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occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Axe-man posted:

I find the easiest way to support change is to support it with your dollar. It might take a while and there might be hold outs, but in the end, women take up 51% of the world, and the more that is impressed on people's income and bottom line the faster that will change. Basically, instead of just talking about it do something about it! Voting with your dollar and etc etc. Those that don't change will fall to the wayside of those that do. :)

This doesn't actually work very well for women. The target for most of these things is "men," sometimes with an age-demographic qualifier attached, so women liking it is just considered a sidebar. If women play with sexy minis or read sexy comic books or buy sexy video games, then they assume that women like or at least don't mind cheesecakey stupidity. If women don't buy these things, the response is "women just don't like X" and a shrug. There are even cases when too many girls liking something can cause cancellation or otherwise spike a product because "it isn't hitting the target." Paul Dini had some words about this and the response to his cartoons. An artist on the Green Lantern also posted a comic on his experience.

That's leaving money on the table really, assuming that girls won't buy certain things ever or not bothering to figure out what they'll buy, but marketing mythology seems to treat gendered sales as a zero sum game--you can't get women without alienating men or something.

It all just ends up explaining why we can't have nice things.

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occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Yeah, the number of 5e products delayed or cancelled by someone's jury duty is hilarious, but when you're working with such a small crew it's less avoidable than when you have lots of people working on a project that can cover each other.

Ultimately that leads right back to management decisions and budget from WotC though.

Could you explain that a bit further? I haven't heard this bit of news, whose jury duty did what?

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Mors Rattus posted:

Because ways other than mine are wrong.

That's basically it, and it's not unique to tradgames. The Hugo fracas this year was caused by a bunch of milsf grognards declaring that anything not their thing being popular had to be the result of a conspiracy of wrongness for the sake of whatever 'political correctness' is supposed to mean now, gamers whine about filthy casuals ruining 'real games' or even complaining that Bioware chose to widen its audience. Even Disco Demolition was a whiny manbaby response to something part of the status quo didn't like being popular or even existing.

It's not new, but it is a completely childish and aggressive set of behaviors by insecure people.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Dr. Tough posted:

I'm pretty sure that the consumer base of RPGs is much too fractured (not necessarily a bad thing!) for the hobby to have a 1980's TSR style dominance again. I'm also not really sure that 4E is the correct place to look for pointers on conducting this marketplace take over seeing that it was a commercial failure. Recall that it actually caused WotC's share of the market to decline. And no it wasn't because of a plot from evil grognards to keep new players from seeing the light.

4E wasn't a commercial failure. If it had been, there wouldn't have been a slew of books for it, and there wouldn't have been a 5E. WOTC isn't in a rights-licensing situation where they need to crank out a lovely edition every X years or lose the rights to D&D, they could sit on it forever. But they felt there was some blood in that stone yet, Pathfinder or no Pathfinder.

And yeah, it had some good stabs at accessibility and support for the system. WOTC's no-PDF policies remain absolutely baffling, along with a lot of their other decisions with the brand, but 4E by itself did not cause those things.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Terrible Opinions posted:

Again this is anecdotal but for most women who make that sort of request it isn't because of pop culture horror stories about a specific hobby. Usually it's due to unpleasant experiences they have personally had in male dominated hobbies/environments.

Yeah, I've been navigating the hobby world for years and I will still tend to grab a friend or two or make sure of a safe space before going into a new hobby environment. There's also stuff that isn't quite at the horror story level, but more like, a new player comes in and does stuff that is completely not within the system's expectations--like one friend of mine was confronted with a goblin camp, and had the non-weapon proficiency 'fire-building' on her sheet. To her, this was a match made in heaven--she tried to use it to set fire to the camp. Some members of the hobby would react to such a 'failure' to understand the rules with derision, especially if the player was female, say. It's even worse if the female player wants to spend some time on her wardrobe to look less like a scruffy murderhobo or otherwise doing anything stereotypically feminine.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Kurieg posted:

Kindle books. You need to control both the method of distribution and the method of accessing the files.

