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I picked up the PDF copy of the 70's, and so far I'm liking it. I am a little bothered by the frequent use of "…but more about that later."
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Dec 22, 2014 23:31
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FMguru posted:It was a one-man show, and that one man showed that enthusiasm for gaming and sound business sense are wholly non-correlated. Daedalus's implosion left a ton of unpaid bills, and a lot of people would like to get a piece of him if he even pokes his head up again. It's also true in other sort of niche hobbies, like various indie music scenes and all levels of pro wrestling--nerds who love their thing but aren't very business-savvy/may also be kinda criminal. I think it's just the smallness of the enterprises where one (or few) personalities have no checks.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:20
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ProfessorCirno posted:Reminder that when 4e was released, the wizard was slightly unfinished because, during development, some people in the dev team kept buffing them to be intentionally more powerful then every other class, so they had to revise the wizard constantly to fight against it. Do you have a source for this? Because that's pretty damning if true.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:22
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Rob Heinsoo posted:I shouldn't act like this was a simple decision to make or carry out. There are a lot of people who don't want to let go of the idea that the wizard should be the most powerful class. The first Player's Handbook teetered back and forth between design drafts and development drafts, and sometimes the wizard had been deliberately bumped up to be slightly better than all the other classes. I wasn't comfortable with that, and the final version of the wizard is, if anything, possibly on the slightly weak side; the wizard was all alone as the first practitioner of the controller role and we stayed cautious knowing that we could improve the class later if we needed to.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:16
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FMguru posted:"Nerds with no business sense, sometimes shading towards scam artistry" is a sadly recurring theme in RPG history. Like James Shipman of Outlaw Press, that dude who outright steals Tunnels and Trolls books, puts his name on them and sells them.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:39
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Lightning Lord posted:Like James Shipman of Outlaw Press, that dude who outright steals Tunnels and Trolls books, puts his name on them and sells them.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:41
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Lightning Lord posted:Like James Shipman of Outlaw Press, that dude who outright steals Tunnels and Trolls books, puts his name on them and sells them. That is straight up criminal and illegal. Why hasn't T&T put a C&D on his P&S?
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Dec 23, 2014 02:57
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Covok posted:That is straight up criminal and illegal. Why hasn't T&T put a C&D on his P&S? They've tried, he just laughs. He seems to be proud of being a thief. Ken St. Andre says that it's not worth the money to pursue in court. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/09/23/scamwatch-followup-tunnels-and-trolls-publisher-speaks-about-outlaw-press/ EDIT: When Shipman was confronted with stealing art for another book, his response was A Scumbag posted:I really don’t care. Your item(s) will remain there forever. Copies are selling very good. Over 50 copies sold to date. I’ll probably soon be adding Hobb Sized Adventures and Angry Flowers to my web site as soon as I get the layout finished.
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Dec 23, 2014 03:12
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Last month I think someone talked about the various historical (not L5R) samurai RPGs that have been published over the years but I can't find it. Can someone help me find them or re-summarize what's out there?
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Dec 23, 2014 03:54
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clockworkjoe posted:Last month I think someone talked about the various historical (not L5R) samurai RPGs that have been published over the years but I can't find it. Can someone help me find them or re-summarize what's out there? I think that last list missed FGU's Bushido. It's very much an FGU product, and very much an 80s RPG, but it was playable and had a lot of good Samurai-era flavor in the rules.
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Dec 23, 2014 04:23
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So a thing I've noticed in various Editions and Retroclones of Dungeons & Dragons is that most of the demi-human/nonhuman races have some innate form of ability to see in varying levels of darkness. The humans and halflings are pretty much the outlier in this. In a pre-industrial society where torches and lanterns are the major light sources at night, I can't overstate how much of a disadvantage this is for both warfare and dungeon-crawling. Unless you're playing in a setting where the PC races are more or less completely separate and isolated, this would have a huge effect on stuff. A lot of video games and television shows depicting medieval fantasy worlds have ludicrously bright night-time events. If you don't have the equivalent of a modern city with electric lights on a moonless night, poo poo gets really dark real fast, as in "you might as well be blind" fast. Dwarven and elven city watch patrols would function far better at night than their human counterparts. Bandits, raiders, and guerrilla soldiers of the same races can sneak into human towns at night and gain a massive tactical bonus by taking out the lantern bearers leaving much of the town blind. And when dungeon-crawling in narrow halls and caverns an entire party with darkvision will not give away their presence with a bright lantern. My question is, hasn't this rather major thing ever been reflected in D&D settings and worlds?
