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Bucnasti posted:The thing is, every year there's a new crop of young people who want to make believe and haven't committed to one of the many different forms. Those are potential table-top roleplayers, but there are not a lot of games that cater to them and the types of make-believe they want to participate in. Monsterhearts is going in that direction, but it doesn't seem directed at a "new to roleplaying" audience. Where are the all-in-one-box teen-wizard RPGs? or the kitchen sink-high-fantasy-anime style rules-light RPGs? While I don't agree you'd need a company necessarily the size of Hasbro, the base idea here is really sound. There needs to be a big enough advertising push that would take either lots of money or lots of free working hours to figure out a plan to break through the D&D=RPG wall. Serious question, outside of gaming stores and gaming forums, where do people advertise their games? Because those two are the only places I've seen ads for RPGs.
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Jun 24, 2015 07:16
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JackMann posted:I thought you were joling, so I did some googling. you weren't. Jesus, this was a draft, right? Or do people who invest in the UK markets just not know how to read things other than investor reports? Even then, just reading this preamble makes me wonder who would willingly give these people money. It sounds like grog.txt became a CEO.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:00
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Lemon-Lime posted:What the hell kind of indie RPG author has interns? I'm surprised that authors don't have offers for free internships from people who have more dreams of RPG Superstardom than they do sense. These people clearly exist given what we've seen from Kickstarter, and given the financial situation, I'm surprised some of the big authors/companies don't push around a bit more "Hey, I bet you'd like your name on this RPG, all you need to do is volunteer 10-20 hours a week!" nonsense. Without going Palladium and declaring this after they offered to pay you. Now I'm going to go scrub myself for thinking of this.
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Jul 13, 2016 17:20
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Slimnoid posted:It's very much the classic example of someone seeing two groups fight, go "can't we all just get along?" and that, when presented evidence and voices of the victims proclaiming that no, they can't get along because someone is being a humongous shitlord, promptly sticks his head in the sand and stops listening. I don't know. If I was the public-facing side of a company, I'd see this and go "well, gently caress, I really screwed up" and shut it all down in preparation for a "I'm sorry, I didn't realize how bad Zak S was" post. I'd say the same thing about making a rambling, good-hearted but ultimately naive, knee-jerk blog post where you mention the toxicity-bomb that is Zak S on your company website, which I'd have the good sense of never posting, so who knows what will happen next?
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Jul 27, 2016 17:47
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Well, that didn't take long. How mad do you think he was that he couldn't be the villain? I kinda want to live in the universe where Rob called Pundit a shitbird instead of Zak S, just to see the alternate version of this post. http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2016/07/why-cant-we-all-just-get-along-sure-as.html
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Jul 27, 2016 23:47
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Does people paying attention to Pundit even matter anymore? Unlike Zak, he does seem to be a more benign man who shouts nonsense at clouds type, fighting a war in his own mind. Am I missing something?
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Jul 28, 2016 00:13
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FMguru posted:My prediction: Boy, that last thing I wrote sure generated a lot of strong feelings! We should probably all try to cool it a notch or twelve. There's clearly a lot of blame to go around. Things would be so much better if everyone just chilled out and remember that it's all supposed to be about having fun with elf games, not fighting culture wars! Okay, I'm gonna fully admit, I'm giving the man the benefit of the doubt, because making a poorly thought out blog post is easy. If you know nothing about the depths of Zak S, then it's easy to pretend that he's just a normal bad actor in our hobby. There are already lots of those. Given that I made a similar blog post back when livejournal was a thing to a smaller group that didn't matter (deleted because even 20-year-old me realized after the fact that I got too deep in my own head and up my own rear end), I'd rather assume that people are having moments of stupidity and be proven wrong every time in this hobby rather than the alternative of dismissing people as eternal fuckups for their first strike. Call me an optimist.