The reason steam works is that you need steam to run the programs you install with it. Which means you need to be associated to your account. You can sort of get around that by logging into a computer then going offline, allowing you to log online in another location, but you can't just google drive your friend that copy of codblops you just downloaded and replicate it into infinity.

Also

You can strip the DRM out of Kindle books pretty easily though, if one is so inclined.

I guess people pirate steam games too but mostly the sales mean it isn't necessary. RPGs have the perilous problem of a huge number of entrants to the market being willing to work for free, which means that prices for paid content are driven down even if the free content is immensely poo poo.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Leperflesh posted:

I don't' know why RPG books have to be treated differently than just books. I feel like if publishers started just putting their stuff up as kindle versions on amazon for a typical kindle-like discount, that'd be that. The one drawback is that looking at illustrations on a kindle still kind of sucks, but if every other book publisher can figure out how to work with that restriction, RPG publishers can too.

There is at least some genuine effort required in converting and laying out an ebook format, and a lot of RPG publishers don't seem to have or want to have any experience with that at all. Like Chuubo's has an ebook version and I was honestly shocked that this was the case. But I agree, it would be awfully nice.

Some publishers do just sort of lazily slap out a conversion to ebook and it doesn't always work well--I bought a Judge Dredd volume in ebook and it was just the laziest, shittiest loving scan with no effort to merge splash pages, tons of useless white space, etc.

RPG publishers might be able to recoup the expense over time but it probably wouldn't pay for the initial outlay quickly.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Comrade Koba posted:

Not sure what defines a "top RPG series", but GURPS immediately comes to mind. My calculus textbook has prettier pictures.

There is some good art in GURPS, just also a lot of bad. GURPS Magic 4th was particularly egregious in the poser-art department but even then there were also decent pieces in there.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
General popularity means that people with more...niche tastes will be drawn to D&D's OGL for their weird publishing needs, but I also feel like in putting that stuff out there and desiring validation for it, the authors want their work to be associated with a "real" (or THE real) game. Thus, poor OGL's coattails are ridden by some very awkward parasites.

That's a theory rather than anything I can back up, but the sort of people who want to be 'gaming authorities!' always flash their D&D cred first. I'm talking about the folks who want to gatekeep or otherwise try to be king of our tiny poo poo molehill rather than someone like Shannon Applecline who did actual research to be an authority of sorts.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Adults also read YA, more and more, since it uses simpler language and structure--there isn't so much trying to pry apart the delicate spun-sugar edifice of sentences someone has written. If you read a lot of SF paperback novels marketed to adults from the 60s and 70s, aside from being extremely nuts, they have a pretty similar language level.

That simpler language also means you can blow through a YA novel in a few hours, which means buying more books. Basically, expect more YA to keep happening. I just wish that 'YA reading level' did not require 'being about a teenager and their dumb issues' every time.

RPGs marketed towards kids would need a similarly clear language style, but I imagine adult players would also appreciate it.

occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jan 29, 2016

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
It's especially weird in that they don't put Black Widow on things aimed at girls like backpacks sold as 'girls backpack' and what have you. 'Family Values'? I mean Hulk is a shirtless berserk roid job. Maybe if they just didn't put her in T&A pose it wouldn't come off so sexualized.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
It's not as blatant as Tournament of Rapists or similar such poo poo but if a community had a lot of women and/or feminists there would probably be some shitlord versions of those willing to defend any old thing that adhered vaguely to their vision of how the hobby's norms should operate.

Versus our homegrown 'rape is REALISM women were oppressed deal with it' brand of usual grog.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I was gonna say 'how could 3E be first D&D for so many people--' and then remembered it came out in 2000. I've been away from D&D as my main RPG for a long time and I forget how much time has gone by, gosh.

