TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future

«‹›3 »

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Kreigspeil would probably count

# ¿ Apr 22, 2013 05:24

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 3, 2024 10:56

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Cheap Trick posted:

They are the cutest guardians of my bookshelf

Kickstarter-related question: what caused the price of international shipping from the US to skyrocket recently? Is this only affecting USPS, or are courier companies hiking up their rates too?

Rusty is guarding one of my computers from those evil metal swords. You can actually buy them through the website now.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 22:45

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Spawn of Fashan was a print media troll that was a satire on all the AD&D alikes in the early 80s. Alma Mater was a send-up of high school and was one of the first games ever booted from Gencon...

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 20:09

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Interesting post on What worked/What didn't work on Kickstarter.

http://paperdragonpress.blogspot.com/2013/08/steampunk-abc-one-year-later.html

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 21:27

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Rulebook Heavily posted:

I'd much rather see RPG design embrace the idea that you don't need to learn most of the game's rules before even making a character and instead the ruleset grows more complex during play.

Really, the classic example here is Traveller. It has a cool chargen system which you can even play as a kind of minigame on its own, rolling life paths and interesting backgrounds and cool randomly generated planets to come from. The actual gameplay by comparison is simple to the point of being immensely boring and doesn't generate those cool results much.

DriveThru has the Starter Edition for free too... http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/80190/CT-ST-Starter-Traveller

# ¿ Sep 14, 2013 18:16

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Monte Cook and Steve Jackson actually do a decent job of talking to people like adults.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 00:26

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Gary published a poo poo-ton of shovelware through Adamant Entertainment. He and Louis Porter jr. are awful 'designers'. Even Fields brings in some creativity as vile as it may be.

GMS did release an interesting rules lite game called Underworld in 2000 or so and wrote the Skull&Bones game for Green Ronin's 'Mythic Vistas' d20 line.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 00:28

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Pope Guilty posted:

I have a copy of Underworld! It's pretty hilariously amateurish and badly edited- there's numerous places where the art just obscures the text and somehow nobody caught it before going to print.

I have Underworld too! The other thing is that GMS loves working on stuff for d20, but Underworld is about as far awy from that as possible and has some actually interesting ideas too :gonk:

Broken clock twice a day etc...

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 09:05

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

But now you're a 'Big-Deal' novelist though...

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 17:55

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Evil Mastermind posted:

There's also C) Fred Hicks is capable of acting like a professional in public.

I have a friend in the industry who says that GMS is a nice guy in person, and that Fred Hicks isn't. That may or may not be true, but we don't interact with these guys in a personal way. I deal with them on a professional level, which is a level that Fred can act appropriately on and GMS can't.

I've met both of them and had the completely opposite experience.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 19:19

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

thespaceinvader posted:

Buy a starter set.

Piss-all. The only time you see any other wargame systems on offer is at FLGSs or online, and not even at some FLGSs. I've never seen a Warmahordes box in person, and GW has a store in most towns.

Warmahordes is all over the place at my FLGS along with Mantic stuff.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 17:32

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Eons ago I was doing a lot of 6mm Civil War and to make huge loving square formations easier to deal with and speed up set up we had cardbord square proxies.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 17:20

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Well you can make a painting 'inspired by Picasso' and sell it as 'inspired by Picasso' completely legally as long as you don't claim it is a 'Picasso'.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 20:35

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I would have jumped on a game that had 'Ghibli-inspired' on it in a heartbeat. I almost didn't get into GSS because it didn't.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 21:28

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Sure it's ethical as long as it doesn't claim to be 'The Studio Ghibli' game and says it is simulating those sorts of situations.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 22:45

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Wheaton is a huge Fiasco fan.

# ¿ May 3, 2014 01:02

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Who is John Solomon...?

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 22:04

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

ravenkult posted:

Nobody tells me nuthin'

Anyway, Mikan is cool. In 10 years doing this, he's the first client to tell me ''Hey, let's put a female POC on the cover of this game about battling huge alien bugs.''