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Jul 28, 2016 16:02
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ProfessorCirno posted:For me, the thing that separates this - well, other then the fact that Truman isn't some 20 year old on his Livejournal - is that this actively involved making GBS threads on his friend and using him as a vehicle to display his own self-righteousness. This wasn't him just randomly trying to appear above it all and make a bland placation of "can't we all just get along," this involved him intentionally surfing his friend's body through the street. For me, that's what takes this from "well meaning but slightly ignorant" to "actually malicious." You don't get to claim you didn't mean to stir up problems when you just threw your friend into a wood chipper. And I will reiterate - I cannot understand people who see this and remain his friend. He's just shown exactly how little that means. Because you get a bug up your rear end. You feel like the world's a bad place and you think one blog post will make everything better. It's dumb, but it's the sign of someone thinking they're having a moment with God or something similar, but instead you're just having a wank and you don't realize it until you're done, there's a mess and now you have to clean up. It feels good to be self-righteous. When you get in that zone, you think you can do no wrong, despite the fact that you're throwing people under the bus left right and center and you're doing nothing good. Some of us I'm happy to look like an idiot if he gives some  response to all this, and then he'll probably lose my business. But as someone who's done the same poo poo, who's held my own friends to higher standards than I should in an rear end in a top hat manner and felt miserable about it after the fact, I'm giving him a chance. Call me naive for thinking that two to three hours of someone's life doesn't define them as a person, even if they're dumb enough to broadcast it to the entire internet, but this is how I live with the hobby we have, toxicity and all.
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Jul 28, 2016 16:30
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Zurui posted:From what I see here, no one is saying it defines him as a person. Very publicly throwing a comrade under a bus on your business blog is a very, very unprofessional thing to do. If he had an issue with this guy he could have just settled it between the three of them. Instead he wrote a thousand words on how we all need to be nice to each other no matter what. Making future decisions based on a single flashpoint is defining him in some way. Even if he fully and unreservedly apologizes for talking out of his rear end, it's true that it's going to affect his future business choices and he's going to have to live with that no matter what. It was unprofessional. He might lose future business for it, etc. But right there, you're saying "I'm not going to buy a thing because someone made a single extremely horrible decision". I can't live like that in this hobby. Jack Norris, one of the people working on the pretty-good Tianxia kickstarter, is a man I once thought was an rear end in a top hat beyond my willingness to give him money. I had multiple conversations with him, and most of them ended with me thinking "wow, he's a jerk". But over time, I've seen him change enough that I felt like buying from him was alright, because we both got older and, while we aren't in the same circles anymore, we both did change. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for assholery before it affects my business decisions. Maybe I'm too willing to forgive mistakes if the person who does them treat them like mistakes. Everyone has a line they need to draw for themselves on what they feel is boycott worthy. I'm setting that line on what he does next.
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Jul 28, 2016 18:03
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Foolster41 posted:I saw that, and couldn't help but think that this is going to lead to Roll20 monetizing playing D&D in some way. I'm not sure how they would, and maybe that's unfair to WotC. Their not GW, but I vaguely remember them doing stuff crappy in the past in this vein. I don't think it's going to be any better or worse than Roll20 currently is. They have their special galleries which already have a cost, they have subscriptions for better features, they already monetize playing RPGs on there in useful but not required ways. If they start charging people to try and play DnD, the most likely result is a lot of people filing their games under Pathfinder or Other while using homemade macros to keep playing their DnD games for free if they so desire. They could try locking that down, but it's so easy to start a new game that I doubt the effort would be worth it for Roll20. I also doubt they're getting a big enough cut from the sales to police this willingly, because that's less money for WotC.
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Jul 29, 2016 19:36
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8one6 posted:[exaggerated collar loosing motion] Well, not anymore. Okay, this is the one thing stuck in my craw over all this. Zak S was in the right place at the right time to start a shitstorm. The whole post was about toxicity in the hobby, and how Magpie wouldn't work with people who were being toxic. Zak S is, even if you don't know every inch of his toxicity, a very toxic member of the community. There was no loving book with Zak S. Truman is an idiot, that apology isn't perfect but it's also pretty boilerplate safe, and if I had any money tied up with him, I'd have to actually think about what to do. But there was no loving Zak S book, and you can tell just by how he treats the whole situation. He's trying to be RPG Jesus, suggesting to turn the other cheek, which is naive as gently caress. He was calling people out for not being perfect, which is arrogant as gently caress. He was humanizing a person who has done some extremely heinous poo poo, especially to current and former members of this forum, which is hurtful as gently caress. But at no point do I believe, from reading that initial post, that there was a Zak S book in the making. Zak S was in the right place to cause a flashpoint event where someone tried to cure the entire toxicity of the hobby with a single blog post. Truman deserves a lot of poo poo for that post in the long run, but the Zak S book is the weirdest bit of made-up hate from the entire shitstorm. There's plenty to call him out for on what he actually wrote.