Also, as much as grogs bitch about dragonmans and tieflings and lack of gnomes as unthematic, every single one of them had some kind of 'unthematic' thing they embraced into D&D and it was okay because <reason> and 3E offered a huge glut of supplements that made it official which is obviously legitimate then unless it's in 4E. :shrug:

occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Feb 22, 2016

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Alien Rope Burn posted:

There's the usual clause to nix offensive material, whatever that may be, and they have the ability to pull down whatever they like (and since it's exclusive, you can't put it up anywhere else). They can't take ownership of material you write for them, IIRC, but they basically can give you a "like or lump it" offer as far as I can tell due to exclusivity.

Wait, does this mean once it's submitted to them, you can't submit it elsewhere if it's rejected? I mean if one scrubbed it of infringing material, assuming that were possible for the piece.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Maxwell Lord posted:

Doesn't quite sum it up- some of it's not specifically sexist but just generally creepy as poo poo, some of it's racist or transphobic or something else besides typical patriarchy.

'Chauvinism' isn't actually limited to sexism, it's just exaggerated and ridiculous loyalty to a cause beyond all sense and reason. The term is named after a French guy who remained doggedly loyal to Napoleon long after he was exiled and the dude himself was grievously injured in battle but he insisted in the ongoing superiority of the Emperor's rulership, etc.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I don't have a lot to add, people have said a lot of good things in this thread already about how harassment goes unchecked, but I wanted to comment that the movie Spotlight does a really good job of illustrating how offenders are protected and victims are silenced, systematically. How even otherwise good people who 'would never' end up being complicit, through doubt or inaction.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

chaos rhames posted:

The paywall was never about enforcing correct opinions, it's just for stopping gamefaqs 12 year olds.

I thought it was more about enriching Lowtax on their anger. I mean it's not a bad business plan and gives people brief breaks from shitheads. I mean yeah it will keep out literal kids for whom :tenbux: is a serious allotment of their resources.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Halloween Jack posted:

This has come up a few times in grogs.txt, but I've noticed that discussions about the RPG market itself tend to take on a peculiarly libertarian bent, until it comes to the subject of particular game that a particular poster wants--then he wants it to be cheap-to-free for nonsensical reasons.

I always notice how 'libertarian' arguments are completely in favor of companies working for their own interests, but when labor agitates for its own interests, they're "entitled" and "lazy" and probably millenials who don't know the value of an hour/dollar or whatever. This guy exemplifies a lot of similar attitudes about how developers should feel honored to drop 80+ hours a week in videogames "because they are art not a job" and they shouldn't complain about the hours or being underpaid because again art! Didn't he mention games are art?! Stop being such a spoiled whiner!

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Re RPG pricing: It's always been weird to me how people also flip out over games being divided into multiple books. Like D&D, AD&D, 1st even--you needed the PHB, DMG AND MM to play. Sixty bucks. Pathfinder sells for $50 and you still need the bestiary. They say only the GM needs it, but like most players won't want the inside edge on enemy powers. Plus, monster manuals are great bathroom reading. I love the things myself!

But nWoD publishing a unified rules book and then devoting the big fat splat books to the big fat splats, OMG. Too expensive! Complete money grab! I just threw up my hands at these people eventually. I mean some of their objection was 'that thing I liked is no longer supported' but the whinging about having to buy two books to play Werewolves was just dumb, especially after how many problems oWoD had from not trying to unify its systems and pretending that multiple splats would never interact in a single campaign, ever.

(not to say that nWoD got all that right; CoD is proof it didn't. But it was an attempt to evolve.)

I guess I am saying that some of that cheapness is a way of channeling grog dissent in a manner that sounds almost reasonable. "I'd buy it but they're just too greedy" is almost plausible until you pause to think about it even a little. POD lowered costs for smaller firms, but that leaves us with the massive wreckage of so many other larger businesses who tried to compete at scale and could not.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
"This survey is currently closed, as we have hit our cap for participants. Thank you for your interest!"

