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JDCorley posted:You might check out etsy and see how other people who do handmade stuff handle limited online sales. I almost think etsy is a little better for craft-type gaming products like awesome miniatures or terrain.
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Apr 23, 2013 03:16
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The thing I remember about my readthrough of KPFS is that it's pretty explicit that you don't get rewarded mechanically for doing truly heinous stuff -- only really petty, stupid evil acts. So I assume it'd just become an exercise in absurdity. And I think that's the intention. It's still a game I don't really have any desire to play, though.
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Aug 10, 2013 03:40
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We've used tablets and phones as character sheet replacements to great effect in D&D 4e. If you're using DDI, you save a ton of paper that way since you don't have to reprint (at minimum) every time you level up. But yeah, that Golem Arcana thing looks pretty dumb.
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Sep 12, 2013 15:44
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Dr. Tough posted:How easy death is in a game is really more about the group and GM than it is about the game itself. Esser-Z got it right: Esser-Z posted:Easy death in a game like modern D&D is in conflict with the complexity and length of char gen. Dying easily when chargen takes five minutes to roll up, as with OD&D, is one thing. Dying easily when you spent twenty plus minutes figuring out your character is totally different.
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Sep 29, 2015 17:17
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Leperflesh posted:I bet there are actual programmers who are RPG fans that would be happy and willing to help develop apps to support a cool game system for little or no cost. The same goes for technical writers. On the other hand, if all we're talking about is a straight rulebook replacement, the technology exists to do that with little to no technical knowledge. It's called a wiki. The problem is you'd be in pretty much uncharted territory as far as monetizing that goes, on top of the time it takes to properly hyperlink the thing. I like where you're going though, and I mostly agree with it. Just last night I cracked open a PDF for Shadowrun 5e to look at the rules for making a character and it was extremely painful to parse.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:44
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not a programmer or technical writer myself, so just to be clear...are we talking about publishers doing what Hero Lab is doing, but for their own games instead of waiting for a third party to capitalize on the opportunity? On the other hand, this conversation started with how awful rulebooks are, both as references and learning guides. If you're just looking to replace that with a knowledge base-type format you don't really need all that much technical skill as long as we're ignoring the monetising aspect. I mean, I'm sure a skilled technical writer would do a much better job, but you can't really do much worse than a lot of coding KBs, which are still light years beyond a textbook. ImpactVector fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 22:22
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thespaceinvader posted:Which circles me back to 'make an online database (which is a shitton easier and requires a lot less developmental chops), make an API for it, paygate it, watch someone else develop your tools for you'. Regardless, one of my friends figured out how to capture the XML data from one of the builders. I think he wanted to make some kind of item database. But if you've ever seen the big chunks of XML they work on in the CB thread, you'll know they're ugly as sin. So I don't think he got very far. Alternately, people have been scraping the compendium basically forever. But that's just as clunky and error prone. I think masterplan and a few of the character sheet apps went this route. Anyway, my basic point is that this has been done before. But you still are going to have a hard time monetizing it because once someone pulls enough data to make a reasonable copy of your database you're pretty much toast. The only thing preventing it in 4e is that the actual tools, while really clunky, are still going to be way better than something someone is going to put together in their spare time.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:57
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That Old Tree posted:The delay in releasing material for bards and gnomes could—and probably should—be chalked up to space constraints more than anything else.
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Apr 30, 2016 20:07
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moths posted:That mentally probably grows from when a DM does "work" preparing a game for free. They're extrapolating their unpaid effort to what a designer does, when in reallity running a game/campaign is how they choose to consume and enjoy the product. Heck, I still remember creating my own character sheets in MS Word for Shadowrun and D&D back in high school because none of the ones I could find laid anything out in a useful manner. As people have mentioned though, the answer to the above isn't less money spent on tech writing/editing.
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May 9, 2016 18:54
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I was just about to give Mearls the benefit of the doubt on responding to just the claim and missing the context of the diversity dig (which seems like a pretty Mearls thing to do). But then I saw Pundowski in the thread and not getting called out on any of his poo poo. Yuck. Does someone have a link to the Industry Insider list they're talking about? The GenCon site is garbage.
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May 13, 2016 15:28
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's a pretty amazing one-two combo of ignorance and shittiness side by side, and the comment largely just boils down to Mearls desperately trying to gatehouse the hobby. I guess I've always seen Mearls as a clueless goof with no context awareness (so, a nerd) in way over his head as a voice in the hobby. Not that it really excuses lovely behavior. And it's extra ironic because there were at least a few WotC credits in the guest list that I saw.
