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I am in favor of game companies being able to better figure out how desired a product is in advance of producing it. Oh, you're willing to donate more to see this done and get these extras, and fund this upgrade for everyone else? Cool! KS also aggregates all of the projects under one roof. I think most people don't go to every game company's website often enough for this ransom model to succeed when distributed across all publishers. It might be better in some ways to have a site that is games-only, because such a site could perhaps make the KS + Amazon cut of the action smaller. It would miss some of the exposure, though. I don't mind even the most established of established companies using that model. If WotC Kickstarted a D&D 4.5, fixing the things that needed fixing and re-doing some of the older classes and including a simple character builder and compendium on a CD, I would back that the second I saw it. Given the traffic to their site, though, they could probably ransom-model it on their site.
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Apr 2, 2013 20:19
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So there's this thing, an article about "The Future of D&D and Tabletop Gaming." And I think it is 100% backwards. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since it's for this new Gygax Magazine, and couldn't be better calculated to preach to that particular choir. If I were writing about the future of RPGs and tabletop gaming in general, I wouldn't be rehashing game history for the millionth time for the majority of my article or recalling what it used to be like. Whether you gamed in the 70s, 80s, or 90s doesn't matter; the gaming landscape is really different now in significant ways. I also wouldn't talk about how it's hard to get together for a bunch of hours to feel like a hero; it's cool if you can do that, but I think one of the glaring issues is that most adults DO NOT have lives that can accommodate a game may well be just fine on a high school or college student's schedule. The future of RPGs in particular is very likely (based on what we're already seeing) games that are: -- shorter rather than longer -- streamlined games, rather than GURPS -- not just SyFy-type settings -- appealing to a wider audience -- collaborative rather than adversarial -- built to take advantage of technology for asynchronous or irregular play -- light- or no-prep for a "GM" That's not in any particular order, and games as we know them now aren't going away either. If the hobby is going to expand at all, though, it can't all be "you must have $250 and large blocks of time" games. And if I were going to address the value of tabletop gaming today, instead of "get them durn kids off them iPads!", I'd be talking about : -- abstract thinking -- creative play -- reinforcement of math, language, culture, and history -- (for RPGs) empathy -- (for RPGs) the value of improv training ...all in the environment of real-life social skills like negotiation, compromise, networking, and sharing. And these are as valuable for adults as they are for kids.
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Apr 3, 2013 00:02
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Kai Tave posted:(Gears of War 5, I'm pretty sure that places like Gamestop don't take pre-orders for games unless those games are for-sure coming out). Good ol' Gamestop has definitely allowed pre-orders of things that are not for sure coming out. Computers, cars, and a number of other things are "purchased" before they exist (at least the exact one you will eventually take possession of). Can we agree that Kickstarter at least SOMETIMES is a store, that people are sometimes purchasing things (real, existing things) in a manner identical to other merchants? That when one is funding a project that is an unproven concept and a rendering of the box, it's not much like a store?
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Apr 5, 2013 15:28
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jivjov posted:I don't care to quote every relevant post, but one thing to keep in mind is that Kickstarter makes it abundantly clear, on everything from their terms of service all the way to the big green button you click to initiate payment, is that you are not "purchasing/preordering a product", you're "backing a project". Big difference there. On the other hand, you have things like this, in which nobody is breaking any laws regarding usury in any way, but the effect is still an interest-bearing loan. If it walks like a store and quacks like a store . . . I am not sure it matters what the green button says, if sometimes it is acting like a store.
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Apr 15, 2013 20:29
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jivjov posted:I'm really not sure what you want them to do. The terms and conditions clearly lay out the whole concept, and as I mentioned before, the big green button you click to make a pledge says "make a pledge" not "make a purchase". The reward tiers are called just that, "reward tiers". Not "purchaseables", not "goods for sale". I wouldn't mind seeing them differentiating the products that really are pre-orders (or really are "donate to help make this happen"), but what I'd really prefer, game-wise, is a separate site that consists solely of pre-orders for established companies.
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Apr 19, 2013 16:38
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YOU ARE NOT PREORDERING A PRODUCT. WE ARE NOT A STORE. THE PROJECT CREATOR IS LIABLE, NOT US!
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Lemon Curdistan posted:I hate to break it to you, but "what most people are seeing" does not actually define reality. I hate to break it to you, but "how most people respond to something" is real, even if the impetus is not. If you yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater and there is none, the stampede of people leaving does not make the fire a reality, but the stampede is very real and could result in deaths. Kickstarter and TG as an industry would be very wrong to disregard the fact that many people see it as a store.