And they say girls don't like RPGs.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Countblanc posted:

There are always people who gently caress with anonymous data, this is just something inherent to Internet survey-style data gathering. It could be for flavors of cereal and there'd still be people saying their favorites are poo poo and gunpowder flavor, so if course something more political will have liars and trolls. As a grad student you learn what you can actually use with this information and what is just noise, and I trust these people to do that.

That said, I've done a study like this as an undergrad focusing on women in board gaming that used interviews rather than anonymous surveys, and not everyone gives the answers you'd like them to. As a bright-eyed leftist who was a semester away from finishing their degree in Women's Studies I fully expected the women I spoke with to talk about the misogyny in the hobby, the times they've been stalked after club meetings, etc. There was plenty of that, but there were also some women who talked about how "the feminists in the hobby" are blowing things out of proportion, that things were actually fine and people needed to stop being so sensitive. Particularly on the topic of the portrayal of women in the games' art, people deferred to "I like playing hot characters instead of ugly ones" or things of that nature.

I guess my point is that, when that study goes up behind a paywall in some soc/wgs social science journal in a year, don't necessary be disappointed if the findings aren't "99.9% of women in the hobby acknowledge that there's an issue with the both industry and the hobbyist sides of tabletop gaming," even if they do filter for obvious male trolls.

The second paragraph people used to baffle me completely until I understood that humans are risk-averse, and challenging the status quo is more dangerous than not challenging it--that is to say that the modest social rewards women get by telling themselves and their male friends that there is no sexism are better than the penalties they would receive by 'making trouble' and the potential for genuinely greater reward in a more equal situation seems remote. So obviously, the status quo is fine. You also see this with black or gay Republicans--individuals in a minority might be rewarded fairly substantially, and risk a lot by fighting the status quo. Or poor white people voting Republican for slightly different reasons. Or to go further back, anti-suffragists. It's interesting, if still very frustrating when trying to study and combat inequality.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Fossilized Rappy posted:

Oh, certainly not, it's just that the little things keep adding up to a picture that not everything is all that organized. It's probably just related to my pessimism over the TG industry as of late, though.

I can state with great certainty that SJG's business is not all that well organized, though 'being generally functional and maintaining a positive cash flow trickle' puts them head and shoulders above a lot of former game studios. These days anyone who wants to keep doing games in a real office has to have it pretty together, even Siembieda has had to clean up (and clean house) a bit.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Libertad! posted:

Quick question. What if a publisher were to upload their own PDFs onto filesharing websites? In the sense of "if anybody's gonna be distributing my books on Pirate Bay, it's gonna be me!"

Does this make a difference on things one way or another, in terms of public perception and/or other things?

Plus you know, there's not always a good way to tell if a scanned Player's Handbook is gonna be good quality, so if a publisher themselves do it you have a good chance that it'll be as close to the original file as possible, right?

e:fb

Eclipse Phase did this (does this?) IIRC and the line is still chugging along so I can't say it's hurt them much, I don't know if it's helped them either. But as others commented, piracy just doesn't work the way content owners think it does. It's great as a smokescreen for anti-consumer legislation like the DMCA though.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Monster Hunter is a really crunchy game system that I love where you have huge gear lists that contain very, very meaningful mechanical choices.

Of how to fashion up appropriately of course, nevermind about those armor skills.

But seriously while MH has some few choices that are sort of 'ultimately optimal', they're actually hard to get within the game's economy, and they aren't really necessary for 99% of the game. The choice of weapon matters. Elemental damage vs. Raw and other considerations matter. Your playstyle changes with the weapon, which changes which armor is best. It all makes quite a lot of difference, and the gear has a lot of the game's personality in it.

But that's cheating, it's a videogame that has millions of dollars of development time in it.

