|
Comrade Koba posted:Suleiman was the guy who admitted to being a sex pest but implied it was his victims fault since he could not be blamed for being in possession of such amazing intellect, witty charm and mesmerizing beauty, right? Yes, and he couldn't possibly do anything to really hurt women because he loves his mother and sisters so much. quote:My Apology
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 12:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 18:35 |
|
|
I don’t know what he did but I’m sure his dad’s cancer justified it
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 12:48
|
|
|
Just one of the sex pests of this and the adjacent horror fiction industry. He's the one that the Green Ronin higher-ups are going to provide a timeline for Any Day Now explaining why he didn't actually do anything wrong/it's not their fault they knew some of the allegations but still put him in a mentorship program over young women.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 13:26
|
|
|
That Old Tree posted:Yes, and he couldn't possibly do anything to really hurt women because he loves his mother and sisters so much. I'd forgotten the whole thing but the 'eyes possessed of an intensity some have called alarming' reads like he's describing his Mage character.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 14:34
|
|
|
I remember the thread had a good time memeing on his rear end due to his complete non-apology.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 15:06
|
|
|
Cool Dad posted:I'm out of the loop, what's wrong with OPP? Mostly it seems like every few months it turns out the execs are doing lovely stuff. No ethical consumption under capitalism yadda yadda. I suppose buying the fan supplements on drivethru go directly to the ones who made them after OPP get their cut?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 15:20
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Mostly it seems like every few months it turns out the execs are doing lovely stuff. Yes. Or, well, it goes into a drive thru account they have to cash out, but they get direct money per sale.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 15:28
|
|
|
Green Ronin never did publish timeline.txt did they
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 16:43
|
|
|
Anyone here actually publish for the various fan-driven drivethru licence? I boguht a couple, like the fanmade V20 Rome books or the Glorantha Duck book.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 16:49
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Green Ronin never did publish timeline.txt did they Oh my no. One of the GR people came out swinging on RPG.net after attacking someone who came forward on Facebook about how it was being overblown because all of Suleiman's offenses were from several years ago and only were things like 'he flirted with me' and 'he was kind of a dick' when the receipts being brought were both worse and more recent which necessitated there being a timeline to absolve GR which still hasn't happened yet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2024 17:17
|
|
|
Welp, despite all the scrambling WoTC keeps doing to deny it, Hasbro's CEO is still all in on using LLM AI content gen in MtG and D&D. https://venturebeat.com/games/how-hasbro-is-jumping-on-the-game-opportunity-chris-cocks-interview/ quote:The advantage we have–it’s funny. This is cutting-edge technology, and Hasbro is a 100-year-old company, which you don’t usually think is–usually you think there’s a threat there. But when you talk about the richness of the lore and the depth of the brands–D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine. Literally thousands of adventures that we’ve created, probably tens of millions of words we own and can leverage. Magic: The Gathering has been around for 35 years, more than 15,000 cards we can use in something like that. Peppa Pig has been around for 20 years and has hundreds of thousands of hours of published content we can leverage. Transformers, I’ve been watching Transformers TV shows since I was a kid in Cincinnati in the early ‘80s.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 00:11
|
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:Welp, despite all the scrambling WoTC keeps doing to deny it, Hasbro's CEO is still all in on using LLM AI content gen in MtG and D&D. This bitch didn't create anything he's taking credit for there
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 00:19
|
|
|
LMAO, "Cocks".
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 00:23
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:This bitch didn't create anything he's taking credit for there Yeah, that royal 'we' is laying claim to a shitload of work mostly done by freelancers for bottom dollar pay.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 01:26
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Mostly it seems like every few months it turns out the execs are doing lovely stuff. This isn't a really helpful response. What kind of lovely stuff? There's a lot of flavors of that in ttRPGs.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 01:31
|
|
|
The quality of their stuff has been going downhill for a long time now, largely because they rely entirely on freelancers being paid beer money and their books are increasingly word salad with mediocre art (and Melissa Uran because dropping her would actually cost them something). They've lost pretty much all of the creatives who started with White Wolf because they moved on to jobs that could actually support them. There have been some scandals, but at this point most of the ill-will they have is more a matter of "Jesus, nobody should be able to publish books as bad as Mummy 2e and The Contagion Chronicle and keep trucking on like they still have credibility."