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Dec 24, 2014 04:43
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Given that the existence of magic and wizards has essentially no impact on the functioning of society in RPGs, hoping for darkvision to affect worldbuilding is perhaps a bit optimistic.
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Dec 24, 2014 04:48
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Asymmetrikon posted:Given that the existence of magic and wizards has essentially no impact on the functioning of society in RPGs, hoping for darkvision to affect worldbuilding is perhaps a bit optimistic. *cough*DarkSunEberron*cough*
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Dec 24, 2014 04:52
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Libertad! posted:*cough*DarkSunEberron*cough* Oh my god Dark Sun is the post-apocalyptic fallen world future of Eberron 
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Dec 24, 2014 05:08
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You know, I never considered nightvision something that would really weigh into racial choices in Dungeons and Dragons. Everquest though? Who would play a barbarian when you can't see at night! At least the best character type, Erudite Necromancer, could get night vision amulets pretty quickly.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:22
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Plague of Hats posted:Oh my god Dark Sun is the post-apocalyptic fallen world future of Eberron There was a thread on /tg/ where someone came to that conclusion and decided to make a whole campaign based off that premise, with a heavy dose of Chrono Trigger time-travel/alternate timelines thrown in for good measure. I think it started off as FR (or similarly generic fantasy world), with a choice being made where the future would be either Eberron or Dark Sun; the PC's had the ability to go back and forth between time and the two alternate timelines, and they had to somehow prevent Dark Sun from happening. If things got REAL hosed up, the DS timeline went forward into Gamma World and the weirdness therein. Honestly I'd have played the gently caress out of that game.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:46
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Mormon Star Wars posted:You know, I never considered nightvision something that would really weigh into racial choices in Dungeons and Dragons. Everquest though? Who would play a barbarian when you can't see at night! At least the best character type, Erudite Necromancer, could get night vision amulets pretty quickly. I remember when it mattered some, but it was never that big a deal after the first couple of expansions, and after PoP vision-enhancement gear started falling like rain.  WoW easy mode babby syndrome before WoW was even a thing!!!
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Dec 24, 2014 05:47
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Asymmetrikon posted:Given that the existence of magic and wizards has essentially no impact on the functioning of society in RPGs, hoping for darkvision to affect worldbuilding is perhaps a bit optimistic. I have a whole rant about how D&D-land can't be Standard Pseudo-Medieval Europe if Continual Light spells exist. But yes, one of the things that makes Eberron so great is that it actually acknowledges that when you have magic, that will actually affect the culture at large.
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Dec 24, 2014 06:13
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I spent too much time trying to calculate how a few wizards with Stone to Flesh spells could feed a nation. It is pretty fascinating to try to take these rules and worlds to their logical conclusions.
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Dec 24, 2014 07:09
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It's for this reason why in my current Pathfinder campaign I designed a few "Laws of Magic" as a limit on things. One of them is the Law of Impermanence, which states that the intricate energies of magic must be repeatedly maintained by dedicated castings over time to prevent its effects from becoming warped of malfunctioning. For example, those who forge magic swords have its power slowly drain over time to the point where even mighty artifact weapons become merely mastercrafted blades if rare material components and rituals aren't used to invigorate the fiber; sometimes magical items and spells will simply stop working over time; citadels forged of animated spell energy can suffer disastrous catastrophes if the owner does not care to attend to the central orb holding everything together. This is the explanation of how my megadungeon prison underneath the campaign's magic school is leaking demons and other monsters out into the city. The wards which held them in check have not been maintained enough. It also encourages the accumulation of spell components, because wizards always need more to cast spells, and fabricating goods to try and wreck the economy inevitably backfire when the "wizard goods" break down. My campaign world's still high-magic, but I wanted to place some interesting limits on the one-man Weird Wizard Show that is the Pathfinder spell system.
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Dec 24, 2014 07:22
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I actually have a picture of two wizards writing down the rules of magic:
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Dec 24, 2014 09:19
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...what in the world is that from? I don't watch television, at all.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:31
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Athas used to be inaccessible from any other realm, which I took as meaning it existed in the future, way at the end of the D&D multiverse. Everything else had already died and burnt out, all that remained anywhere was a chunk of sand and rock whose inhabitants are fighting over the scraps. Then they were just like "oh it's over here and some wizard poo poo makes it hard to visit."