For RPGs, GURPS has always done more or less what we needed it to do for crunchy stuff. For us, the fairly-lethal nature of combat suited the kinds of campaigns we were playing, and our GM applied a genre-appropriate touch to modify it towards the style we were going for at the time. Of course, I've played so much modified GURPS that I don't know if I actually know the base rules at all, like we used ritual magic rules pretty much exclusively.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I like the Golden Kobold but Critical Hits is also good--'The Critties'?

You could do a statue for the Kobold by spraypainting one of those foil-wrapped chocolate easter bunnies.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I've not personally used the Green Ronin forums and I used to hate it when people would bring builds from the Atomic Think Tank to Mutants and Masterminds games. That said, it is helpful sometimes to have a forum dedicated to whatever small or obscure game you're playing. Sure, RPG.net and this place exist and all, but it's really easy for stuff to get lost in the traffic. I really can't fault smaller shops for not wanting to deal with the headache of a forum these days though, hosting is an expense on the already-thin margin of RPG publishing and the omnipresent assholes make moderation such a chore. I guess if the staff isn't interested in making the forum an active part of their interactions with the fanbase it could work, but we've seen what a mixed bag developers on forums can be already.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Kwyndig posted:

Short of wormhole technology that breaks special relativity there's no way of really knowing how someone actually voted, that's kind of the point with American elections. I mean yes, you can ask them, but legally they're under no obligation to answer or answer truthfully.

That said, classic Conan was fairly racist, just not as racist as his contemporaries. Of course, Howard also killed himself fairly early on, so we have no idea if things would have changed as time passed and attitudes changed. Unlike Lovecraft, who at times made other racists go "whoa there pal, dial back on that racism a bit"

This last bit I think is key. There are some signs of change in Howard's later stories--more nuance in the depictions of non-whites, and the stronger female characters appear more later on. And then he killed himself at thirty, after his mother died. I think he might have had more to say as time passed, but we'll never know.

As far as the boardgame goes, I agree with Leperflesh up there, Asmodee and Monolith made some choices which were not the best possible. They went for the fallacy that you can't market something to men and boys without minimizing and objectifying women, and that certainly isn't true.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I love how your mutant power can be "Special Vehicle." Turbo Teen, go!

Also that some of the entries are for lowered attributes, and some origins just straight up get 30-50% more powers than others, potentially.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
In the context of how we bind the idea of personhood to the word human, I had one GM make a fantasy world in which 'human' was the word used for basically any bipedal sapient. So I and my co-player were both dwarves, but that was akin to saying we were both black-haired--it was just a trait that described the characters. It took a minute to absorb the concept but when it clicked it made the othering of traditional non-humans a lot easier to discard.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I've heard that about the SCA as well, also that they used to put member names on a watchlist or something. I mean they do teach and practice fighting and survival techniques, it's just that it's carefully curated swordfighting rather than guns and the only governments they want to overthrow are rival cliques fighting each other for the budget.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
The modern successor to the Anne Rice novels are the urban fantasy/paranormal romance books which are big enough to get their own section in some stores. Thing is, Anne Rice, for all her sins and faults, was writing a vampire novel with maybe some romance in (I never read them, vampires make me want to go to sleep) but a lot of the newer genre is the other way around, romance with vampires in. Or werewolves. Or whatever, some kind of alpha-stereotype nonsense. What's-her-name who does the Anita Blake books was one of the first to ride this train to success (metaphor intentional) and there are a lot of others.

It's a shame that perfectly good modern fantasy by women often just gets thrown into this category and given a book with a lady in leather pants holding a crossbow on the cover, making it utterly indistinguishable from scores of romance clones.

What this means for the WoD is that they're trying to appeal to entirely the wrong people, and one of the huge successes of original WoD was that it lured a lot of people into RPGs who never would have looked at them otherwise. I don't know if that could be repeated now but it seems like they're missing an opportunity.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Halloween Jack posted:


This is the sort of thing that has its heart in the right place but makes me suspicious. See, people didn't know that they wanted Blade before Blade came along, and it was the same way with Twilight.

