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Baron Porkface posted:Someone in the last thread quoted someone saying that there have only been 4 true innovations in tabletop gaming, and MTG was one of them. Does anyone know what the others were? Off the top of my head, I would guess Settlers of Catan, Dominion, and Apocalypse World, but I have no idea what that other guy would say.
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Apr 22, 2013 05:16
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I'm gonna talk to Mikan about using BackerKit for Inverse World's surveys when we send those out in a couple months, thanks in advance for the heads up that that exists and how cool it is everybody.
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Jul 1, 2013 08:31
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Reaper also made their own backer survey resource, because with how entangled and impossible their system had become, Kickstarter's would've been impossible to use.
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Jul 1, 2013 08:45
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thiswayliesmadness posted:I've been discussing n' trying to help a KS project that the artists at my sister's tattoo shop might start up featuring some of the art that they've done but I'm not sure of the legality of something. I know it's basically a big no-no to try and set up a KS featuring your own take of someone's copyright material, such as all those Final Fantasy/Mario/etc. based projects you see out there. There's a lot of fantastic tattoos they've done of movie characters and such that I assume would fall into this category like this guy (who was done in 6 hours): I think if you make it VERY clear that the art shown is not part of the project, simply an example of her previous work, it would probably be okay. Especially if you explicitly source each work: "This is a tattoo of the boxart of Hellraiser," for instance. But, that is probably not a question to leave up to random forum-goers. I'd shoot the kickstarter folks an email and just ask them directly what their policy on that is.
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Aug 16, 2013 08:00
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The ideal solution, to me, involves just... not using the digital aspect to track movement. Make everything it tracks independent of placement on the board. The rest of this post will be theoretical examples. It could be used to simulate/replace Arkham Horror's 10 million cards with a single app that lists all the different decks, and when you need a card you just click which deck you draw it from, with an Inventory for each player to hold on to cards you keep. If you wanted to make a game with a ton of cards to represent things, having a database app that lets you randomize between them would be a huge boon. You could use it to replace the cards and command boards in Space Alert. The app would have a touchscreen with your 13 action slots on the bottom and your hand of cards on top, and you'd just drag and drop your cards onto the action slots. This would let your hand of cards remain hidden from everyone else without requiring you to put your own cards face down, making the game clearer for the user while increasing obfuscation between team mates. If you keyed it to the game's 10 minute timer, it could also 'lock in' various portions of the board for you, as you move on through the phases, and then 'reveal' all your cards when you reach the end of the round, for playback. The only downside I can see is that this would prevent trading cards, but that is a small loss and if the game were designed with the app from the get go, something could be done about that (like removing Data Transfers entirely and keeping Incoming Data only). And that is only a Space Alert-specific drawback - if someone else made a real-time board game, an app like this would be ideal. As for a minis game, I'm going to use Malifaux as an example. In Malifaux, I'd want a digital companion to keep track of: Keyword abilities, rulestext references, activation order, strategies and schemes, victory points, soulstone pools, and a game setup walkthrough. The keywords and rulestext would be simple enough - a searchable glossary would do the trick. The rest would be during-play aids. Keeping track of Soulstones (preferably with a quick reminder on everything they can be used for listed under the number) would be marginally useful, since all it takes is a die to do that in the real world, but it'd be nice to have along with the other stuff. A setup guide would be convenient, to just walk you through all the steps of setting up a game, and in order, and the guide would end with you inputting your Strategy, Schemes, and Crew, so it could then keep track of everything you have for the round. The big one I'd want would be Activation Order - a list of all the units you hired, input by you during the setup phase. When you activate them, you'd mark a checkbox, and they would grey out and be unable to be activated until the end of the turn. The boxes with your team wouldn't even need any stats other than their HP - the rest is already on convenient stat cards that come with your models - because I'd only want it to keep track of HP and conditions on the model, like whether it is Fast, Slow, or Burning this turn. Then, when the turn ends, the app would go into a "between turns" mode, where it would ask you whether or not you triggered your schemes/strategies and keep track of victory points accrued. Basically, all the upkeep stuff and hard to keep track of stuff would be useful to digitize, in a modern minis game. Digitizing movement and gameplay would be pointless because of the double-tracking thing people have mentioned, and if you're going that far I honestly WOULD rather just have a video game. Gosh I would love a tabletop minis-type wargame for the PC, why hasn't someone made one that isn't RTS yet.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:00
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Ettin posted:Well that's kinda hosed by regular standards For the record, he and Adam Koebel have both also backed Inverse World's kickstarter. So they clearly do endorse it. Just, they refuse to actually say anything about it or acknowledge its existence anywhere.