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Dec 24, 2014 16:36
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moths posted:Athas used to be inaccessible from any other realm, which I took as meaning it existed in the future, way at the end of the D&D multiverse. Everything else had already died and burnt out, all that remained anywhere was a chunk of sand and rock whose inhabitants are fighting over the scraps. That makes sense since it's kind of sort of D&D's answer to Vance's Dying Earth.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:38
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NGDBSS posted:...what in the world is that from? I don't watch television, at all. Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
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Dec 24, 2014 17:43
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WordMercenary posted:Most videogame devs haven't actually heard of any modern games at all. I once got to ask Chris Avellone what he played, and the answer was basically just 2e and Ars Magicka. The only storygamey game he seemed familiar with was Mouseguard.  he mentioned how much he loves the frequent games of Numenera he gets to play (I assume with other people at Obsidian Entertainment, not just for his own amusement). I am sure I can imagine the reaction in this subforum to that, though.Kai Tave posted:I can't imagine that whoever it was that was churning out all those lovely Avalanche Press pseudo-historical d20 sourcebooks with stripperiffic cover art went into that going "yes, this is the culmination of all my game design aspirations, my heart and soul is being poured into this."  I am utterly shocked that I never saw any of these back in my D20 IS AWESOME days. They really are as bad as you made them sound!Also for as much as D20 seemed to sink the gaming universe from like 2005-2008, I still wish it were possible to ever live in as exciting a TIME FOR GAMING again as the first few years of D20. It was probably the last time actual newly-released physical books were by and large a better solution to a problem than the Internet! Mormon Star Wars posted:At least the best character type, Erudite Necromancer, could get night vision amulets pretty quickly.
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Dec 24, 2014 18:20
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Quarex posted:Well, he has certainly heard of at least one modern game; when I was talking to him about gaming at the Wasteland 2 release party Well he is a writer on Torment: Tides of Numenara, so it's impossible for him to be unfamiliar with the game. I don't know if I'd consider myself a fan of Numenara (although it's possbile I'll get more interested in the setting since I am a huge fan of Torment and Avellone in general) I certainly don't feel excited about the system. However I do like how it's acting as sort of a gateway to the wider RPG world for many people who only have had D&D on their radar. Sort of an "Oh yeah, there are other RPGs aren't there?" thanks to it being a creation of Cook. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but that's the reaction I've seen.
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Dec 24, 2014 18:30
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Quarex posted:
I'm inclined to disagree on two counts, first being that the rush of d20 books was a better solution to any problem and that we aren't living in an exciting time for gaming right now. I mean I get what you're saying, the days of WOO NEW D&D HYPE are over and Next is a big bowl of soggy oatmeal, but I honestly think that if you're a roleplaying nerd it's a pretty decent time to be one between a proliferation of small-press games and self-publishing along with social media making it easier for you to find a group willing to play games that aren't D&D via forums, Google Hangouts, roll20, or straight-up "looking for group" ads.
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Dec 24, 2014 19:34
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Lightning Lord posted:Well he is a writer on Torment: Tides of Numenara, so it's impossible for him to be unfamiliar with the game. I don't know if I'd consider myself a fan of Numenara (although it's possbile I'll get more interested in the setting since I am a huge fan of Torment and Avellone in general) I certainly don't feel excited about the system. However I do like how it's acting as sort of a gateway to the wider RPG world for many people who only have had D&D on their radar. Sort of an "Oh yeah, there are other RPGs aren't there?" thanks to it being a creation of Cook. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but that's the reaction I've seen. Numenara looks like the sort of cute, low-maintenance RPG that I would play with my group when we want a break from our main RPG but don't want to invest in a crunchy system.
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Dec 24, 2014 20:08
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Quarex posted:Also for as much as D20 seemed to sink the gaming universe from like 2005-2008, I still wish it were possible to ever live in as exciting a TIME FOR GAMING again as the first few years of D20. It was probably the last time actual newly-released physical books were by and large a better solution to a problem than the Internet! Honestly I get that much more now then I did then, but I was rarely into the third party stuff of 3.x BECAUSE of the glut. I am infinitey more interested in new indie games then I ever was in More D20 Splats. The arrival of completely new and different games and game styles from Japan only makes current times that much better. In the year or two before 4e gaming seemed to be excited over new bonuses and subclasses for a single game. Right now, the excitement is over new ways to game entirely.