If I were going to advise the neo-VtM developers to try to latch onto the current craze in blockbuster movies, I'd tell them to take the parts of V:tM that drew the most criticism, "superheroes with fangs," and amplify it! But attempts to wed YA vampire stuff to superheroes hasn't been very successful. (Frankenstein and Mortal Instruments). I admit, it's a peculiar comparison because action-horror has fallen into a mid-budget franchise niche.

I was suggesting more tying it in to blockbuster novels--and they are blockbuster, by book standards--the audience is already prepped to read things and invested in their fictional universes. oWoD wasn't driven to success by the Interview with a Vampire movie, that came like three years after 1st ed V:TM. I don't know if this is workable, mind you, but there's still some brand recognition for WoD and maybe you could persuade or create crossover. It just...requires marketing money and looking outside the echo chamber of current fandom.

quote:

The thing with trying to sell storygames to a brand new audience is that lots and lots of people are already doing freeform roleplaying in forums and chatrooms with no rules beyond the tenuous social contract of the people involved, and have been doing this for years. I'm not sure why there hasn't been someone breaking into that market in a big way with a rules-light narrative game that's easy to play online.

Partially at least, a huge number of these freeform games are using copyrighted materials that would be ludicrously expensive to actually license. You can file off serial numbers and make a really winky adaptation, but I'm not sure how effective that would be. Back to the modern vampire romances I mentioned before, it seems a shame that nobody has tried to make a licensed game directly from some of these series--but again, expense. Jim Butcher is an online roleplaying nerd already so he understood what he was selling when he gave his blessing to Dresden Fate, not all authors are quite so familiar, and their agents likewise. And of course, we've all seen plenty of badly designed licensed flops. This is why I feel like the WoD has an opening--it offers the desired themes (or it can if they can back off the 90s edgelord nonsense for ten goddamn minutes) with a broad existing framework that would let a lot of different adapted versions of copyrighted characters exist.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
To me the atomic bees immediately suggested the hook another poster mentioned, their incredibly precious honey. It's one reason I like fluffier monster write-ups that detail more about their personality and habits (the dread "ecology") since that lets me better think about how to incorporate them into scenes. Plus I just enjoy that kind of detail. Of course, it's just as easy to lay that out in a section of "monster hooks." It really would be a benefit to a lot of bestiaries, especially ones offering relatively more sophisticated critters than the Ankheg level of 'burst out, attempt to eat adventurer'.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
The worst thing about the really toxic trolls is not just their attitudes (though those are awful) but their infinite time and energy to make bad faith arguments--they don't eat, don't sleep, will not just let something die because their identity is built around their insecurity and the need to silence opposition. And once they've exhausted everyone into giving up, they declare victory and a thread is destroyed. Banning these people actually allows more genuine, free speech because their personal chilling effect is highly detrimental--all of us have seen it happen somewhere. There's even been some work studying the direct attrition of user bases in heavily unmoderated spaces. Minority voices tend to drop out quickly, as fighting that fight during one's leisure time as well as the rest of the time is pretty exhausting.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Thegamecrafter there is doing about as well as we can hope for, but you're just choosing from an array of standardized pieces rather than creating custom bits for your own game. That's fine, and you can make a perfectly good game set with those choices, but us Ameritrash players love our carefully crafted custom components/cat toys.

I didn't go deep enough into their site to see if they can do custom 3-D printing for a greater cost since there's basically no way it would end up being economical if you were trying to create a commercial product.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Really, as much as I want the game industry to pay professional editors and technical writers, I'd be glad if some game writers would even accept honest feedback. So many of them are so drat sensitive and/or arrogant they seem to think they don't need it.