That has been my desktop for the last six months or so.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 04:32

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Jedit posted:

Well, you may be so hard up for it that you'd gently caress a woman with horns, blood red eyes, giant bat wings and green skin just because she had a nice rack, but some of the rest of us have standards.

Those are my standards.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2014 17:02

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I do all my gaming online these days, so all the players inherently have to have a device in front of them.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 02:07

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

FFGs Horizon series were all at least interesting and Spellslinger and Grimm were pretty loving good. I can't imagine any of them were really high effort.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 15:16

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Which was some cold poo poo because Cook published a bunch of Mearls stuff under really generous terms (Iron Heroes).

# ¿ May 6, 2015 00:48

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Evil Mastermind posted:

And it's not just an "old game/new game" dichotomy. Look at GURPS; that's been around forever and yet manages to make fixes as new editions come out.

Fixes is debateable, but I get your point.

# ¿ May 7, 2015 19:59

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Fenarisk posted:

I'm not a fan of comics at all but those comics were perfect in every way. Even friends who aren't into tabletop loved them.

John Rogers is gamist swine. He wrote the Crimeworld section for FATE, Fiasco stuff, and even backed Spirit of '77. That should tell you all you need to know. :colbert:

# ¿ May 8, 2015 16:42

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Zeb Cook maybe?

# ¿ May 8, 2015 19:29

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Going back to MiB and Ghostbusters. Yes the movies are comedies, but the stakes are lethally high in both and the protagonists are actually really competent. That's the thing that the games missed. The PCs shouldn't be schlubs.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 22:20

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

paradoxGentleman posted:

At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan?

I feel like either FATE or GURPS could pull it off, but that feels like cheating because those are generic, all-purpose systems that are designed to cover a lot of ground.

Iron Heroes

(Not completely kidding)

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 16:03

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Terrible Opinions posted:

Isn't Blue Rose based off the same romantic ideas as Tolkein and the Faerie Queen? Just you know made by someone in the modern era so there are like gay people and female agency isn't seen as a bold change in direction. How can you be "protecting the purity of roleplaying" if you're against what D&D is explicitly based on?

It sure is based on that (along with a lot of other stuff. You could run a ton of 90s fantasy series with it). They're not protecting anything but their 'One True Way'.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2015 15:45

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

BrainParasite posted:

The quickest way to bring in new blood to RPGs is to build a young adult party game. Some weird bastard of CaH and Fiasco. A little "edgy". Takes about an hour. Rules you could learn even if you're a little buzzed.

I knew it, Castle Falkenstein was way ahead of its time.

You joke, but CF really was ahead of its time. Absolutely fantastic game.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 05:21

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Kai Tave posted:

On the other hand, Cyberpunk v3.

Pondsmith works for Microsoft now, doesn't he? Well used to, quick Google check says he worked for Microsoft then Monolith on The Matrix Online of all things. I mean it looks like the guy's done about as well for himself as anyone in the TRPG hobby/industry can aspire to, and there's always that new tabletop Cyberpunk he's talking about making to coincide with the 2077 computer game.

He was one of the main writers of the first ARG too and worked on I Love Bees for Bungie.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 08:09

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Evil Mastermind posted:

I actually just remember that the old Warhammer Quest board game had something like that. It came with a "Roleplay Book" that was more or less babby's first RPG. You still sent your little guys through the dungeon missions and such, but the idea of the Roleplay book was to say "okay, now that you've played this swordsman a few times, you're probably wondering what happens to him when he's not running around a dungeon killing things."

Admittedly the book was mostly random tables the "GM" rolled on for when you went to various town locations, but it was there to get you thinking of your guy as more than just a piece on the board that only exists in the dungeon. Descent and the 4e D&D board games are pretty similar to WHQ, but I don't think they have anything like that.

