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That sounds kind of boring tbh. One of the most exciting parts of a new supplement, at least for me, is expansion of character options. Setting information is cool and all, but you want to give the cool new setting information some cool new crunch that ties into the new area of the setting you're exploring. You don't need to print new subsystems, but I do think you should probably have some mechanical representation of the differences between the your new setting and the old setting.
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Apr 18, 2017 21:46
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homullus posted:This sounds like D&D brain damage. Some people like games that are equipment or character feat/spell/ability heavy; others believe that this is what all games are supposed to be like. The reason it's called a Roleplaying Game is because there's an actual game attached to the roleplaying. I've bought products that are purely setting information before and from my experience those products are really cool but also not very useful. I'm not saying that every game has to be heavy on character options, I'm saying that if your expansion to the game has absolutely no new character options it's not adding much new content. Variations on character options are what make a setting come alive. If you're not adding those new options, you're just writing a weird almanac.
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Apr 18, 2017 21:56
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Elfgames posted:It's kind of weird seeing you guys act like decent fluff and a technically written ruleset cant go hand in hand like 4e had in my opinion basically the best fluff in D&D it did have a problem with a few too many pages of powers but that's always a D&D thing I'm pretty sure people were explicitly saying that 4e has the best writing in D&D on the previous page.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:25
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FMguru posted:The problem with the every-book-must-have-crunch-in-it publishing model is that it's hard to produce a continuous stream of crunch that doesn't suffer from power creep, being straight-up broken, being redundant or unnecessary, or eventually becoming a giant unparsable mess that requires a player to sift through 30 separate books to make a character or buy equipment or choose combat maneuvers or whatever. D20 was famous for this, but see also GURPS 3E and even D&D 4E (for all its laudable focus of core classes being balanced and reskinning, 4E still had massive feat bloat). The solution is to make feats more impactful so you don't have to print so many of them and then do slight expansions of each class while occasionally adding new classes. This is more or less what WotC did before the Essentials reboot (except a lot of feats were dumb and unnecessary). There will always be new classes to add and perhaps slight additions to class' kit so you can definitely keep that going for a while until you want to start over with a new edition. You can also release campaign settings/setting expansions that have some crunch but not so crunch focused as like a Player's Handbook (also what 4e did). There are a bunch of things you can do if you keep a tight ship and make sure to always play test extensively.
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Apr 18, 2017 22:47
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slap me and kiss me posted:The internet's reaction to all your work summed up in one perfect question: Because everything else about 4e is better. People can have nuanced views on things.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:14
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Ferrinus posted:That's already Exalted 3E, which is to say it's the barest beginnings of an overture to playability that's still weighed down by massive amounts of accountancy and lovely legacy mechanics that will surely get walked back into pure regressive territory next time around. 4e is a legitimately good game. There are things it could do better, but saying it's the barest beginning of playability is absurd. There are very few RPGs on the market that have math as tight as 4e, especially if you're looking at what the math looks like in the Monster Vault.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:34
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Exalted 3e would sell much better if it had a technical writer review it
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Apr 19, 2017 00:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
The prospect of wading through all the crap in the book in order to figure out what everything does has more or less convinced me to not purchase the book
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Apr 19, 2017 00:52
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Kai Tave posted:I'm willing to bet real world money that it wouldn't, and in fact spending the equivalent amount of money you'd have to on a technical editor to increase the art budget would almost certainly have better returns. That it puts you, personally, off is not a very relevant datapoint, I don't recall seeing any sort of massive hue and cry from backers up in arms over the naturalistic language demanding their money back, or anybody outside of the Something Awful Shitposting About Exalted thread who really cares that they deliberately opted to keep the old wonky BP/XP split for no reason whatsoever, or any of the other mechanical/conceptual issues you could point at to the degree that it looks like it's had a real negative impact upon Ex3's future. This is a bad way of judging if it mattered. The backers were extremely unlikely to interact critically with the text - they just wanted a new edition of Exalted. You'll notice that when you're talking about Exalted with anybody that isn't already invested in the game, you can talk about the amazing setting and all the cool stuff you can do it but you can't ever tell them how easy the game is to get into. Exalted has a reputation in the hobby that it's very hard to get into and very complicated. If 3e had been looked over by a technical writer, it might have been able to shed that reputation and attract new customers. As it is, most customers are just those who were already invested during 1e/2e.
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Apr 19, 2017 01:06
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Bedlamdan posted:I have no real opinions about Holden beyond really liking the game he wrote for, and deriving a weird amount of schadenfreude from the fact that Ex3 is outselling anything else OPP is putting out. EX3 is outselling the rest of OPP? When was this said?
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Feb 10, 2018 01:46
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White Wolf used to be a successful business. Now, Onyx Path doesn't even own the rights to the World of Darkness license and is on the life support of endless Kickstarter campaigns.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:25
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Kai Tave posted:I'd quibble with characterizing the Kickstarter model as "life support" given that Onyx Path's release schedule has been far more prolific and robust than, say, D&D 5E. These days operating via crowdfunding is just another business model, and honestly a more sensible one when it comes to a niche hobby like tabletop RPGs. I don't know that I would use D&D 5e as a good comparison - it has had quite a few supplements and adventures at this point and has had an absolutely massive volume of sale compared to pretty much every other RPG out there right now. My issue with the Kickstarter business model is that it relies very heavily on people who were not Kickstarter backers wanting to purchase the product after it has been released, and when a large number of the Kickstarter products are 20th anniversary editions whose market is primarily composed of those people who would support the Kickstarter it makes for a difficult environment to make a profit. That's without getting into the issues with Onyx Path competing against itself with World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness or Onyx Path not doing any advertising. I have no doubt that Onyx Path can continue to kickstart new products for years to come - my doubt mostly comes down to if they can actually run a profitable business while relying on Kickstarters as their primary sales.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:01
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Mors Rattus posted:Please, do point to the RPG company that is running on a strong profit margin. The technically correct answer is Wizards of the Coast even if it ignores a lot of things. The more realistic answer is that if you're not producing D&D you shouldn't be in the RPG industry unless you're a wizard and have somehow managed to make World of Darkness popular once more.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:06
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S.J. posted:Wizards of the Coast is not an RPG company, and I'm willing to bet good money that D&D is kept around for the licensing just as much as anything. I mean, D&D 5e has by all reports sold incredibly well. WotC is mostly a TCG company but they also have the most successful RPG on the market right now.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:10
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Mors Rattus posted:See, the thing is that if you think Onyx Path is teetering on the brink of extinction, so is pretty much everyone else in the industry. They’ve been making their current model work for years, but the doomsaying about Kickstarter has never gone away. I don't think that's a particularly contentious position. The RPG industry is pretty awful at this point and has terrible long term prospects outside of a few major players.
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Feb 15, 2018 01:44
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thelazyblank posted:The RPG industry is changing, and Kickstarter is one of the major drivers to that. Now that we're a few years in, the benefits and drawbacks of the Kickstarter model are more obvious, but it's overall a boon for the industry. Now there's far less waste than there used to be. The revenues may be lower, but so are the costs. The margins are the same they've been since the 90s, if not slightly better, for your moderately successful RPG companies, and that's all they need. My issue with this is that it works fine for now but ten years down the line, where are the new players coming from? The RPG industry has become more and more insular and I honestly have no idea what's going to happen as the playerbase gets older.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:06
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