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May 6, 2014 12:54
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Bucnasti posted:Can anyone tell me current rates for freelance RPG writing? That's about right, yeah. Pay in this industry for freelance writing is seriously subpar.
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Jul 21, 2014 06:52
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Mors Rattus posted:Games Workshop thinks it killed Pokemon. It was in one of their annual reports. No lie, they actually killed their line of Blood Bowl miniatures and stopped supporting the game in large part because of the success of Cyanide's video game release. Games Workshop has no idea that the people who buy the video game and enjoy it are liable to turn around and by the cool board game version. In 2009, the video game came out, and the same year GW completely dropped the Living Rulebook and stopped supporting the minis line entirely. It's the weirdest thing.
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May 8, 2015 07:44
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Alright, I'ma take a crack at this. I'm going to go with Costume Fairy Adventures for literally every single one of these points. Every single one. The only thing its missing is the magic school thing, but there is plenty of goofy magic going on. It isn't out quite yet but I'm going to be telling literally everybody as soon as it is. Kickstarter backers have had completed drafts for 2 months now, they're just held up on actual printing before they release things, but CFA is incredible.
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Jun 24, 2015 18:43
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Kestral posted:It's shockingly difficult to get art commissioned of people who aren't white. Apparently when you provide reference material consisting of a bunch of Arapaho, Cheyenne, Melanesians, and one tanned Turkish dude, most English-speaking artists will laser focus on that vaguely white guy, then just stick a few feathers and beads on there and call it good. I would love to find a few artists who can actually draw people of color for the next time I commission art, but that is no easy feat. Your best bet is to find an up-and-comer rather than looking at who does art in the industry currently. The artists embedded in the TTRPG and Marvel/DC comics circles are mostly people who've been there for ages, and they have a very narrow idea of what good work looks like and stick to it. New artists who haven't worked in the industry can be just as talented as the people who've been there forever, and they bring in a very different set of values and biases. Also, new blood can often be very excitable about getting their work published in a book, which is fun to work with. For examples of some people who are doing great on the diversity front, Maddi Gonzalez, H.P. Heisler/Clove, and Crossy (Crossy's portfolio is a bit sparse at the moment, here's some of their work: x, x, x) have all produced simply fantastic work for my games (Inverse World, Fellowship, Breakfast Cult). Kaitlynn Peavler is also very good, if you can get her. She's quite busy and has issues committing to long term projects, but if you just need a couple pieces here and there she's great. A fair bit of her work is also free to use in published works, which is nice. If you want to go looking for new blood, there's a lot of skilled artists on tumblr, if you know where to look, but blind hiring is rough. I've had much better luck asking artists I am already friends with who they'd recommend. Artists know other artists. Every artist has a dozen others they respect and look up to, and odds are pretty good at least one or two of them will be looking for work. So if you can't hire any of the above people because they're too busy working for me or something, you could always ask them who is looking for work. They'll know somebody. FOR EXAMPLE, before publishing this post I asked Clove for friends who I should plug and immediately got two excellent suggestions: Cataegory and Ruby. They've both done really good work for Six Feats Under, and they are both open for commissions. I highly recommend them.