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May 13, 2016 16:22
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Slimnoid posted:I'd wager that most people have him blocked for being an obnoxious rear end, as well as being an untalented hack. It's pretty difficult to call people out when you don't see their poo poo. It also makes me wonder why anyone would use such a wide open platform for any kind of professional PR stuff (oh wait, Mearls).
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May 13, 2016 16:32
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moths posted:Calling out those shitheads helps to make it a discussion about them. "Making any discussion about me" is literally the only thing they are skilled at doing, and it's a frequent distraction/derail technique from whatever is currently going on. I'm kind of surprised it doesn't do that for people you've blocked. But I'm sure that would have all kinds of other ramifications.
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May 13, 2016 16:52
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Kai Tave posted:And yet Sean K. Reynolds keeps finding work. A lot of game design is cargo cult, from all the D&D heart breakers and the hobby's obsession with equipment lists even in games where it doesn't make sense (FFG Star Wars, I'm looking at you) to the recent rise of Apocalypse World hacks. Sometimes you get a functional game whose rules reinforce the kinds of fiction or table experience they're trying to evoke, but a lot of times you just get a warmed over reskin of something else with a lot of holdover mechanics that don't really make sense in the new setting, genre, or style.
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May 16, 2016 20:35
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Zurui posted:PbtA games are *especially* susceptible to this. It's incredibly easy to play Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts and not actually grasp what makes the system work. By that, I don't mean the bare mechanics (on a 7-9...) but how the mechanics exist to support the sort of fiction your game is modeled after. In many ways, a PbtA game is defined not by what you can do but by what the rules don't actively support. Dungeon World's damage rolls are an instance of that. Turns out rolling for damage after rolling to hit (with the inherent risk for bad things on a failure) makes for anticlimactic results and really wonky damage/armor value scaling. And don't get me started on Bonds.
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May 16, 2016 21:22
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MalcolmSheppard posted:You'll always have people who just want to blow poo poo up, power trip, or violate social norms inside a fictional box, and trying to design to prevent it is foolhardy, especially when an informal word of caution is a more efficient way to go about it. Then again, I've seen people powergame loving Fiasco by competing to gently caress up in some spectacular way the fastest/most and congratulating themselves about it, which is in fact a really boring way to play, because there's no tragicomic arc and nothing to lose, so people who play against intent can sometimes freshen things up. That group of power gamers would probably have a good time with D&D 4e or Strike!, where the game rewards pulling off rad, synergistic combos.
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May 17, 2016 19:40
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Yeah, it's like he saw that Fate was the new cool thing but completely missed the boat on how the fate point economy works. Plus you have character options like "Wields Two Weapons at Once" competing with "Controls Gravity". That's not even an exaggeration.
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May 31, 2016 17:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:FWIW I can't wrap my head around Fate either. Compels as a concept I understand, but I try thinking about setting target numbers in the system and my brain just shuts down. In Fate, rolls tend towards neutral with a pretty strong curve. So a target 2 above a player's skill is actually pretty tough and odds are will require at least one invoke.
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May 31, 2016 18:09
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, most of the time they're making opposed rolls, so in those cases they know what they're trying to beat. For non-contested rolls, I'll usually try to keep things in the +3 to +5 range. I think of it in terms of "You'd have to be Good/Great/Superb to pull that off". It really is tough though, and I didn't always succeed either. More often than not at least a few of my players ended a session maxed out on fate points, which is a good indicator that they were never challenged.
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May 31, 2016 18:46
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Jimbozig posted:Play Strike! and never set a target number again. And the Angel Summoner is probably just a Summoner/Leader.
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May 31, 2016 20:01
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That's completely unusable. I always include page references next to my spells/items/feats so I can go look them up since I usually end up summarizing on my sheet to save space. What the gently caress happened to that game?
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Jul 12, 2016 20:12
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Sort of.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:34
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Lightning Lord posted:Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached. It's a little different from OSR games designed for unexamined D&D assumptions from the ground up.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:50
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potatocubed posted:Reading Burning Wheel back in the early 2000s opened my eyes to a lot of story-game design stuff that I'd never really thought about before and I was much impressed. I still think beliefs and instincts are great tech. Playing it was kind of an exercise in frustration. It's a game which rewards system mastery -- just like the D&D it pulls away from so strongly -- and as such it's entirely possible to 'build to concept' and end up with a woefully ineffective character even in their supposed area of expertise. Luckily the concepts in it that were once pretty novel are showing up in a lot of other games.
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Aug 31, 2016 18:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:There legit isn't a big jedi / non-jedi gap, and you can absolutely have any kind of mixed team that you see fit. There are a few nonstandard actions scattered around the jobs, but they're pretty rare. It was something I also missed from WFRP3, though I do think that game seems to take it a bit too far in the other direction for all but the heaviest crunch-loving group. Even just two or three special actions per talent tree would have been really cool IMO. If they were spaced decently you could pick them or not depending on how much you want to interact with the mechanics.