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Apr 19, 2013 16:43
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Fenarisk posted:That's the risk though, so if you don't like it don't use it. This argument is really dumb. If you but speakers from the back of a van you know drat well you take a risk. The back of a van does not superficially resemble Best Buy, though.
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Apr 19, 2013 19:31
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LumberingTroll posted:That's a fair point, maybe never isn't the way to go, maybe hold a Kickstarter once or twice a year to sell my designs, and new ones I will inevitably come up with. For me making terrain is as fun, if not in many cases more fun than actually playing the games they are meant for. This is a pretty good argument for not going "never", you know? Just as there are those guys who make their 18XX games by hand with long waiting times, you're probably better off being a guy who does stuff irregularly, when it's fun and worth your time. Like, really, I'm assuming you have a lucrative day job, since you can afford to go buy expensive stuff when you feel like it; the sense I am getting is that you chose "never again" because you (rightly) don't want it to become a monster unfun timesuck sideshow. Rather than "never again", you should probably be skewing more toward custom work and high-end stuff that's more interesting to make and done in smaller batches, with occasional Kickstarters to launch new terrain types. Price yourself out of most peoples' market, except for the Kickstarters, which will basically pay you back for the design time on new terrain.
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Apr 22, 2013 15:19
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Mikan posted:This is what White Wolf does, it seems to work well enough. Warhammer Fantasy 3e's adventures included new player options. Indie games tend to do this. The multiple core books plus enemy book is really more of a D&D thing and I'd argue outside of D&D and Derivatives we've already seen a move to this model. Which would make sense if there were one GM for every ~5 players.
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Apr 24, 2013 19:08
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My former FLGS would give a discount on special orders. Sometimes I think they were just ordering from Amazon themselves, but I didn't mind, since they provided play space for free and I met some cool people there.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:53
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Ettin posted:Come to think of it... What about Paranoia?
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Aug 10, 2013 05:11
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Rulebook Heavily posted:stuff about the minis market I didn't live through what you just did, but do consider HeroClix. HeroClix is a miniatures game, but it's sold and marketed more like a toy, one you can give to your nieces and nephews without blushing. Somebody sculpted those . . .
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Aug 15, 2013 20:03
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Look back at the Reaper KS, though, and look at how similar the work-in-progress sketches are to the final products. I have no doubt that "artistic license" happens, but I think the reason it is at all tolerated is not "butbut Frazetta did this stuff." Frank Frazetta made a name for himself doing what people were asking him to do, and once he had a reputation, people sought him out for more of the same. I think we see license tolerated for the same reason a few people alluded to: deadlines. Blown deadlines are incredibly costly in many lines of work! It's not just "oh, well, just push the release back, we see that all the time": production runs usually happen all at once, on a tight schedule. If you delay production to get a bit of art or a sculpt more in line with what you wanted originally (and asked for), the place you were going to have the product made may already have another thing scheduled next, so you have to wait your turn or break your contract -- those places need to make money too, and work on other things! The longer until your turn comes, the more wasted any marketing you did ends up being, so you may have to pay for additional advertising when your thing launches. You may also have to break/renegotiate contracts further downstream if the product is delayed.
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Aug 16, 2013 14:25
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moths posted:This is a better thread than the KS one for this discussion: First off, of course: Space Alert. You can't do the same thing with cards. You could have a player read things out in a timed way, sure, but then they can't play. Yes, you could do it entirely digitally, but I don't think it feels "saddled" with physical components. Second: I played a lot of the technologized board games in their first run. One fun example of this was Stop Thief. You get clues each turn for where the hidden criminal is going, in the form of specific sounds. Footsteps (or two, or three), a door opening, that sort of thing, each coinciding with a board location. You had to listen closely and then deduce where on the board this was. Edited so that it made a lick of sense. homullus fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 16:51
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 It was actually pretty cool. And yes, you could die during character creation.
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Sep 14, 2013 05:22
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My experience with Pay What You Want is not TG, but it is relevant: I think the more "personal" the interaction surrounding the product, the more likely you are to get something at or above market value. I have done other kinds of work PWYW, very personal (teaching, tutoring) and been better-compensated than the going rate. When you can get something for free without human contact, I think it just feels like free stuff, even if you resurrect the [blink] tag for "PWYW" in 48-point font.