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 02:00
|
|
|
Sionak posted:This isn't a really helpful response. What kind of lovely stuff? There's a lot of flavors of that in ttRPGs. There's a few things like the discussion a few pages back of one writer at OPP being racist towards a Palestinian writer, but for the most part the lovely things that are revealed about Onyx Path are just... that they're a badly managed company, and that's being reflected in the quality of their work. That their books are written by getting a swarm of underpaid contractors to write each chunk of the book with minimal managerial oversight and their entire business strategy is using the influx of money from one kickstarter to survive until the next one. They're exceedingly normal flaws in this industry, and if their books were still good it probably wouldn't come up in here at all. That's why MonsieurChoc's answer was kind of nothing: because there isn't actually a smoking gun you can point to and say "this company is Bad now". Just a series of reveals that make you go "oh, I see why they've been going downhill lately".
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 02:06
|
|
|
Yeah, people point at the racism like a smoking gun as to 'why it is bad now' but things have been going downhill ever since Paradox took over the license. I'd speculate it is at least in part because their level of desired managerial oversight made it a pain in the rear end to write for them. This slowed down the kickstarter pipeline and means that it's harder to keep a writer engaged on followup projects. They've lost a lot of good talent in the last six years. Like a writer should not need to specify that "the sentence about werewolf sperm being so mighty it breaks IUDs" was inserted after the fact by publisher fiat. but that's the world that Parawoof created.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 03:07
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Yeah, people point at the racism like a smoking gun as to 'why it is bad now' but things have been going downhill ever since Paradox took over the license. I'd speculate it is at least in part because their level of desired managerial oversight made it a pain in the rear end to write for them. This slowed down the kickstarter pipeline and means that it's harder to keep a writer engaged on followup projects. They've lost a lot of good talent in the last six years. Right? We should not have been shocked at Sambrano's treatment writing for Werewolf 5E* - and I don't think many of us who paid attention were - because it's been there mostly since day one of Paradox's tenure. *A Native writer who tried to make the setting more friendly to actual Native viewpoints and was roundly rebuffed and ignored and was told things like "Well, why don't we just kill one of the two Native Garou tribes outright?"
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 03:30
|
|
|
Many people who would have cared had already written off the NuWOD after the parade of V5's atrocities. Because Jesus Christ V5 was a load of edgy alt-right bullshit.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 04:16
|
|
|
Stories of mistreatment/underpayment of freelancers by OPP have come up several times over the years and it can't all be laid at Paradox's feet. One story that sticks in my mind was one writer saying how peeved they were that they were expected to run a game for Kickstarter backers who pledged at a significantly more expensive reward tier, but saw none of that money in compensation. Of course, some of the freelancers with complaints were bad actors themselves, and muddied the waters a bunch. I won't lie, I gave OPP way more slack than I should have because of said bad actors. It may not mean much anymore since I'm not at all interested in the products they put out now, but I'm good with not giving OPP or Paradox any more money for anything.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 04:19
|
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:Welp, despite all the scrambling WoTC keeps doing to deny it, Hasbro's CEO is still all in on using LLM AI content gen in MtG and D&D. Reading the whole interview doesn’t give me quite that impression. (It does, like most CEO interviews, make me wonder why these barely-coherent word-salads don’t make investors nervous, because for as much as these people get paid you’d expect that they’d be better communicators.) The first quotation starts with Cocks talking about responsible AI usage and the ethics of LLM training and he’s basically responding that they could develop a “D&D” LLM trained just on their own content. This answer strikes me as more meaningful, from later in the interview: “Cocks interview” posted:Cocks: Well, we’re a toy company. We’re a pretty soft empire. Once again, I think it’s just a paradigm that you have to figure out. I’m sure if you went to a classic P&G-style brand manager from the 1950s and you told him what the world looks like today, with user-generated content on the internet pre-AI, they’d say, “How do you control this thing?” And the answer is, it’s not really control. It’s co-creation. It’s engagement. It’s truly embracing a community mindset to a brand being owned by more than just a company, but by hundreds of thousands of fans who care as passionately about it as you do. That could certainly mean “use AI art in products,” but I read it more as Cocks saying that DMs are increasingly going to use AI tools in their personal campaigns, that he sees little difference between trying to control that and trying to control pre-AI “user-generated content,” and that he doesn’t see a problem with it. My guess is that he’s thinking Hasbro could make money by providing AI tools for D&D trained on content Hasbro owns, and that if they don’t, people will just use existing (more generic) tools to do the same things and Hasbro loses out. I saw no indication he thinks these tools are a replacement for official products or that he imagines WotC will stop selling