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Simian_Prime posted:It's important to note that of all the hundreds of movies and TV shows made in the Western genre, approx. 0 have been made in a setting where the Confederacy won the war. It's only tabletop RPGs that seem to have this weird fetish for a Southern victory. It's not even relegated to Western RPGs. You get it in other places too like Shadowrun where the balkanization of the US results in a resurgent Confederate States of America for some reason.
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Aug 10, 2015 00:31
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drrockso20 posted:EDIT: also looking over SJGames' site they barely have anything for GURPS in print, it's kinda ridiculous Does GURPS come in a convenient pocket-sized format with illustrations by John Kovalic? No? Then SJG doesn't give a poo poo about it.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:23
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Plague of Hats posted:Considering SJG still releases micro-supplements through e23, they seem plenty dedicated to GURPS in the sense that they like it and want to support it, but also it's an RPG so it makes poo poo money. Yeah, what I said was probably more snide than it needed to be, Steve Jackson seems like a guy who doesn't just want to roll around on a pile of Munchkin money forever (apparently he kind of regrets that SJG is now "the Munchkin company" in most peoples' minds) and he did release a version of Ogre that you could use as an emergency shelter if you wanted. But you're on point that GURPS almost certainly doesn't make as much money as Munchkin does, though its minimal and low-key releases probably don't help matters for an RPG that's always been known for an extensive body of supplementary material.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:51
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drrockso20 posted:they should really start hopping on the Kickstarter bandwagon, I bet a new edition of GURPS would make a butt ton of money since it's still a pretty big name Honestly, considering that SJG has figured out what makes them a decent amount of money (i.e. not RPGs) and have stayed the hell away from the landmine-lined field of Kickstarter, they might qualify as the most business savvy tradgames publisher in existence at the moment.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:55
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drrockso20 posted:but they have done several Kickstarters... I sort of meant in an RPG context, sorry. I know they did Ogre via Kickstarter, but what else have they done? Did they do something GURPS related and I just missed it?
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Aug 13, 2015 08:00
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Countblanc posted:The whole recruitment system is weird to me in general. Unless everyone knows each other and I'm just not aware of it but like, I've found that focusing on novel character ideas instead of player synergy leads to a much less enjoyable game and has characters that end up functioning more as gimmicks than anything. Like if the way to get your character in a game is to make them stand out of course you're going to make their two paragraph introduction explosive (and maybe a bit pandering if you know the GM's tastes) and possibly make their mechanics something weird too. Something I've noticed after spending time both places is SA's game room is really good about getting games off the ground and rolling (which is a separate matter from ensuring those games don't peter out which is the same just about everywhere including the tabletop in my experience) and I attribute at least part of that to the recruitment process, whereas RPGnet's PbP forum gets way fewer games even started because A). fewer people just stand up and go "I'm running this game with this.premise, starts in seven days, get your apps in, go" and B). A lot of the time when someone does get persuaded into GMing the recruit process stalls out as those interested players dither over who should be what instead of just putting a character out there. "Will you play well with the others and not be disruptive" should be a basic expectation for anyone involved imo.
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Aug 31, 2015 00:09
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I think folks writing "explosive" apps is probably partly an attempt to catch the GM's eye but also partly a result of them getting hype for the game. I mean, I don't usually app to games I'm not at least halfway excited about in the first place, but I generally take it as a sign of enthusiasm instead of trying to game the selection process.
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Aug 31, 2015 00:42
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I mean most people who regularly post to SA tradgames enough to want to run and/or play in a PbP game are probably going to at least be passingly familiar with other SA tradgames regulars to the point where GMs can make an educated guess over who they think they'll click with and/or will play well off of the others.
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Aug 31, 2015 02:50
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01011001 posted:Very much so. Shorter broad-strokes backgrounds are probably easier to work with if anything, filling in details as you go as you see the party and decide what kind of game you want it to end up being and what kind of character you want to be playing is a good practice. I generally favor this approach as someone on the player side of things myself, but I'm also realistically aware that the average PbP doesn't last long enough to really get to the point of incorporating finer details and interpersonal relationships between the characters...hell, most of my face-to-face games never went that far either.
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Aug 31, 2015 04:16
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Grassy Gnoll tried a thing a little while back where people just did elevator pitches rather than full character sheets and backgrounds, and I'd really like to see that picked up again by more games, especially those with involved character creation processes. There are a lot of games where just working out the sheet or learning the system can be a real chore and I'd rather not have that hard work go to waste. As someone who's apped to Shadowrun and higher XP 40K games this is true, that said it's also helpful to know in advance whether your elevator pitch actually meshes with what the system allows you to make or if it's going to be a case of "well I have a great concept but now I have to tie it into a pretzel to actually make it work in practice or go back and change some stuff."
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Aug 31, 2015 05:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There are similar issues with stuff like *World games where if two people app the same playbook, only one is going to get in, and having it just be a quick pitch would soften the blow for that kind of dilemma. There's kind of a "honor among appers" where two people rarely do face off for a playbook or class anyway, so it's not a huge issue, but- well, complaining about that is a whole other can of worms to open up. Eh, I think it's better for people to pitch what they want even if it overlaps and let the GM decide who they want. One of the things that kills the inertia behind any game that looks like it's attracted a GM on RPGnet's PbP recruitment forum is people going in a circle about "well I want to be this archetype, oh I guess that means I'll be this one, but wait I wanted to be that one, well I have the following three concepts in descending order of priority, actually I think I'll go back and change my character, but I changed mine too, etc."
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Aug 31, 2015 05:30
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Potsticker posted:It's better, but it doesn't stop the feeling of wanting to app something that isn't taken until all the major classes/playbooks/what have you are taken. This is true and it's happened in face-to-face games I've played in too, the idea that everybody's gotta be their own unique thing with minimal overlap. Part of it is that a lot of games favor specialists over generalists and if you have folks doubling up then you wind up with "gaps," but then again more games could stand to discuss modifying the sorts of challenges to throw at players if they don't have a rogue or a hacker or whatever and how it's fine if you have two people who want to be The Whatever (though a lot of games also don't give you enough tools to make two nicely differentiated versions of the same schtick/archetype/class/whatever too so there's that I guess).
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Aug 31, 2015 06:17
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Helical Nightmares posted:The Shadowrunner problem (TM) I mean like a lot of things elfgame it traces back to D&D...someone's gotta be the Cleric after all. Though Shadowrun does highlight the fact that even games that pride themselves on "we don't have classes, build whatever you want!" often nudge people in the direction of classes in all but name anyway ("You'll want a street sam, a decker, a mage, a face, and maybe a ninja.") re: clear communication and management, this is another thing I think SA Game Room gets right because it's frequently not "I wanna run D&D4E, who's in?" it's "I'm going to run a 4E game in the vein of XCrawl, make flashy characters out to cut promos and score endorsement deals, decide if you're a face or a heel" or "Ars Magica, set in this particular location during this time period, with the following themes being highlighted." A lot of places leave that stuff up in the air to be determined after the fact which makes character creation a nebulous process at best. And laying down a framework also helps make your job easier as a GM simply by virtue of the fact that you can tell who's paying attention and who isn't. In a long-running PbP over at RPGnet with an excellent and reliable group of players the GM once informed me that he made his selection based on the fact that we were the only people who submitted characters in line with the pitch he put out, everyone else just submitted generic characters without any concern for what was going on. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Aug 31, 2015 |
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Aug 31, 2015 08:05
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