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Sep 17, 2013 15:38
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At the risk of pointing out the obvious, how would he even know whether you made $2000? And doesn't the license agreement just say "you know what you have to do, it's the thing to do"? If your Numenera thing really is flying off the shelves and you're really getting close to that kind of money, you probably SHOULD contact him, to get more cross-promotion or (maybe even) some help/work from Monte later.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:07
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The horror really does seem to me to be the unknown here, and it hurts the dozen people who are either A) seriously thinking of writing a thing that they can only imagine being based on Numenera, or B) actually Monte Cook. The rest (who are thinking of writing, but their thing could go with another system) will probably just do that, so . . . I feel bad for Monte and the other 11 people.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:30
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Literally The Worst posted:Man this is really depressing, and it's going to make it hard to pimp their poo poo at work, and to buy it myself. I'd like to lie and say I'm not going to buy FFG stuff from now on, but I got an LCG monkey on my back and he wants some goddamn packs. I've done a little freelance contracting for FFG, and everyone I've met or worked with was kind, clear, and professional. I have had no interaction with the upper tiers, but I am happy to support the work of those I have interacted with, and want to support the continued production of high-quality products in the hobby. I would be willing to pay more for my hobby if it meant everyone made a living wage, though.
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Apr 20, 2014 02:59
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The thing in per-word's favor is that you are getting X amount of material independent of formatting. If you're asking somebody to write something about dwarves for your RPG supplement, what do you tell them? You can say "give me $300 worth of information about dwarves", "give me 15 pages about dwarves", or "give me 3000 words about dwarves" (or some combination, obviously). If you're working with them closely and/or they have a body of work that gives you appropriate expectations, I think the first one is more reasonable overall, with some guideline about how long it really should end up. If you have an unknown writer, I think you might be asking for trouble with the dollar amount sans context. I do some freelance RPG editing and proofreading, and when offers come, they always come with the word count and dollar amount of the contract, take it or leave it. I'm not trying to make a living doing it, so I can't see myself refusing one based on the compensation. It's just a better way to spend a few evenings than what I would have been doing otherwise.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:35
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There was the "sexism" stuff with the art direction at the beginning of 5e.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:21
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Leperflesh posted:Every competently-written contract has a termination clause. What it generally comes down to is whether/what the conditions (often costs) are for unilateral termination. The more recent articles say that GenCon isn't looking at breaking the contract, just factoring Indiana's hatefull trolls into its next move in 2020.
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Mar 25, 2015 15:49
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Bucnasti posted:In my fantasy world, it all comes full circle and they return to Milwaukee. In that same fantasy world, Wisconsin is likely not trying to outdo other red states in scorched-earth conservative policy. I would love it if it came back to Milwaukee, though -- I haven't been to a not-Milwaukee GenCon. Though if we're developing fantasy scenarios, why not Lake Geneva, WI (population 8,000). They could buy the building The Dungeon was in and make it a year-round museum/game store.
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Mar 26, 2015 15:50
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bunnielab posted:I saw "Highlander" at a very young age, katanas and trenchcoats will always be cool to me Be the swordfight that you want to see in the world.
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Apr 3, 2015 00:09
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I've never played one so I couldn't comment. I'll bet they are pretty bad. A reverse paladin.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:26
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dwarf74 posted:Frankly, it kinda looks like WotC has been making GBS threads the bed for a while. What is going on out there? DM's call? But really, it looks as though they are just keeping "a product" on the market. Giving away things for free costs money, you know!
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Jun 22, 2015 22:01
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moths posted:
But . . . they do come from Tolkien's books.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:41
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moths posted:How big were 80's assassin games like SJG's Killer? I mean the ones where you get a friend's name and someone else gets yours, then you tried to shoot them with a toy gun before someone shot you. Those were really popular! Especially in college, where it was more attractive to actually set up some "clever" ambush using campus features and known routes and such. It was possible in HS, but less interesting.
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Jun 24, 2015 14:31
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I'm more interested in rules for moving a campaign forward generationally -- what happened to the cities you visited, the laws you instituted, the business schemes you started, the cults you quashed, the evils you banished? Did your previous PCs have children, and if so, are the new PCs descended from them?