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Dec 24, 2014 20:33
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I just wanted to greet this thread and subforum a Merry Christmas. I only started the hobby in April this year, but it's been a ton of fun and I'm really looking forward to traditional-gaming a lot more in 2015. I've kicked my Steam sale habit, I'm getting to play with my dad and brother and long-time friends, I'm reading more, gaining a better understanding of game design concepts and generally just have the mental gears turning a lot more constantly on top of all the socialization.
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Dec 24, 2014 20:39
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Yeah this is probably the best time to be into gaming ever. We're flooded with options, and you never have to settle for hateful cat-piss players with today's social media tools. Plus the monolith of D&D is finally good and dead.
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Dec 25, 2014 03:10
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moths posted:
And what do you base this on? I won't call D&D dead until they stop putting books out for it. Also there's the diehards that still play various versions of D&D. As long as they're around I wouldn't call it dead.
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Dec 25, 2014 04:19
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On the other hand literally every single other game publisher ever aren't tripping over themselves to churn out d20 Whatever anymore. D&D is always going to be the beginning and the end of the hobby for a bunch of folks no matter what, but the good news is that it's easier than ever these days to go "I'm tired of D&D, I'd like to play something else" and do that instead of resignedly shrugging your shoulders and rolling up yet another 3.X character with a sigh.
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Dec 25, 2014 04:33
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It's no longer the only game anyone plays, it's dead as a monolith. Hell even the poor souls who only play D&D are no longer honour-bound to a particular D&D (or Pathfinder D&D). And it's great. The hobby is free of the choking kudzu it was in the D20 days, or the light-blocking oak it was before that. New games are happening, with new ideas and concepts. And people are actually playing them. You can ask "what if we didn't have ability scores?" and have a real discussion. This really is the best time for RPGs. We see the worst of the industry in G.TXT, but for every shitheel homophobe raging against gay paladins, some lucky kid will unwrap a FFG Starwars game tomorrow. For every Kingdom Death creep, there's a half dozen new Settlers or Dominion players, meeting up on meetup groups. Things really are getting better overall, but it's easy to lose sight of that.
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Dec 25, 2014 04:50
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I do believe that we're in a mini-golden age of tabletop gaming. Desktop publishing, online distribution, print on demand and social media are allowing people to make and promote games that would have never seen an audience before. Geeky hobbies are much more mainstream today and the audience is more diverse than it has ever been in the past. DnD lost it's grip on the hobby once before, in the 2nd ed years before WotC bought TSR a slew of other games filled store shelves, Vampire, Shadowrun, Rifts, to name a few. Maybe we'll get back to that kind of diversity in the market again.
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Dec 25, 2014 06:41
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Bucnasti posted:I do believe that we're in a mini-golden age of tabletop gaming. Desktop publishing, online distribution, print on demand and social media are allowing people to make and promote games that would have never seen an audience before. Geeky hobbies are much more mainstream today and the audience is more diverse than it has ever been in the past. I don't think we're going to see a return of the days of RPG "midlisters" like that again...like where you had D&D on top, White Wolf in second place, and then a semi-stable list of a half-dozen games like GURPS, Rifts, Shadowrun, L5R, etc. The market's changed enough that I don't think the sort of "selection pressure" that used to exist and led to a core of games persisting while others basically languished is as prevalent anymore. Like you point out, things are much, much easier on the production end for everybody as well as the promotional end, which means you don't need to be a White Wolf or a FASA to make the game you want without burning huge stacks of money on what could very well wind up being your very own RPG heartbreaker.
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Dec 25, 2014 07:34
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Merry Christmas, guys gals and goons! May your new year bring fun games of all shapes and sizes!
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Dec 25, 2014 13:22
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Merry Christmas you goddamn nerds. And Gygax bless us, every one.
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Dec 25, 2014 18:35
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I got some of my work officially published by a pen and paper company on Christmas Eve, bought Coup and Dominion for my parents, and got a bunch of tiny plastic Warmahordes mans for Christmas. It's me, I'm the nerd
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Dec 25, 2014 18:40
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