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Jul 31, 2016 17:52
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unseenlibrarian posted:(Urban Shadows on the other hand can go hang.) Given that, to the best of my knowledge, it was mainly written by Andrew (or at least, Andrew was the guy who was sharing it in very early beta to the place where I playtested it), I don't know how I feel about that if you don't want to blame the writers. Like, it's a no-win situation in the short run. Then again, enough sales lost will put pressure on Truman to get off of his high horse and actually apologize. Or at the very least, get him to stop riding it in public and give a very generic, full-stop "I hosed up, I'm not going to list all the ways I did gently caress up, but I did and I'm sorry". Calling it an FAQ was just... gently caress, man. I was going to make a joke about Frequent Apology Questions, but I'm not sure now is the time or the place.
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Aug 1, 2016 01:41
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One of the example characters is looking for the number between 12 and 13. This is his One Unique Thing. I mean, um, One Unusual Factoid?
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Aug 16, 2016 23:57
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Evil Mastermind posted:One argument I keep seeing in defense of the game in regards to the price point is how it's a luxury item, therefore the price point doesn't have to be something most people could afford because . It's a bullshit argument, of course, because just because something's a luxury doesn't mean that the price point doesn't matter. It's the weird "know just enough about microeconomics to gently caress it up" issue I see pop up a bunch. It's ignoring that we don't live in Free Market Happyland where all the rules you learned in Econ 101 applies completely. In the real world, like in all cases, there is no perfect luxury where all the people who want it will pay whatever price they're given. Obviously, for those who payed 5k, gaming with Monte Cook has no price.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:59
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fez_machine posted:Why are you guys acting like it's a huge moral failing to be a jerk? You should put your best face forward when doing business. If your best face is a nonsense wizard who gets mad when people don't understand your nonsense, there may be some moral failing mixed in with your business failing. I don't know him well enough to think it's a huge moral failing, but it's also not good. Also, he is the devil moon.
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Aug 31, 2016 22:44
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, yeah, I'm just saying, if the rumors are true then FFG isn't getting a vote. I think he meant FFG making a Not-Warhammer Fantasy game similar to the 3rd Edition WHRPG, using what they've learned from the Star Wars games.
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Sep 6, 2016 18:23
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Zurui posted:Also crunchy gear lists are a time-honored tradition of Star Wars RPGs. I'd definitely be more bothered by the extensive gear lists had it was the only one in the Star Wars RPG history to do it. But if you don't include all the stuff from the dozens of extra books, I think it has the smallest "core" gear list. Which I don't think is a compliment, really, just that it's the least worst.
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Sep 7, 2016 22:38
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What is a Star Wars, anyways?
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Sep 8, 2016 18:12
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Spycraft 2.0 is fantastic and I've both run and played it with grim and gritty and Hollywood big budget action style campaigns, its fiddly bits are why I love it so much. The dramatic conflictt system is a lot easier if you print out the cards and sleeve them. Spycraft 2.0 is the d20 Modern GURPS. If you're comfortable with all the moving pieces and have a good group of players, you can make a really fun game that isn't bogged down in numbers and charts. Especially if you have proper cheat sheets for everything that summarize the charts in a much more interactive way. Unfortunately, if you don't prep well for it, it can get bogged down quickly. I'm surprised no one ever made a Spycraft 2.0 Lite at some point. Or even a 13th Age-style Ode To Spycraft.
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Sep 10, 2016 20:10
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I remember there being kickstarter rumblings at the end of 2015. But yeah, it seems like Crafty needs to make money first or something, riding the Mistborn wave IIRC.
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Sep 10, 2016 21:17
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Why the gently caress would you want to simplify it? Let me introduce you to table 4.7, which shows you the list of what to find in tables 4.9-4.61 which take up just under 50 pages worth of book space. That's not even the whole gear section. They have a table (4.70) to distinguish the differences between various known diseases. The skill lists are a mess of synergies that give specific skill usages the benefits without making it easy to tell what does what from just a character sheet. The game as it is now rewards people for making nonsense class picks (hello Scientist!) for various benefits, and involves so many moving parts that I don't know how anyone plays the thing without some form of house-ruling or ignoring like a quarter of the book. It's just 450+ pages of data overload that could probably make a better game at 250 if they didn't drag over as many d20-isms and pared down the skill list, along with not differentiating between goddamn submarines. It's got enough good parts that I'd probably still play it again at some point, but right now, checking out the chart to see which chart has the information I want for this specific action seems like actual work rather than sitting down and enjoying a game. Maybe if I didn't have a job that was basically 90% excel and excel-like work, I'd feel different. But there's just so much extra d20 cruft that just takes away the enjoyment of the game that most people probably wouldn't actually miss.
