreaker that only seems to be in conversation with D&D, and I'm here to tell you that, yeah, that's *absolutely* what it is. But! Even though it isn't breaking new ground in any respects, it still does have some fun ideas. The first couple of things you listed is just stuff from 4E, the auto hit for damage being the first big exception. The post death mechanic and victories also sound very neat... so absolutely a heartbreaker yeah. Tell me more about the ability scores. Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 10:46
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The reasons I'm interested in MCDM RPG are: - it's drawing a lot from 4E which I would love to play again but there's generally too much baggage around it to get a group together - it's taking some clear steps to make combat faster and more streamlined while keeping the interesting stuff (cool powers, forced movement, terrain control, positioning matters) - it's addressing the adventuring day in an interesting way I think it's a bummer that the 6 ability scores are sticking around, but DTAS for D&D-like systems is basically a solved problem at this point so if they turn out to be a millstone around the system's neck then it won't take a lot of effort to rip them out.
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Jan 17, 2024 11:05
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Tarnop posted:The reasons I'm interested in MCDM RPG are: The other problem(s) are the knock on effects on design. The attitude of "gotta have 6 stats!!!!!!" and the description of their stat choosing method makes me worried about what other sections of the game are similarly hand thought out of deliberately left bad because of tradition. On a more concrete note, unbalanced or unnecessary stats tend to lead to weird rules patches and feature bloat to try to make the poo poo stats useful that start having weird knockon effects, and pages and pages of class features that DTAS end up condensing into "get +3 to the following list of nouns". If you build on uneven ground you can't just straighten the ground without slanting the house. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 11:13
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It doesn't look complex enough to need a builder from what I've seen. There are only 10 levels I think? Less need for things like power cards generated with your stats factored in because the maths is way simpler. But maybe feats will come along and ruin things. I agree with your second paragraph. It's worrying how little care was paid to the question of why 6 stats. It was more worrying when he said that it's fine for some stats to be much more applicable than others. But honestly, as a GM I treat stats as keys? flags? the thing where it's the player telling you the stuff they want to do. Then build adventures accordingly and be generous with applicability. But still, definite heartbreaker vibes
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Jan 17, 2024 14:21
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The ability scores would be very easy to fully remove, but I didn't find them to be that bothersome in play. They're all rated from +1 to +3 (so a very small band, really) and everyone seems to be attacking with their best score (not sure exactly how your attack score is decided, all that math was baked in to the playtest). The scores are Might, Agility, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, and Presence, so pretty much the D&D 3-physical, 3-mental setup, but in my opinion with much clearer areas of influence. It would be very easy to just lower the DCs and remove the scores entirely (leave the attack bonus baked in but remove any other influence) or swap in a different system with Fate-like aspects or anything else you desired. I know Colville said something about the stats not all being equally useful but I think they all got at least one use in the playtest, and since the stats have no secondary modifiers (you don't get to add Agility to the group initiative rolls, or Might to your health... I think) I actually don't think you have the same D&D issues with Dex being a god stat etc. You can also pair any skill with any stat, which is my preferred way of handling skills (loving 5e's wishy-washy "well sooooometimes you can change the stat but not really" drove me up the wall). Unless the higher-level powers get significantly more complicated, I don't think power cards will be necessary. I think also you are limited to 6 or something, you have to pick a loadout instead of just gaining more abilities forever. It's quite accessible in that way (IMO), and even though you have way more abilities written on your sheet at 1st level than in 5e, I would say the system is much, much easier to teach and play than 5e.
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Jan 17, 2024 16:46
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The MCDM RPG is almost the opposite of the traditional definition of "fantasy heartbreaker" since it's A) very willing to throw out heritage rules/mechanics to improve their desired gameplay and B) it's getting actual playtesting and feedback
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Jan 17, 2024 16:49
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Nor was it designed by people with no public profile who have mostly only ever played D&D.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:01
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whydirt posted:The MCDM RPG is almost the opposite of the traditional definition of "fantasy heartbreaker" since it's A) very willing to throw out heritage rules/mechanics to improve their desired gameplay and B) it's getting actual playtesting and feedback The thing could grow as big as Pathfinder and there would still be goons calling it a heartbreaker because they decided that's what it was the first time they heard about it. They saw a youtube man was making an rpg and their headcanon is that Matt Colville has only ever played or read D&D and that's as much thinking as they're going to do about it.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:04
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To most people "fantasy heartbreaker" just means any fantasy game that's not Official D&D, nobody reads the essays
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Jan 17, 2024 17:05
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It's the new sort of heartbreaker where a bunch of smart people try really hard for a long time to make something good, succeed, and then find that nobody cares because D&D's lock on the minds of the player base is too strong, and it breaks the authors' hearts.
Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 18:08
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Zorak of Michigan posted:It's the new sort of heartbreaker where a bunch of smart people try really hard for a long time to make something good, succeed, and then find that nobody cares because D&D's lock on the minds of the player base is true strong, and it breaks the authors' hearts. Every few years, the Brain-Damage dot Post comes back around. It seems we're back at it.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:26
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Jan 17, 2024 18:31
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Colville pulled the trigger on MCDM in the wake of the OGL scandal, so it's still ultimately juxtaposed against D&D even if he's going interesting places with the design
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Jan 17, 2024 18:32
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whydirt posted:The MCDM RPG is almost the opposite of the traditional definition of "fantasy heartbreaker" since it's A) very willing to throw out heritage rules/mechanics to improve their desired gameplay and B) it's getting actual playtesting and feedback I wasn't aware of that definition, I just thought that it meant a game that prior to release gets your hopes up higher than is reasonable and is inevitably some kind of let down
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Jan 17, 2024 18:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:Colville pulled the trigger on MCDM in the wake of the OGL scandal, so it's still ultimately juxtaposed against D&D even if he's going interesting places with the design And also because he's explicitly bringing back mechanics from the previous edition of D&D like healing surges, and not pretending he isn't
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Jan 17, 2024 18:35
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 Point of order, your game doesn't have to be unpopular, it just has to lose money. Edwards himself noted that crowdfunding allows designers to fail upward in ways that weren't possible for heartbreakers in the 80s and 90s.
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Jan 17, 2024 19:17
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Halloween Jack posted:
Right I always thought they were heartbreakers because the designer would financially ruin themselves printing a bunch of copies that never sold. Crowdfunding lets them waste other people’s money as well as their own.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:09
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Ron Edwards is generally credited with coining the phrase "Fantasy Heartbreaker" and this is his essay clarifying his previous essay specifically to define what he's talking about : http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/10/ A lot of folks here have read this and this is specifically what they mean with the term. However the term has been used much more broadly for long enough that we can't really insist on this narrower definition anymore. I'll quote what I think are the key elements directly from this essay: quote:A Fantasy Heartbreaker's basic, imaginative content is "fantasy" using gaming, specifically D&D, as the inspirational text. What's D&D Fantasy? Well, it's about seting up a character starting-point with a strong random component as well as a strong strategy component, having encounters, surviving them (or not), and improving. What characters do is travel, team up, bicker a bit, walk a tightrope between cooperating and exploiting one another, suss out threats (risk assessment is a big deal), and fight with unavoidable or especially rewarding ones. Some giveaway details: gotta have elves and dwarves, gotta have underground complexes, gotta have teams of adventurers, gotta have array of tactical possibilites for combat (armor/weapons), gotta have similar array of spells, gotta ramp up the range and scope of both arrays with "experience," and gotta have a chock-full smorgasbord of threats. The person whose heart is broken by the heartbreaker is Ron Edwards specifically, and more generally, folks who appreciate what Ron is saying about these kinds of games. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 20:25
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so are we saying its a heartbreaker because it may be competition? did they have a version of D&D that was modern and urban themed (like there was a gangster class) or am i brain damaged from the past 5 years
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Jan 17, 2024 20:48
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John Romero posted:so are we saying its a heartbreaker because it may be competition? d20 modern and Shadowforce Archer.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:49
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Ron Edwards posted:Another issue concerns the three-plateau assumption regarding a character over time: a prolonged "weeny" stage, a brief "pretty drat good" stage, and an upwardly-spiralling "unstoppable" stage, straight out of old-school D&D. Are there any games that turn this around? Like you start out as a bad-rear end at the top of their career and then you slowly sacrifice your youth and vigor through the campaign until you crawl across the finish line a broken and battered old man.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:52
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John Romero posted:so are we saying its a heartbreaker because it may be competition?
