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Kurieg posted:I guess we know why they're being so nice to DND 5e suddenly. It is possible that I am being nice to DND 5E because I actually like a lot about the system. And my bosses have nothing to do with what I choose to write about in tabletop. And I flatly said "I will not write about ACKS" when I took the position. And it's possible I'm focusing on tradgames stuff because it gets way, way more traffic and that means I get to buy rent and groceries. Though I try to write about indies or get my newsies to when I can, see: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/140388-Eberron-Gloom-Creator-Unveils-Phoenix-Dawn-Command-RPG http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/136093-Bundle-of-Holding-Indie-Pack-Lets-Dogs-in-the-Vineyard Workin on a review of World Wide Wrestling RPG right now too. So. Edit: Sorry! This came off as aggressive, though I'll admit to being a little huffy when I wrote it. Either way, do try to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Organizations and writers are not monolithic. That interview was not for expressing my opinions, but Crawford's - frex, I agree with most of your responses to what he had to say. JonBolds fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 22:10
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The Escapist burnt whatever doubt they might have benefited from months ago.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:24
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JonBolds posted:It is possible that I am being nice to DND 5E because I actually like a lot about the system. A shadowy conspiracy to steal tens of roleplaying dollars from internet doughmen is one thing, but this is just implausible
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Apr 8, 2015 22:29
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JonBolds posted:It is possible that I am being nice to DND 5E because I actually like a lot about the system. The problem is not with you so much as the organization you represent. The Escapist has been linked to plenty of cases of "ethics" in the past, including in this hobby, which makes it decidedly harder to take articles written there - regardless of who wrote it - seriously.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:37
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ProfessorCirno posted:The problem is not with you so much as the organization you represent. The Escapist has been linked to plenty of cases of "ethics" in the past, including in this hobby, which makes it decidedly harder to take articles written there - regardless of who wrote it - seriously. Hey, that is totally understandable and fine by me, but don't be surprised if I say you're wrong when you guess at my motives and get them wrong. Or when you say there's collusion and there ain't. ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that one of the former Escapist employees now works directly for WotC in their D&D department. If an article directly involved Greg T I'd add a disclaimer. In this case, the article did not. I interviewed crawford back in January, I wrote this up the other day, I sent WotC's PR a link to the article. In between I got an email from Greg saying "this is my new job, but my job is not to talk to you so go through PR for everything anyways." Cool! Anyways, Fantasy Grounds, that is a bad choice of platform and it is waaaaayyyy too much money. I hope nobody buys it. I hope everyone puts the system info directly from their books into the virtual tabletop of their choice instead. I want to know what really happened to cause the relationship cut with the DungeonScape people. Their product was pretty solid. I smacks of a corporate higher up being all "How much are we paying into that? Okay, I am lowering your budget and I want you to cut that."
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Apr 8, 2015 23:08
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Yeah, fair enough. Apologies. I was incorrect and misspoke.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:18
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Guys. Noam Chomsky has already made it clear that there is a close, systematized, symbiotic-like network of relationships between a wotc, the escapist, and any interactions with or dependencies upon phenomenon such as memes (and their propagation through message boards) and, particularly, redditors - especially in /tg/. It's all very clearly laid out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico-media_complex
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Apr 8, 2015 23:23
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JonBolds posted:I want to know what really happened to cause the relationship cut with the DungeonScape people. Their product was pretty solid. I smacks of a corporate higher up being all "How much are we paying into that? Okay, I am lowering your budget and I want you to cut that." Nah, the product was a mess and there was a huge difference of vision between what the creators wanted (see their later, failed kickstarter) and what WOTC wanted.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:58
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DungeonScape posted some thing where they said "we wanted to create a whole new Digital Initiative Experience Paradigm Shift for D&D but they just couldn't jive with our grand vision man" while all WotC wanted, presumably, was a digital character creator. It sounds like things were a mess on both ends because on the one hand DungeonScape sounds like a bunch of idiots for trying to create something wildly different than what the client wanted while on the other hand how did Mike Mearls or whoever was supposed to be checking in on this project not notice what was going on and say "hey no guys, just the character creator that we asked for, all right?" I get that the answer to the latter is probably  but still. I'd say that WotC actually dodged a bullet because DungeonScape, what got released of it, looked like poo poo...slow, badly designed, clunky, etc...but this new program doesn't actually look any better so I guess not.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:07
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So is there a legitimately good virtual tabletop?