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Sep 11, 2016 03:22
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dwarf74 posted:Holy poo poo, there's game industry folks signing from all over. Right now I love my hobby. I think this is really the best case. That we all get to be reminded that no matter how dumb this is, it comes from a good place and is attracting people to commit to something better than the alternative. It's a nice little change of pace from "hobby is a garbage fire made of garbage fires". EDIT: Well, that devolved quickly. Maybe not good people, but people doing a single good thing. Like, this doesn't make someone a saint or anything. Just better than the usual. The Lore Bear fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Nov 6, 2016 |
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Nov 6, 2016 07:10
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moths posted:It's also absurdly picky about what is or is not OSR, the "influence pedigree" of games, and seemingly more interested in tribalism than fun. Everything can call itself PbtA, how is that at all the same thing? The only thing that's being made official has to do with the business and legal use of PbtA as a means of official advertising and branding of your book (using logos, using quotes from the original book, etc). Like, did you not read the section that keeps getting quoted in this very thread?
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Sep 12, 2017 18:22
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Pretty sure that'd be inside baseball at best as far as the mainstream press is concerned. D&D hasn't ever really been excoriated for anything creepy in its closet in the mainstream (not counting the invented sins of the Satanic Panic). Nobody writes a review of Baldur's Gate EE and brings up all the awful poo poo around Drizzt, even though he shows up. It doesn't happen, at least that I'm aware of. Yeah, the old stuff wouldn't become an issue until Swedracula dumped it on someone important's lap.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:44
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gourdcaptain posted:The other thing is, especially with RPG.net's rules against attacking game designers, any conversation he's involved with from now on there will be the most hideously awkward at best thing. Saying that someone who has sexually abused a minor has sexually abused a minor isn't an attack, even under RPG.net's rules. Unless you bring it up as a reason he's wrong about mechanics or something really stupid like that, stating it factually isn't against the rules. I'd wish they'd just ban him to make a point, but nothing from their statement reads "Stop talking about this, it's handled".
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Oct 24, 2017 17:13
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Serf posted:man how fuckin dumb do you have to be to have worked on beast lol I imagine the same way a game that ended up being about how good and cool being the abusers were managed to make over $100k: Lots of subterfuge and/or straight-up lying, which is why a lot of people who kickstarted it were really mad at the first draft. You can sign up reading a brief blurb and then get asked to write some weird section and not see how that part connects to the whole. People could have returned what they were paid and asked what they put in to be taken out, but I doubt people who write on RPGs make that much money. Beast was an awful game, now with an even more awful context. That doesn't mean it was pitched to be that.
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Oct 25, 2017 18:14
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah, I certainly don't mean to say he's not guilty- I think the delay in banning him was down to trying to verify. As things go, it would have probably been better to snap-ban him then unban him if something came up.
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Oct 28, 2017 01:40
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moths posted:The only thing I didn't like there was the "when leadership gets back," which suggests this isn't the official GR posture. It said back in-office. As much as their feet should be held to the fire, this is a common issue in all businesses where telecommuting/work from home/etc is a thing. Things don't get communicated to some people as effectively via e-mail as they do in person.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:21
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Nuns with Guns posted:Sooooo Kingdom Death, how's that going? Still creepy and filled with dicks? zak s and matt mcfarland are working on a beast expansion to kingdom death with extra anus huffing and gms is preparing a KD transmedia empire.
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Feb 6, 2018 19:08
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Sampatrick posted: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. 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. They're much less likely to fail now, entirely because if you can do Kickstarters right, your risk is relatively low: You know how many people want to even think about buying your product before you print a single thing and you can set the minimum amount of cash needed so that you don't end up losing money on your product. These two things are big killers of new companies in the hobbies realm. The long term prospects for the industry are fine, even possibly good, if you accept that it will definitely not look like it did in the 90s.
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Feb 15, 2018 02:55
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Sampatrick posted: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. I don't know how you're posting from five years ago, but if you can sell this technology, you can single-handedly save the industry. Well known podcasts/actual play shows like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone are picking up RPGs and selling them to people. Evil Hat noticed a ridiculous % bump in sales to Monster of the Week after it got played on The Adventure Zone. The hobby is, for the first time in a long time, actually growing at more than a glacial pace. I don't understand any person who fears that the industry will not exist in 10 years. There are things to worry about in the hobby and the industry, but viability isn't one of them. Unless we define viability in a real old sense like "number of physical books in your FLGS".
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Feb 15, 2018 03:18
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