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

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

It's your typical punishment obsessed gaming outlook. After all, if ~~daddy~~ the GM can't take away your toys at the drop of a hat, then how is he going to get any respect around here? :reject:

# ¿ Apr 15, 2016 14:03

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 06:21

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Falstaff posted:

A lawyer weighs in on the class action suit against Wizards.

tl;dr doesn't look too good for WotC.

Interesting. A lot the industry leans pretty heavily on volunteers. I wonder what the legal status of, say, Pathfinder Society is. And, now that I think about it, what's the legality of convention volunteers?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2016 16:43

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

remusclaw posted:

I could be wrong but I think HeroQuest has something like that going on.

Not really. It does have a section that recommends setting the difficulty of obstacles according to the narrative pace and/or the mood of the table, based around the idea of a "pass/fail cycle." However, it's strictly GM advice with no real mechanical backing.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 01:36

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

The Diana Jones award isn't bad, in the sense that it's interesting to see what the industry insiders like.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 21:04

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Also it has the best origin story

quote:

What is the Diana Jones Award trophy?

The Diana Jones trophy was originally created by the UK office of TSR Hobbies in the mid-1980s, to commemorate the expiration of that company�s licence to publish the Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game and the subsequent destruction of all unsold copies of the game. It was liberated from TSR Hobbies by forces unnamed and subsequently came into the custody of a member of the Diana Jones committee.

The trophy is a four-sided pyramid made of Perspex, standing ten centimetres high and mounted on a wooden base. Sealed within the Perspex are the burnt remains of the last copy of the Indiana Jones RPG, including two still-recognizable cardboard �Nazi�� figures, as recorded in gaming folklore.

The Diana Jones committee believes that a trophy that embodies the destruction of the last copy of one of the games industry�s most unloved and least-mourned products is a suitable symbol for the aims of the Diana Jones Award.

Who is Diana Jones?

Nobody. The only visible part of the Indiana Jones logo within the trophy has been burnt away so that it reads Diana Jones, and the award takes its name from that.

Haystack fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jul 11, 2016

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 22:28

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

quote is not edit

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 22:29

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Speak of the devil...

quote:

ANNOUNCING THE 2016 DIANA JONES AWARD SHORTLIST

From another long and eclectic collection of nominees, the secretive committee of the Diana Jones Award has distilled a shortlist of five contenders that it believes best exemplified ‘excellence’ in the field of gaming in 2015. The Diana Jones committee is proud to announce that the shortlist for its 2016 award for Excellence in Gaming is:

ConTessa, an organization
http://www.contessa.rocks/about-contessa/

ConTessa is fresh, passionate organization dedicated to getting more women to play, discuss, and create tabletop roleplaying games. They started out as a blog dedicated to this purpose and quickly developed a series of free online seminars, hangouts, and events to bring women into the RPG fold. Last year they moved into face-to-face encounters by launching a track of their own inside Gen Gen, the largest tabletop gaming convention in the world, innovatively creating a con inside a con.

Eric M. Lang, a game designer
http://www.ericmlang.com

Eric M. Lang is the prolific designer of a staggering collection of board and card games whose volume is exceeded by their quality and acclaim. His deep love of games, gaming, and gamers inspires his co-designers and publishing partners with such grace and good nature that it’s impossible to feel the worse for failing to live up to his example. A very small sample of his achievements include Blood Rage, Dice Masters (with Mike Elliott), Chaos in the Old World (a 2010 Diana Jones nominee), and Living Card Game designs for properties including A Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Warhammer 40,000.

Fall of Magic, a story-game by Ross Cowman, published by Heart of the Deernicorn
http://heartofthedeernicorn.com

Fall of Magic is Ross Cowman’s elegiac fantasy game about loss, travel and discovery, all played out in a slowly unfurling landscape full of genuine wonder and weird surprises. The game marries a peaceful, carefully paced aesthetic with tack-sharp design elements that are smarter than they look. It’s hard to get more fantastic or magical than an actual scroll. As a hand-crafted object, Fall of Magic’s cloth-map-as-setting powerfully evokes its themes, and sets a lovely bar for production – small press or otherwise.

Larpwriter Summer School, a course organized by Fantasiförbundet (Norway) and Post (Belarus)
http://larpschool.blogspot.co.uk/p/about.html

Larpwriter Summer School is a week long intensive course on larp design. Organized annually since 2012 in Lithuania, the curriculum is packed with lectures on design and theory, design exercises, educational games, and playing larps. The summer school is attended each year by around fifty students from around the world who have very little or no experience in larp design, with a crew of twenty people teaching and running the practicalities. The summer school has taught a new generation of designers, developed design theory and tools, and built an international network of alumni – who are all invited back each year. The alumni have gone on to create not only larps, but numerous larp festivals to showcase their works.

Pandemic Legacy, a board-game by Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, published by Z-Man Games
http://www.zmangames.com/pandemic-legacy-universe.html

The Diana Jones Award shortlisted the first Legacy game, Risk Legacy, in 2012, but Pandemic Legacy is such a leap forward from that forerunner that it more than deserves its place on this list. The game brings in elements and influences from other genres inside and outside traditional board-gaming to create an experience where the whole is greater than the sum of its amazing parts. A Pandemic Legacy campaign is an experience unlike anything else in gaming, and the waves it has created are felt across this and many other areas of interactive entertainment

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 13:28

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

A fun bit of trivia is that Greg Stafford bought the very fist copy of D&D, literally out of the print shop.

quote:

A friend of mine, Jeff Platt, was at a printer�s shop to pick up a catalogue where he met a guy getting his new fantasy game. Jeff bought one from Gary Gygax right at the shop. Gary told me later it was the first copy of Dungeons & Dragons ever sold.