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Oct 31, 2015 07:49
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Kestral posted:Speaking of talent, I love that second picture of Crossy's. Where's it from? That piece and the first one were both drawn for Fellowship, my next game book. She is the playbook art for the Harbinger playbook. I've told Crossy they should really put those on their portfolio, but they drew those like 8 months ago and the portfolio page I linked is only two months old, so that's already "old work." I don't really get it because it's still GOOD work, but it isn't my portfolio to curate. Kestral posted:Boy, isn't that the truth. It's maddening how difficult it is to find specific things or categories of things on tumblr compared to, say, DeviantArt. Looking through someone's tumblr-based portfolio is particularly excruciating. Tumblr really does seem to be where the talent is these days though, for reasons I'm not tied in to that community enough to get. What is the appeal of tumblr as a platform for artists, aside from the "it's where everyone else is" networking aspect? Tumblr makes uploading posts super easy, the reblog and like features are solid, and the tag feature makes following and finding fandom work very easy. A lot of skilled artists start out drawing fanart, so tumblr becomes a natural flocking ground because fandom work spreads like wildfire there. While places like DeviantArt or LiveJournal revolve around building a friends/followers list, where you only see stuff posted by people you've gone out of your way to follow, the Reblog system that Twitter and Tumblr use lets people share every little thing they find cool or interesting. So a popular person shares a thing they like, and then a chunk of their followers will also share it, and this repeats on down the line. And every so often a new share becomes a new follower, because they want to see more stuff like it. It's a powerful positive feedback loop.
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Oct 31, 2015 08:50
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It takes longest with your very first product by a considerable margin, because DTRPG checks new publishers manually every time. Once your first product is approved, future products should be auto-approved and go live within an hour of you putting them up for market. At least, that's been my experience - I haven't had to wait on anything in a long time.
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Jan 31, 2016 07:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh good, it's been a while since the last one of these. People are just so mad about the most reasonable take-down process and email notification in history.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:05
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Leperflesh posted:Not that SA is immune. Sometimes I mention in threads in TG that I'm sick of vampires. Invariably, six people come out to recommend to me the vampire things that I really should check out, because they're different and good compared to the rest of the vampire stuff. That's super-innocuous and not especially annoying, but it's revealing of the basic psychology: if you like Thing, and someone else declares they don't like Thing, you typically feel an instant reflexive need to defend Thing. I think part of that defensiveness when posting in a public place (like Twitter or the SA Forums) comes less from trying to say "oh you should try these vampire things, person who said they are tired of vampire things" and more "oh this person says vampire things are tiresome, I hope they don't convince other people that vampires are tiresome, here's a bunch of cool vampire things for everyone else to see so they know vampires are cool actually." It isn't even you specifically they're trying to convince, even if their spiel is directed at you. It's everyone reading your conversation they're trying to convince, because you want more people to like the things you like, right? You don't want them to also think the things you like are dull, so you need to talk about how cool they are wherever someone talks about how dull they are. I've had to teach myself to respond with just "that's fair" when someone says they don't like Thing I Like. It can be rough, especially if it actually Thing I Love, but sometimes you just have to let go. People don't have to like everything I like and that's okay, because I know that some people do like that Thing I Like.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:33
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The chalk writings thing didn't trigger anyone or lead to counseling of any kind. No one involved went to counseling, nobody involved used the phrases "safe space," "triggered," or "traumatized." All that happened was some students protested pro-Trump vandalism at their school. Everything else was added in later by the reporters, and the exaggerated reports blew up on social media. So no, it really wasn't 'pretty bad.' It was blown out of proportion by sensationalist journalists wanting to make crybabies out of reasonable adults just because they're young millennials.
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Apr 9, 2016 05:56
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Yeah I got halfway through that article before I could not continue any longer. I co-wrote a book with one of Zak's victims and she has literally vanished off the internet and out of the industry, NEVER to return, entirely because of Zak S and his bile. This apologism is not welcome or wanted.