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Apr 9, 2015 00:11
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Ojetor posted:So is there a legitimately good virtual tabletop? In your imagination.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:17
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I'm sorry, 'theater of the mind'.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:18
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JonBolds posted:Hey, that is totally understandable and fine by me, but don't be surprised if I say you're wrong when you guess at my motives and get them wrong. Or when you say there's collusion and there ain't.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:38
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Ojetor posted:So is there a legitimately good virtual tabletop? I will argue that Roll20 is one, yes. It has a learning curve and isn't perfect (maybe not even great), but it is legitimately good. I've tried a whole bunch of solutions to run a campaign for my group scattered across the country and this is the only one I've actually enjoyed using.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:41
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CaptCommy posted:I will argue that Roll20 is one, yes. It has a learning curve and isn't perfect (maybe not even great), but it is legitimately good. I've tried a whole bunch of solutions to run a campaign for my group scattered across the country and this is the only one I've actually enjoyed using. Yeah, I've used Roll20 as well and it works for me. I don't run really run games that require detailed maps so I can't say how good that part of it is. But you can alter the map and make it a blank page to put text on, so I use it to either put character sheets and other game info there or draw crude maps to give the players an idea of what the place is like.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:47
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The problem with virtual tabletop development is it just doesn't really seem like the potential market is there to attract any serious software company to pour a bunch of time and money into making a great tabletop app for an extremely niche hobby many of which look down their noses at digital anything for ruining the "purity" of their gaming experience.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:48
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ritorix posted:Nah, the product was a mess and there was a huge difference of vision between what the creators wanted (see their later, failed kickstarter) and what WOTC wanted. Kai Tave posted:I'd say that WotC actually dodged a bullet because DungeonScape, what got released of it, looked like poo poo...slow, badly designed, clunky, etc...but this new program doesn't actually look any better so I guess not. Just how bad was it really? I never got around to looking at it while it was in beta and now it's dead so I have no idea what it was like.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:50
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isndl posted:Just how bad was it really? I never got around to looking at it while it was in beta and now it's dead so I have no idea what it was like. It was the kind of thing I would expect out of a university project with students demonstrating their learning of mobile development being done in 6 weeks.
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Apr 9, 2015 00:56
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I think it was ritorix who posted about trying the whatever-it-was they actually released and it sounded pretty bad.
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Apr 9, 2015 01:05
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isndl posted:Just how bad was it really? I never got around to looking at it while it was in beta and now it's dead so I have no idea what it was like. This was one of the first promo screenshots they released to get people excited for it:  That image, by the way, I found on an Escapist article giving unabashed praise to it: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/136859-D-D-DungeonScape-is-the-Good-End-of-Codename-Morningstar
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Apr 9, 2015 01:19
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CaptCommy posted:I will argue that Roll20 is one, yes. It has a learning curve and isn't perfect (maybe not even great), but it is legitimately good. I've tried a whole bunch of solutions to run a campaign for my group scattered across the country and this is the only one I've actually enjoyed using. I think it's pretty great, though I might not be looking for the same things as everyone else. It was absolutely perfect for Strike since making simple macros (which is all that game requires) was really easy, and they randomly add really cool functionality like when they added custom card decks. AFAIK it doesn't have like, a direct "plop your character sheet in here and it automates everything for whatever system you want" function but I've never ran into hurdles. Also music.
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Apr 9, 2015 01:29
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Count me in on the "likes Roll20 fine" crew, but I don't really do anything too demanding with it.
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Apr 9, 2015 02:04
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That bard does not have a charisma score.
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Apr 9, 2015 05:14
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I'd guess that the Charisma score can be found by scrolling the tan slider down the tan background. And the only reason I could (even barely) perceive that was I just recently hosed up my monitor settings to ultra-bright SUN GONE NOVA OH GOD MY EYES.MadScientistWorking posted:People are going to question your ethics when you work for a lying sack of poo poo who actively promotes racist propaganda and enables harassment from the rest of the hobby. There's also the fact that your pro-5e piece got run, while any hypothetically negative/ neutral piece would almost certainly end up on the cutting room floor. Influence is entirely unnecessary when things already go the way you want.
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Apr 9, 2015 05:27
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Ojetor posted:So is there a legitimately good virtual tabletop? Roll20 is the best we've got. It's just that at some point trying to automate a lot of stuff with it is going to push you into either "why am I not just making a computer game?" or "this is a labor of love" territory.
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Apr 9, 2015 05:45
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Rosalind posted:This was one of the first promo screenshots they released to get people excited for it: It's like they sat down, agreed they had all the tools they needed at their disposal... and then walked away congratulating themselves on a job well done. How is that layout useful for anything during gameplay? I make more useful character sheets in Word. 
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Apr 9, 2015 05:58
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Here's a video of how the monster pack works on Fantasy Grounds. The guy doing the tutorial is nothing special, but the actual system does looks pretty cool. Expensive but cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b9BLbQ6ejw There are other video's but this is the only one I have watched. gradenko_2000 posted:Roll20 is the best we've got. I personally like Maptool better then Roll20 but Maptool is harder on the player end. Then again it could just be because I can make Macro's on Maptool and suck at it on Roll20. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 06:36
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Ojetor posted:So is there a legitimately good virtual tabletop?