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Jan 17, 2024 20:53
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We can add a (C) to whybird's earlier post because one of MCDM RPG's stated goals is skipping the schlub phase
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Jan 17, 2024 20:53
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Leperflesh posted:The person whose heart is broken by the heartbreaker is Ron Edwards specifically, and more generally, folks who appreciate what Ron is saying about these kinds of games. Ron’s an rear end but he wasn’t wrong here. I also liked this argument in: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qzart1lzv4vjjuo/We%20Hold%20These%20Rules%20to%20Be%20Self-Evident.pdf?dl=0 That essentially discuss the “immigrants dream” style of play wherein you walk in to a new world with nothing and eventually become a god.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:57
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Halloween Jack posted:That's a core part of it, actually. The 80s-90s heartbreakers were trying to compete with D&D in its own niche, so they were turbofucked, without regard for the actual merits of their game. Yeah it's essentially a tautology: either it's trying to "fix" and therefore competing with D&D, or it's not... and therefore isn't a heartbreaker. We can expand this to apply to other goliaths in the RPG world, IMO: if you're trying to "fix" Cthulhu games but your game is basically one of the main Cthulhu games with the numbers filed off, is naively self or small-press published, has one or two good or even brilliant ideas lost in the pile, and seems to have been written from a point of ignorance about the full range and scope of modern RPG mechanics available for you to leverage? That's a heartbreaker I'd say.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:58
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Bucnasti posted:Are there any games that turn this around?
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Jan 17, 2024 21:02
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PuttyKnife posted:Ron’s an rear end but he wasn’t wrong here. I also liked this argument in: That's an interesting essay, thanks.
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Jan 17, 2024 21:14
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When I first started our show System Mastery, we got asked about heartbreaker's all the time but neither of us were forgers or had heard of Edwards. We eventually settled after reading a bunch of them that a heartbreaker was a game that was "D&D but the author really thought that it need one or two big changes to fix it and then it would be perfect, then the world harshly disagreed." Eventually we started finding White Wolf and even Palladium equivalents out there, but like for us the most classic distillations were always "I like D&D but the religion in it isn't just Catholicism and they got the alignments all wrong."
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Jan 17, 2024 21:53
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Are there any dungeon map making apps that let you move entire rooms around?
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Jan 17, 2024 22:19
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CitizenKeen posted:It feels very dominated by collectors. It plays well? Just my opinion, but it's the most fun me and my non-TCG playing fiance have ever had playing a card game together. The game plays fluidly and quickly, and actions early in the game really set the stage (literally) for what happens later in the game. It is dynamic and interesting -- I've never had a game between two identical decks take the same path to an end-game twice in a row. For anyone who enjoys these sort of games, I can't say enough about how fun it is. There is a set of four preconstructed decks, each themed with a different element (Earth, Fire, Air, Water) that can be purchased for $40 at a bunch of different retailers right now, and even if you never want to get "into" the game beyond that, the gameplay and value from these decks is excellent. If you're into uber-competetive TCGs like flesh and blood it might not be your thing -- it plays more like a board game.
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Jan 17, 2024 22:33
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Bucnasti posted:Are there any games that turn this around? Blades in the Dark has the Traumas, which pile up to make you nigh unplayable, but you do get better at your core activities, if you don't build up Traumas too quickly.
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Jan 18, 2024 00:53
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Halloween Jack posted:That's a core part of it, actually. The 80s-90s heartbreakers were trying to compete with D&D in its own niche, so they were turbofucked, without regard for the actual merits of their game. It's the classic problem with any definition of the internet that it gets misused in one place and then the misused versions constantly propagate. It doesn't help that Ron Edwards also frequently redefined his own terms (there's like three different versions of "story now") But I think the original definition of a fantasy heartbreaker was: a) shares setting and theme with D&D; b) shares a significant amount of high-level structure with D&D for no particular reason; c) contains a number of "innovative" mechanics which are not innovative at all, but just not D&D (eg, spell points); d) contains at least one genuinely innovative and interesting mechanic. At some point it got changed to the current definition of "any fantasy game that is not D&D and is doomed to be steamrolled by D&D", but a lot of the "heartbreakers" Edwards originally listed were written before the steamroller was fully running.
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Jan 18, 2024 03:00
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Blades in the Dark has the Traumas, which pile up to make you nigh unplayable, but you do get better at your core activities, if you don't build up Traumas too quickly. They don’t reduce your playability at all, until the very last one that takes you out of the game.
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Jan 18, 2024 03:07
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