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Jul 27, 2016 00:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:Was there a trend of popularity for class-less/point-build-type games in the late 90s/early 2000s that would have nudged 3e's design towards the modularity that it ended up having as being "in-vogue"? This was the time when GURPS was fresh and new, people didn't realize BESM was awful yet, and as Kwyndig said, every White Wolf vampire game was point buy (although they limited what you could buy based on what type of monster you were). This is also the era Champions and HERO came out. Point Buy was very much a big thing in the tabletop sector, at the time.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:52
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This twitter thread is pretty relevant to that, too: https://twitter.com/Avonelle/status/863937589052669952
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May 20, 2017 11:55
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Fellowship does not have the words "race" or "class" within its text.
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May 20, 2017 17:12
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The podcast group I'm in, Six Feats Under, just did an episode on how to run a kickstarter: http://www.sixfeatsunder.com/episode/kickstarter-podchat/ It's got me, 3 time kickstarter runner, and James D'Amato from One Shot RPG, so if you're looking for advice, hey. Give that a listen. That Old Tree posted:Nothing wrong with that. Keep in mind, though, that depending on what you're doing with your game, a 6"x9" book might be better. Digest size can be more attractive if you're putting out less than 50k words, especially if it's a "core" book. (And then any further supplements should be the same size, because of course.) Also, personally, I find 8.5x11 is an unwieldy size for a book. Just a bit too big. I've been using 6x9 for Fellowship, and its a great size for a book to be, I highly recommend it.
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Jul 13, 2017 05:05
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ProfessorCirno posted:This is literally the most commonly reused bullshit refrain on why we shouldn't bother ever balancing anything and minmaxxing is good (until the wizard isn't the most powerful, then it's all broken and has to be changed). It's entirely incorrect in every way. To add to this, because I have a lot of opinions on game balance in tabletops, balance isn't "everyone is equally powerful" or "every option is equally useful," its more like "everyone can play whatever option they want and still contribute meaningfully." PbtA games are pretty good about this, they near-universally provide balanced play experiences, but they definitely don't do it by making everyone equally powerful. For example, The Angel in Apocalypse World is super weak. They're the healer, in a world where being healed still means weeks of bed rest and lots of pain. They can't really defend themselves well, they don't have any real armor or weaponry, they don't have much in the way of food or barter. But they have incomparable leverage, as the only person who can stitch you back together if you come home full of holes. When you play the Angel, you won't be busting heads or taking names or lording over the wastes, but you still get a balanced role in the narrative, because everybody and their mother needs you, and they need you in one piece. And also the structure of *World games involves cutting to whoever we haven't checked in on in a while, so no matter what everyone else is up to, we still spend time with your character and see what you're up to and what you plan to do. So that does a lot to smooth out the bumps. When equal narrative focus is a core rule of the game, that goes a long way to making sure everyone feels important. In my experience, proper balance in a tabletop game is less about everyone's numbers being on par or having equal chances to succeed at whatever they do no matter what, its more about making sure everyone feels valuable, like they're contributing in a way only they could contribute. Its about making sure no one feels like they wasted their time, whether its because the minmaxer killed everything turn one or because half the party spent all battle doing nothing meaningful. And that's where a lot of people trying to design balance in their games trip up. Trying to balance so every option is numerically balanced is very, very hard. It's important in crunchier games, very important, but I think equal (if not more) focus needs to be given to narrative balance, making sure everyone has something meaningful they can do in any situation you put them in. Focusing only on numerical balance (or not focusing on balance at all!) at the expense of narrative balance is the issue a lot of older games face, and I think shifting that focus to narrative balance is the actual thing about PbtA games that makes them work in a way nothing before them really did. That's the real revolutionary idea of it. That and the playbook structure letting you hand someone everything they need to know to play in a single 1-3 page printout. That does SO much to improve pick up and play viability as well as increase player engagement by drastically reducing how much everyone needs to read the books to play the game, and is the other huge revolution that PbtA brought to the table that I am super excited to have stick around forever.
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Aug 26, 2017 03:49
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