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Apr 9, 2015 08:32
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Hrm, in retrospect it was not the best UI ever - it did better in person where you could . At the point of last year's Gen Con they weren't calling it final UI though - but you can see from their Kickstarter video (I never paid attention to their Kickstarter very much) that it's what they were going to go with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwHmy-J6l-0 I retract my opinion about that being good. Straight-up wrong. moths posted:There's also the fact that your pro-5e piece got run, while any hypothetically negative/ neutral piece would almost certainly end up on the cutting room floor. Influence is entirely unnecessary when things already go the way you want. I don't know if an interview is 'pro-5e' - this thread didn't take it as pro. Pretty much took it as someone digging the hole they were already in deeper. For me, the interview was about exposing the less-known developer on the probably top-selling RPG to the public. If somebody'd pitched me a decent negative to neutral piece on D&D 5th, yeah, I'd run it. Nobody has, though. If you're interested and have the chops: pitches at escapistmag dot com. Put tabletop in the subject. Include writing samples.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:29
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JonBolds posted:If somebody'd pitched me a decent negative to neutral piece on D&D 5th, yeah, I'd run it. Nobody has, though. If you're interested and have the chops: pitches at escapistmag dot com. Put tabletop in the subject. Include writing samples. This is darkly amusing since much of the last page has been people telling you why they don't want to be associated with your publisher.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:38
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Which one is the "Well why don't YOU (write for the Escapist) better..." logical fallacy? E: tu quoque? maybe moths fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 15:47
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Lemniscate Blue posted:This is darkly amusing since much of the last page has been people telling you why they don't want to be associated with your publisher. That's not something I can control. What I can control is offering a platform.  moths posted:Which one is the "Well why don't YOU (write for the Escapist) better..." logical fallacy? Sorry? I felt like I was offering something in good faith. I wasn't intending to imply this aggressively or defensively. I honestly mean that I don't have a good piece that's netural-to-negative on 5E in me. When I do, I'll write it. I am only one dude. There is not anyone else at this publication right now who has RPG writing chops.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:52
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Maybe preface your WotC articles with an Editor's note explaining the owners of the Escapist have an business relationship with WotC.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:31
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mango sentinel posted:Maybe preface your WotC articles with an Editor's note explaining the owners of the Escapist have an business relationship with WotC. To my knowledge, no Escapist editor has a business relationship with WotC. We had one guy that wrote for them once before he worked for us, and now he works for someone else - I think that's Greg Tito. I think Justin C won some money in a Magic: The Gathering tournament once if that counts.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:53
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it's about ethics in traditional games journalism
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Apr 9, 2015 18:38
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Yo someone can be a lovely writer for a lovely publication without there having to be corruption involved. Why are you guys being so wacky about this?
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Apr 9, 2015 19:20
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Yeah guys. I'm as negative about 5e as the next goon but the weird non-links between wotc and the escapist are pretty silly. It is, ironically, exactly the flimsy kind of semi-professional in-passing relationships the less insane (but still wrong) gators use to justify their personal crusades, e.g, "this guy knows this guy and used to work for this guy therefore collusion" stuff you see from time to time. "I don't like this publication" is still an okay position to have I just don't see the connection.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:20
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Like oh man this guy wrote effusively about a games product that was not only lovely but was obviously going to be lovely at the time he wrote. This is an unusual failure of our games journalism rather than the standard MO for every outlet and, in fact, what gamers actually want to read, because they are terrible.
30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 19:25
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Mendrian posted:"I don't like this publication" is still an okay position to have I just don't see the connection. Did he do something else I'm not seeing/don't get? I know there was an interview earlier with Mike Mearls, and we're all super upset about that, because he designed the game we're talking about. Except not, because 5th is 3.5 again and he didn't design that. Is that the escapist's fault? Did they pressure Mike Mearls to undesign 4th edition? Edit: 30.5 Days posted:Like oh man this guy wrote effusively about a games product that was not only lovely but was obviously going to be lovely at the time he wrote. This is an unusual failure of our games journalism rather than the standard MO for every outlet and, in fact, what gamers actually want to read, because they are terrible. Oooooooh.... it's that.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:31
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Mendrian posted:Yeah guys. I'm as negative about 5e as the next goon but the weird non-links between wotc and the escapist are pretty silly. It is, ironically, exactly the flimsy kind of semi-professional in-passing relationships the less insane (but still wrong) gators use to justify their personal crusades, e.g, "this guy knows this guy and used to work for this guy therefore collusion" stuff you see from time to time. The thing is, there's also no reason to want to give The Escapist the benefit of the doubt. Greg Tito published a few articles talking up Adventurer Conqueror King while he was the editor-in-chief over the years and that feels kind of shady already because he also made ACKS, and now Tito went pretty much straight from being their EiC to being D&D's communications manager and the Escapist is publishing articles talking about how great 5e is. In a perfect world that wouldn't feel shady, but in a perfect world The Escapist wouldn't be courting Gamergate and willingly associating with toxic RPG personalities like Zak S and Desborough and why would I assume they're not being lovely for a minute? There's not even a good reason that it has to be a corruption thing, since The Escapist has always been pro old-D&D and that's pretty much the target audience for 5e. The Escapist just burnt too much credibility and has too many ex-editors in major D&D positions for me to not at least scoff when they post something pro-5e. I guess what I'm saying is, sorry to Jonathan Bolding for assuming he's a scumbag just because he's working for a company that's really scummy. That's really damning with faint praise, but faint praise is honestly all I can muster for anything that's still connected to The Escapist these days.
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