adventure modules once they have an AI adventure generator up and running. This is very much “here’s a new market where we can compete.” I’m not saying any of that is a good idea, or that I trust Cocks worth a drat, but his statements in this interview aren’t saying “WotC policy is no AI art in official products but I’ll soon change that,” it’s more “how do we make more money off AI?” That could go in some terrible ways or in some ways that might be OK. (Would a LLM AI “Sage” answering D&D rules questions do worse than Crawford? WotC sure isn’t willing to pay someone full-time to do that work.) Free Gratis posted:Stories of mistreatment/underpayment of freelancers by OPP have come up several times over the years and it can't all be laid at Paradox's feet. One story that sticks in my mind was one writer saying how peeved they were that they were expected to run a game for Kickstarter backers who pledged at a significantly more expensive reward tier, but saw none of that money in compensation. I’m not sure “hire rear end in a top hat freelancers so when they complain about how poorly you treated them, nobody cares” ever said anything good about OPP. Not caring about your freelancers’ reputations or deliberately hiring them because then you can mistreat them yourselves just seem like different levels of the same bad behavior. So I agree, OPP seems to have pretty clearly entered the “no, you are the rear end in a top hat” classification. Running even a small game company takes a wide range of skills and it’s pretty rare to see someone good at doing all of them. Get big enough and you’re either stuck in the Peter Principle world where you can hire new employees good at doing very specific jobs but your original management staff all have seniority and can override them, or you get acquired by somebody really big (like Hasbro) where even if their people are strong in areas you were weak, they have no investment in or knowledge of what you do specifically and can easily expect you to adapt to their practices. That can mean good things for HR, say (as compared to the “one boss” office where if your boss harasses you he’s also the only one to report it to), but very bad things for whatever you actually produce (like the marketing wing of the corporation somehow taking control of your future products and release schedules). OPP didn’t have to be villains to end up here, they just set certain priorities and were sloppy in areas they should have cared more about.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 16:02
|
|
|
Narsham posted:I’m not sure “hire rear end in a top hat freelancers so when they complain about how poorly you treated them, nobody cares” ever said anything good about OPP. Not caring about your freelancers’ reputations or deliberately hiring them because then you can mistreat them yourselves just seem like different levels of the same bad behavior. So I agree, OPP seems to have pretty clearly entered the “no, you are the rear end in a top hat” classification. I don't believe OPP was deliberately hiring bad actors as some form of 3D chess. I just think they greatly benefited from the fact that their loudest whistle blower was also publicly being a apologist for his sex pest friend.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 17:03
|
|
|
Narsham posted:Reading the whole interview doesn’t give me quite that impression. (It does, like most CEO interviews, make me wonder why these barely-coherent word-salads don’t make investors nervous, because for as much as these people get paid you’d expect that they’d be better communicators.) Investors love this poo poo. We just saw how Kickstarter going on about "blockchain" even though the CEO himself didn't even know what that really meant or how it would benefit them got the company $100 million just for agreeing to play along. Barely coherent word salad makes people throw dumptrucks of money through your windows.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 18:34
|
|
|
Free Gratis posted:Stories of mistreatment/underpayment of freelancers by OPP have come up several times over the years and it can't all be laid at Paradox's feet. One story that sticks in my mind was one writer saying how peeved they were that they were expected to run a game for Kickstarter backers who pledged at a significantly more expensive reward tier, but saw none of that money in compensation. LOL, what an idiot. Yeah it's lousy the company did that, but on the other hand he was getting to build personal connections to whales with poor impulse control. Flip those goobers into supporting your own patreon where you write whatever. There are also people paying $20-$30 dollars a session (times 6 players) for a "professional" game master to run online games for them. https://startplaying.games/search?gameSystems=world-of-darkness If you're a writer with your name actually in the books you can probably leverage that into making more running games a few nights a week than you make writing the game. When someone offers you whales you take them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 19:15
|
|
|
moths posted:Many people who would have cared had already written off the NuWOD after the parade of V5's atrocities.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 19:38
|
|
|
Facebook Aunt posted:LOL, what an idiot. Yeah it's lousy the company did that, but on the other hand he was getting to build personal connections to whales with poor impulse control. Flip those goobers into supporting your own patreon where you write whatever. oh for sure man the writer in question should have been deeply thankful to be paid in ~*exposure*~ instead of a reasonable wage for their work
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 19:57
|
|
|
Facebook Aunt posted:LOL, what an idiot. Yeah it's lousy the company did that, but on the other hand he was getting to build personal connections to whales with poor impulse control. Flip those goobers into supporting your own patreon where you write whatever. It actually sucks to be told to do a bunch of extra work that someone else got paid for but you didn't and won't. "Just grind harder" is rear end in a top hat advice.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 21:42