White Box D&D was that way with the original Chainmail to be honest. The combat system was pretty much cribbed en mass and it wasn't until the the Greyhawk Supplement was released that we had the descending armor class as the primary resolution. The Blackmoor tried to add a weird hit location system that nobody ever used.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 21:09

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Lemon Curdistan posted:

It's an anecdote pretty much everyone I know also reports, so I'm pretty sure it's not just you. The problem is that AGE is still too close to D&D for comfort, really. It'd be better starting people off on Monsterhearts or Apocalypse World (or Dungeon World, if you want to show RPGs that look like what non-RPG-players think RPGs should look like).

Oh god no, not Monsterhearts. It's an amazing game but when I've tried explaining it to non-RPG people they look at me in shock and confusion.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 23:53

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Lemon Curdistan posted:

Anecdotal I know, but everyone I know who doesn't play RPGs has been way more into the idea of "high school monster romance drama" than dungeon-crawling or post-apocalyptic stuff. You just need to pitch it as "like Twilight but without all the glorification of abusive relationships and creepy secondary characters falling in love with babies."

The trick is to find a game that has enough of a system that using it well is something they can learn, but isn't rules-heavy (because it needs to be easy for new players to learn in its entirety) and has player participation (so they learn good habits before bad ones). I normally start people on Fiasco and then get them to apply what they learned from it to playing PbtA games.

Feng Shui 2 would probably be a pretty good one too, actually, since it's not very complicated and 90% of the rule is schticks the players will never see.

It also has to be a game you want to play too. Fiasco is a fine game, but I hate Coen Brother's movies and that entire genre so I would be terrible teaching it, same with the pseudo-angst of Monsterhearts. They're both extremely good and thematic games where I completely loathe the theme.

I've had a lot of success with Feng Shui, Forgotten Futures, Cinematic Unisystem, and Castle Falkenstein actually.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2015 16:17

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Didn't Whitman have the Ralph Bakshi Wizard's license as well as some kind of Mutant Cops game published back in the 90s?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 21:06

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I have the Wizards game and both 1st and 2nd edition of Mutazoids. The rules must be in some box somewhere.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 22:53

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Everblight posted:

I mean, pretty much every video game on Kickstarter overpromises and underdelivers, and are aided by sitting in Steam Greenlight Early Access hell. The tides are turning on EA, though, and now people openly mock others who buy EA games.

Double-Fine basically screwed the pooch, and they were the big KS that got mainstream attention.

But frittering away your money before shipping a half-finished, buggy mess is still shipping something, so I guess they aren't all scams.

Shadowrun and Carmageddon Reincarnation, on the other hand, turned out great and I was very happy to have backed both.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2015 19:18

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

FUZION had VOTOMS, Bubblegum Crisis, a version of Mekton and a version of Champions.

Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Aug 7, 2015

# ¿ Aug 7, 2015 17:06

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I'm still hoping for a tenth ( or eleventh or twelfth or etc...) anniversary Castle Falkenstein :smith:

# ¿ Aug 7, 2015 22:13

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Bongo Bill posted:

RPG books should be hypertext by default.

Now I want to see Underground as a legit hypertext series.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 19:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 3, 2024 10:56

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Halloween Jack posted:

Ray Winninger's Underground? Why that game specifically?

I always get Underground confused with Brave New World, which has a similar concept.

Underground was basically Marshal Law the RPG. The Underground universe was extremely detailed including one supplement detailing the Lunar Colony and its specific brand of hosed-upness (Steel Deep). Some really clever and well written stuff wrapped around the poo poo show of the DC Heroes system.

Evil Mastermind posted:

If I remember correctly, Underground had "hyperlinks" in the text that pointed to sidebars and such.

Correct!

Brave New World was written by Matt Forbeck and used a variation on the original Deadlands ruleset. It was a much less nihilistic setting than Underground and used a much better system of rules, but they still had issues with the swinginess of exploding dice (just ask Mlleneza about that).

Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Oct 28, 2015

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 20:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG As An Industry - Past, Present, Future

«‹›3 »