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Jun 25, 2015 20:02
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Dr. Tough posted:Well, you don't really need rules for that, that's all supposed to be things that the GM and players take care of. I mean if you want your character to have kids, just say so. In an L5R game I'm in the GM said that a year had passed between story arcs, so I just said that my character now had a kid. No special rule needed. Off the top of my head the only RPG that really codifies that kind of stuff is Pendragon. I know you don't need rules for that. There is no part of RPGs that you could not replace with GM + player agreement. What differentiates RPGs from one another are their themes and the parts they choose to codify with rules, and generational RPGs are not something I have seen often.
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Jun 25, 2015 20:21
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There are a few video games that do it. I want to see it in tabletop RPGs, where players can influence, but do not control, what the world is like for their next fresh-faced band of adventurers. In a rule-governed sort of way. Like, maybe some things that are definitely decided by the individual, some things that are decided by the group , and some things that were unknowable and uncontrollable by any but the GM/game system.
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Jun 25, 2015 20:40
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Dr. Tough posted:Again, I just don't understand why there needs to be special rules for this. The rules for this are already there: it's called playing the game. If the PC's stopped the cultists from killing the king then the result is that the king is still alive and any cultists that the PCs killed are not. You don't need to roll on a table for that. Why do there need to be special rules for whether players hit the bad guys with an axe? You could make a game in which the players literally never miss, or that they decide when they miss. Why have rules for whether the players' business succeeds, or have special rules for vehicle combat, or how much it costs to build a stronghold? Answer: some players enjoy subsystems with a mixture of rule-governed behavior and unexpected outcomes. Why is this hard to understand?
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Jun 25, 2015 21:09
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Bieeardo posted:Clue really could use some more modern, inclusive iconics. 
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Jul 10, 2015 18:49
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Quarex posted:this is only 10% an "ahaha I told you so" to the few people in my Wasteland 2 thread who were like "dude you KNOW Double Fine can deliver, why should we believe Brian Fargo is capable of it???" 
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Jul 28, 2015 18:34
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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. Regardless of what game my group is playing we never do cheap death and typically a character only dies when they're up against the main antagonist or if they're doing something really stupid. With the latter I usually warn people that their action could end with Nightleaf or whoever dying and ask if they still want to continue. This is done precisely because members of my group tend to put a lot of time and effort into characters and it would be really lame if they got killed by some random cultist or ganger or whatever. It's up to you if you want to ignore the rules of a game you're playing, but you don't get to say a game isn't deadly when your failure to play the actual game is the only thing making it that way.
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Sep 29, 2015 17:20
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neonchameleon posted:Cirno has already pointed this out to you. But it gets thrown into stark relief when you look at the books that actually have his name on the cover as lead author. Hammerfast was ok!
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Sep 30, 2015 02:59
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Evil Mastermind posted:Unfortunately, there was a large chunk of people who felt that just the very idea of 3.x being ended was some sort of insane insult and that they were being "cut loose". I mean . . . they were, though, as with all other editions. If I want to get more 1e, 2e, 3e, or 4e content, fixes, adventures, or whatever, I cannot get it from WotC. They are not a company I can buy from, I am not their customer. How is that not being cut loose? Like, I still have all my stuff and can still play "the game" (in my case, 4e). It continues to exist. I understand the "you know the game police won't come and take your books, right?" line of reasoning. But you're going into a whole new (and factually incorrect) area by claiming the relationship between an old-edition player and WotC isn't negatively impacted, if not outright eliminated. 4e is a big departure from 3e, and 5e is a big regression from 4e. There's cause for an old-edition player to be disappointed/"upset" (within reason) and I think you might be tripping over yourself a bit here in your efforts to belittle the reactionaries.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:19
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Literally all they had to do was keep 3.5 around as "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" and release 4e as "Dungeons and Dragons". I think 4e would have been even better branded as "D&D Encounters" because of its fundamentally encounter-based design. But yes, I think they should have just forked development, given them easily-differentiable logos and branding, and released new versions of each. Release all setting supplements as system-agnostic books with the stat blocks available for $2 online or something. Set up a P500-like system for Planescape and Spelljammer and Dark Sun and Dragonlance books or whatever. They could have made a lot of people very happy. 
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Sep 30, 2015 21:26
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bunnielab posted:That sounds like the name for a very very creepy dating site. It does! It was also the name they used for organized play.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:42
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Flavivirus posted:I can heartily recommend Claudia Cangini - she did the playbooks for Legacy (examples here) and was punctual, responsive to feedback and more than willing to include diverse characters in the art. Loved the art for Legacy. Love the game too, but the art further solidified it in the top tier of PbtA for me.
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Oct 31, 2015 15:47
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