So having award-givers also offering "official" feedback might penetrate some few would-be aspirants as to their fixing points. It might not of course, the number of stories I've heard about authors going apeshit at publishers or editors who rejected them is just obscene.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Yeah that's the sort of thing where Shadowrun fucks up. The problem is that the rationale commonly used to say "that's dumb" is also dumb. It's one thing to say "thematically this moves too far from the source material" (I don't agree but there's a legit argument that can be constructed here) or "the implementation of this is lovely, both in terms of mechanics and logic" (absolutely true).

But the arguments are usually about ~realism~ and the idea that 'runners and Corps both make always-optimal choices to maximize their returns, even if they're chasing a tiny tiny edge.

That's just not how these things actually work. Hell, there's even a whole philosophy in project management about this idea. It's relatively low effort to solve for 80% of cases, fairly significant effort to solve for the next 10%, and an absolutely absurd amount of effort to solve for the last 10%. So companies generally don't try to cover that last 10% and deal with it on an exception basis, or just don't bother serving those customers at all. This should be how megacorps generally behave.

It's also at the heart of why cyberpunk worlds suck - it's one thing if a restaurant that specializes in Thai food ultimately decides just to put up warning signs that they can't accommodate peanut allergies. That still kind of sucks, especially when a bunch of restaurants all make the same decision independently, and there's arguments to be made about what are legitimate reasons for non-accommodation.

It's an entirely different level of awful when people working from the same mindset are in charge of safe drinking water or building codes, and that's even before you add in that quarterly returns are the only criterion those people are being judged on, and that the people really responsible are shielded from any actual consequences.

Basically if you want a primer on how megacorps should behave, go watch Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street, The Big Short, Too Big to Fail, and The Smartest Guys in the Room. Especially the last three since they are connected to actual cases where widely praised industries, corporations, and executives made obviously bad choices because it was easy.

This is a pretty elegant way of putting this and it fairly obviously isn't even limited to cyberpunk given that those are all real scenarios and real reasons why 'privatization' has been a disaster in some places. I think one reason it fails in RPGs is that a lot of people don't fully understand that, and also are much more familiar with the trope of the enemy panopticon, and also the idea that they can always ultimately punch the right person to solve poverty/if they enthrone the right king all will be set to right/if they release the right damning evidence then justice shall prevail. Cyberpunk literature waffles back and forth on these areas though most of the authors lean towards their stories being bleak scrabbles for a small measure of victory against an enemy that isn't really an enemy. Cyberpunk RPGs are caught between the normal RPG power fantasy and those realities/genre conventions and they're not super-compatible unfortunately. Not to say that cyberpunk is wasted genre, but I think RPGs are always going to get it kind of wrong.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Ewen Cluney posted:

To me the actual fun, unique stuff from D&D is when it's totally gonzo and embraces the kind of weirdness that gave us Expedition to Barrier Peaks and the Fiend Folio, but I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if someone could get funding to make The Adventure Zone: The Movie. D&D has always been out of step with the fantasy genre in general, and D&D-based stuff in other media badly needs to embrace that (like the Fell's Five comic did) rather than making watered-down Generic Fantasy.

The major thing giving D&D more cultural reach is the growth of comedy D&D podcasts and such, but I have no idea if it's anywhere near enough to actually help the brand. But then unless you just have to use Beholders and Mind Flayers by name, you don't really need to bother with the actual D&D license to do a dungeon fantasy thing anyway.

When you put it like that, Adventure Time: the Movie would cover a lot of the D&D bases. Of course, that's for kids. Because D&D is for hard-playing adults and always has been.*

*a lie

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
It almost feels like the vanity press industry was leaving money on the table all these years, focusing on peoples' crappy poetry instead.

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occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Savage genitalia is the thing most people hear about from Freak Legion but truthfully not that many people ever even read it. I mean, there're the 'WW completionists', and then the smaller slice of the pie chart that is labeled 'people who actually want to play a formor' and the even smaller slice of 'GMs who think their exploding bile demon werewolf game mooks need 'depth'.

So I'm wagering Swedracula makes it a priority reissue.

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