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Sep 6, 2016 22:02
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm mostly just turning down the idea that jedi have all these fantastic maneuvers and abilities and options. They are for the most part doing the same "I attack" on their round. They just might say "I attack by throwing a thing" instead of "I attack with a laser sword." You do have a few extra options like pushing people or buffing your stats and such, but yeah it probably does still boil down to basic attacks most of the time. Regarding the "how can you make shooting things interesting", WFRP3's cards mostly boil down to giving you specific ways to spend your dice symbols. For example, there's a Called Shot card that lets you spend one success for normal damage, or 2 successes for normal damage and giving them the Rattled condition for a round. FFG Star Wars has a generic list of things you can spend symbols on (as does WFRP3), but tying them to specific player abilities that they can choose to use was a lot of fun in the right group, and adds another layer of player choice.
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Sep 7, 2016 18:05
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Brainiac Five posted:Episode 1: the motherfucking podrace you facile sack of poo poo. The comment about the Falcon is irrelevant to anything that happens on screen except as explanation. You never see the characters making hard decisions between smuggling compartments or more guns or whatever. It's just establishing believability for when it outruns the Imperials. Similarly, the pod race, and even the construction of the pod itself, isn't really about what equipment the characters are choosing. They're just challenges to overcome. RPG rules exist to provide incentive for players to take certain desired actions (e.g. giving XP for gold in a game where you want players to delve into dungeons as efficiently as possible). In the case of a licensed property, one possible set of desired player actions revolves around recreating the feel, character, and stories of the property. That's where a lot of people find that the more traditional RPG rules in EotE fall down. There are definitely valid explanations/defenses for gear porn ("they actually do recreate the theme I'm going for" in the case of cyberpunk, or even just "this is the way Star Wars RPGs have always done it, and that's an actively enjoyable thing for me"), but faithfulness to the themes of Star Wars movies isn't really one of them IMO.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:14
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Serf posted:So just because something is tradition then it must always be that way? In that sense, the new trend towards rules light narrative games is more the outlier, and maybe an indication that the hobby is growing and broadening its appeal. But those of us that do enjoy the lighter games shouldn't be surprised when publishers (especially big ones) will tend to stick more closely to "the way things have always been done". They're in the game to make money after all.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:43
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Also, rethinking things, I'm not sure why people are complaining about the gear lists in EotE (which are kind of annoying to have to parse through if that's not your thing, but can still mostly be ignored as was mentioned) when the real genre killer is the brutal lethality.
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Sep 8, 2016 16:52
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unseenlibrarian posted:Yeah, god knows, Star Wars isn't known for having horrible maiming injuries and dismemberment as a frequent th...wait.
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Sep 8, 2016 17:59
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jivjov posted:The Star Wars dice, and their narrative mechanic, are good actually. Whereas in FFGSW, you pretty much just have one big boring list and anything else is on the fly GM rules design. I found it kind of fatiguing to run.
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Mar 31, 2017 16:36
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Spuckuk posted:Might be the wrong thread for it but..did anyone ever play Iron Heroes (Monte Cook), and if so, how broken was it? And I haven't played it myself, but I know I've seen it discussed before. IIRC there were some classes that were okay if everyone's playing IH classes, but also a few that were complete garbage (so, par for the course in D&D-related stuff). If you don't get any hits here you could try the chat thread.
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Apr 11, 2017 16:28
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Mr. Maltose posted:Let me tell y'all the good word on Last Stand, the game where you literally draft your character's abilities.  beautiful bug game  Kai Tave posted:Somebody remind me what the policy is on distributing Last Stand, I know that Mikan quit elfgames and the internet for good reason but I recall that she put Last Stand up on a Google drive page or something that I lost track of, is it kosher to share it around or was it more of a backup for people who helped fund it?
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Sep 26, 2017 23:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:Okay, so here's a question, and in recognition that the discussion is heated I assure you that I am asking this in good faith:
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Sep 28, 2017 15:26
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Cassa posted:Not doubting it, I loved the online compendium, just wondering if there any notable changes. There were plenty of others, that was just off the top of my head.
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Sep 29, 2017 12:55
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Hidingo Kojimba posted:For someone who doesn't hate it, you sure feel the burning need to keep saying it out loud while being relentlessly passive aggressive about it, but that's the beauty of a forum that doesn't tone police I guess. I mostly don't use the site because no one ever really has anything interesting to say about games, probably because the rules make it tough to criticize them.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:57
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