|
|
|
Also as much as I think the vast bulk of this industry needs to just not be happening, I'm not pretending that getting to write cool, fun stuff for a property you enjoy is not a compelling motivation. These people are not stupid for wanting to do this stuff. And then it becomes a thing about power imbalance and "little extra things" that everyone ends up doing as part of their work. So complaining that you didn't have the energy or gumption to say "no" to this bullshit is not unreasonable.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:18
|
|
|
I also think it's a huge leap in logic to assume people who paid for some dumb kickstarter stretch goal will be easily flippable into your elfgame paypigs and that this was just easy money left on the table. This hobby is infamous for being full of people who are the cheapest, most miserly skinflints alive. I highly doubt that it's actually that easy to turn paid GMing into a serious side-gig, even though we're now at a point where "paid GMing" isn't immediately dismissed as the crackpot idea that it used to be.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:20
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I also think it's a huge leap in logic to assume people who paid for some dumb kickstarter stretch goal will be easily flippable into your elfgame paypigs and that this was just easy money left on the table. This hobby is infamous for being full of people who are the cheapest, most miserly skinflints alive. I highly doubt that it's actually that easy to turn paid GMing into a serious side-gig, even though we're now at a point where "paid GMing" isn't immediately dismissed as the crackpot idea that it used to be. in my experience, most people flame out of pro gming pretty quickly unless it's something they seriously want to do, it does change the calculation when you're running games for income rather than just to entertain yourself and your friends.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:22
|
|
|
you could not pay me enough to run games for randos whose sole linking quality was being able to drop thousands of dollars on a kickstarter without worrying
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:25
|
|
|
ItohRespectArmy posted:in my experience, most people flame out of pro gming pretty quickly unless it's something they seriously want to do, it does change the calculation when you're running games for income rather than just to entertain yourself and your friends. I know a couple people who have managed to do this (the guy who runs the Interpoint discord server for Lancer is one example, for which he makes the princely sum of about $1500 a month) but by and large it strikes me as being in the same boat as telling someone "oh you play video games right? You should just make a living as a streamer, how hard can it be?"
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:26
|
|
|
I managed to monetize my RPG hobby in a way I don't hate, and what it has largely led to is friends asking if they can and should do the same with their own hobbies, all "I like jigsaw puzzles, would people pay me to do those on a camera? Like you wouldn't see me, just the puzzle" and stuff. I generally just tell them exactly how long it took and how lucky I am overall and that I didn't set out for it to ever be a job.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:35
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I know a couple people who have managed to do this (the guy who runs the Interpoint discord server for Lancer is one example, for which he makes the princely sum of about $1500 a month) but by and large it strikes me as being in the same boat as telling someone "oh you play video games right? You should just make a living as a streamer, how hard can it be?" Streaming is a really good metaphor for it tbh. Obviously it's a very fun and satisfying job when it goes right but it comes with stresses you wouldn't have to deal with normally. Having to bring tons of positivity and energy to your job every day can be really difficult. Not to mention having to juggle all the different personalities, lack of communication from people on what they actually want ect. It takes a certain personality and attitude, rather than the ability to do a really good weekly campaign.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 22:45
|
|
|
Can someone explain how on earth this can happen? Battletech Merceneries Kickstarter:quote:BattleTech Encounters Err what? The company that made the game got it released by "accident" by it's distributors? Who didn't tell them. Is this common in the games industry these days? This sounds like a huge stuff up but Catalyst is all fine with it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2024 03:16
|
|
|
It is not common but street dates are broken commonly by big distributors because the warehouse guys don't give a poo poo. I've never heard of a situation exactly like this happening before though. It sounds like Catalyst had the product on hold but didn't leave special instructions not to ship.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2024 03:29
|
|
|
Also it's CGL so there's very little reason to uncritically accept this version of events.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2024 03:38
|
|
|
That Old Tree posted:Also it's CGL so there's very little reason to uncritically accept this version of events. They do feel like basically a weird money laundering scheme at this point.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2024 04:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 18:35 |
|
|
Knowing Catalyst they probably weren't paying their pallet rental and the warehouse seized their product in lieu of repayment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2024 04:19
|
|