He was not impressed

quote:

I found D&D to be almost illiterate, poorly organized and not worth my trouble to sort out.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2016 16:13

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Steve Perrin is still alive and kicking.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2016 17:50

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Ok, reading the thread I think I have a pretty good idea of Zak's misdeeds as a harasser and demagogue, but I don't have a good feel for what his works are like. Someone want to give an executive overview (or link an article that does)?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 15:51

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Serf posted:

After reading about the kind of person he is, I can't imagine why you would want to know anything about his work.

A combination of morbid curiosity and know-thy-enemy, mostly.

I'm mostly curious what his particular brand of awful is, and how it presents itself in his works.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 17:44

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Serious question: What are some crunchy games/systems that you all think of when you think "good crunchy game," and why?

For instance, I'm always really impressed by how well Ars Magica's rules work to flesh out its core themes. I'm sure it mechanically breaks down here and there, but I feel like that doesn't matter because the book makes it abundantly clear what the spirit of the game is.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 04:32

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

I can think of several example of novel-mechanics-free RPG books. Most of them are Gloranthan � The Guide to Glorantha is the obvious example, but many of the Heroquest books are all but crunch-free and Griffin Mountain has but one paltry cult writeup that's not really the point of the book. The other example, on the other hand, is the Dracula Dossier, which is 100% content.

I imagine that a fair amount of Cthulhu [Insert System Here] supplements are pretty mechanics-free too, although I don't know enough about that genre to say for sure.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2017 20:54

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Chaosium is actively looking for submissions now, having just put out updated submission guidelines. Looks like they're mostly interested in CoC and nuRunequest material, but I know for a fact that they've also got a soft spot for Heroquest Glorantha stuff.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 03:19

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Let me tell you all about our Lord and Savior Spellbound Kingdoms...

# ¿ May 23, 2017 13:48

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Honestly, I'm not at all surprised about BitC winning, given the history of brigading in parts of the OSR community. What's baffling is how it got nominated in the first place.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2017 22:41

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

LogicNinja posted:

Breaking one action up into multiple rolls without realizing that that increases the chance to fail is my Least Favorite lovely Game Design Thing.

This. In general, the granular mindset seems to have infected way too many goddamn people, and made them incapable of dealing with situations in broad strokes even if the system allows for it. I just recently played in a Heroquest Glorantha one-shot wherein a player somehow managed to require five separate checks just to leap at an emperor during an audience and hold a sword to his imperial neck. One to try and create a distraction, one to close the distance, one to summon the sword, one to strike, and one to resist his magical mask's compulsion to just behead the emperor then and there. It was a cool moment, but it got kind of spoiled by getting stretched out way too frigging long. The system could have handled it in one or two rolls, easy, with just as much detail and a good deal more dramatic momentum. Now, I've got nothing against that player � it was his first time playing the system after all � but it's still lovely that granular, interrupted gameplay like seems to be the default mindset.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2017 04:20

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Given that Golarion is pretty much just a nerd theme park, animatronic Old Ones are pretty much par for the course.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 02:05

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

It is on the rules-lite side of the spectrum, through

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 01:57

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

That's how the new Runequest is doing it. They put out a pretty comprehensive quickstart online and for Free RPG day, and will be selling the full rules/setting books early next year.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 20:46

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

If this calculator is to believed, Ms. Alder would have had a net tax liability of about $25000, absent any deductions. Her actual liability of 22k indicates that she deducted about $10,000. Either she missed some obvious deductions, or more likely (as potatocubed suggested) had a large portion of her expenses in a later fiscal year. She'll probably make back about ~$5000 in tax savings come next tax season.

Related protip: Get a decent tax accountant if you're even vaguely self-employed. It's not that much money for a lot of security.

Haystack fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Sep 6, 2017

# ¿ Sep 6, 2017 00:38

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Leperflesh posted:

You're overlooking the cost of CPP (Canadian social security?) and employment insurance, which is like an extra 10% on top of other taxes. Not that I blame you, that website goes out of its way to hide it.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2017 01:26

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Leperflesh posted:

Yeah that could add another $3k

More like 6.5

There are good reasons to set up an LLC or to incorporate, but the tax savings involved are situational and often not the main point.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2017 01:58

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Leperflesh posted:

Yeah. The big issue is that tax codes generally treat "all the money you got given to you" as income when you're an individual, but "all the money you made after expenses" as income when you're a business. When you are getting money to make a product, the latter is potentially 0% or less than the money you got given to you (if your kickstarter makes no net profit). You should not run a kickstarter and then treat all the cash you get from KS as income.

Noooooo, there's not right. You can absolutely deduct expenses without having an LLC or a corp. That's what it means to be a sole/joint proprietor.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2017 01:22

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Xarbala posted:

Honestly as far as quasi-rational go, that's a pretty drat funny one.

The extra funny thing is that it's also an old Roman superstition.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2017 12:58

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Drafted character abilities would be a perfect fit for Paranoia.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 22:51

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Angrymog posted:

Your maths is wrong. 1000 words at $0.05 per word is $50

They're talking about half cent rates, bro, not five cents.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2017 18:31

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

White Wolf is two kids in a trenchcoat trying to get into an Underworld screening.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 22:37

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 06:21

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Mors Rattus posted:

Please, do point to the RPG company that is running on a strong profit margin.

Chaosium, maybe?

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 00:08

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