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To be quite honest, I think the actual play content of 5e D&D is helping other RPGs out more than it's hurting them- you get a lot of smaller podcasts/streams running other systems sometimes and that gets exposure out there. It's never going to match D&D's level of marketing but it does bring people into the RPG ecosystem and i think that's a good thing.
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Jun 24, 2019 01:04
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I played a birthright campaign that was pretty fun, but we did it in Burning Wheel.
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May 3, 2020 23:46
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Halloween Jack posted:My prediction is that, because the OSR has already created alternative structures for sharing ideas and publishing, the new TSR won't amount to much. Yeah, i'm not sure takes on D&D are anything but an incredibly saturated field, but maybe i guess the TSR name will hit the nostalgia a bit better than OSRIC or whatever.
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Jun 24, 2021 15:44
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Maxwell Lord posted:Also it just doesn't seem like this is well organized at all. They don't seem to have announced any products yet, or the designers they've got on board, or made any kind of concerted hype, they've mostly just tweeted about Not Being Woke. Which does appeal to one very specific segment of the customer base but is not quite the same as actually having a business plan. Yeah, this just seems like the internet and posting making someone really want to post rather than some marketing strategy, as i'm not sure it's particularly good in a business sense to try to hyper-target a market that shares PDFs of every major new release among one another.
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Jun 26, 2021 11:09
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Kai Tave posted:I mean maybe he's onto something but goddamn, I've been accused of being overly cynical before for suggesting that you could sell a deliberately half-assed game as long as the pictures are pretty enough, and here GW is just literally telling their designers "yeah don't put too much effort into this." Yeah, people are so transfixed by the aesthetic that they really will buy a lot of trash just because of the aesthetic and the meme poo poo of their brands.
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Jul 27, 2021 11:29
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HerraS posted:it was the 90s (just barely in 7th Sea's case), having a convoluted metaplot that didn't serve any purpose in your game was mandatory It used to be easier to get an RPG published than a fiction novel.
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Aug 11, 2021 12:53
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SFB's an interesting bit of design that i think shows some of the strengths of creating big systems and seeing what happens as opposed to trying to author an experience and pare everything down to it but it also means you'll lose a lot of people.
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Aug 27, 2021 11:01
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Honestly it'd be nice to see a lot of the 'esoteric lore analysis' applied to actually creating work instead of wikidiving through well known IPs but then i guess people really want their IP stuff.
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Aug 31, 2021 14:57
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah a lot of the games on the list are definitely not something I would characterize as pro-military glorification, I mean Patrol is on the list and, uh, it's definitely not a game about how awesome and badass the Vietnam War was by any stretch. Per the article: Most military wargames are a lot closer to elfgames than commercial wargames because to the military, they're thought exercises, it's not really important to come up with systems to master. It's not like, say, trying to come up with a fairly closely balanced game like, say, Empire of the Sun or Paths of Glory, or even coming up with a detailed model like Pacific War, they're just trying to get people used to abstract thinking about problems.
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Sep 8, 2021 13:32
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Kai Tave posted:In addition to what others have said, it isn't overtly designed to be "disposable" in that sense, you can in theory buy one deck and play it forever, but if you want to play something other than the deck you've been dealt then yes, you have to buy a whole new one and you can't mix and match between them, that's sort of the fundamental premise of the game. I agree that it largely seems to be an attempt at exploring brave new worlds of monetization while also undercutting any sort of secondary market outside of "I got this super good deck and I will sell it to whoever pays me a bunch of money" maybe. I'm not really sure what the overlap is between people who want to play slot machine card games and people who hate building decks. I always found that aspect of keyforge weird, it just feels like a weird garfield tangent. Then again, people keep trying to make "mtg but we made it all about fundamental attacking and blocking".
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Oct 15, 2021 23:50
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Part of the problem is you have to talk about *every new release* regardless of genre but also be a capable writer and no poo poo there's going to be problems. To take it back to TG, it would be like having rando boardgamer come up and try to learn Empire of the Sun to review it- that's enough of a problem as is, but you also have to get good enough at it and play it enough to actually meaningfully comment on it, and then maybe know enough of the history to consider its accuracy or not. Most wargame reviews are 1-2 turns noodling around in solitaire, some commentary about what the game promises to be, and move on to the next one. The voracious appetite for takes ASAP is always going to run against actually having people who understand the thing comment on it intelligently.
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Oct 25, 2021 16:35
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Cessna posted:Historical wargaming - tabletop hex-and-counter games - was at its height in the 70s and 80s. Since then they've been in steady decline as most gamers who want to play a strategy game or simulation don't always enjoy reading dense rulebooks and cross referencing dice rolls on dozens of charts to see if their tank's gun hit and knocked out the other tank: To be fair to Flames of War, they're really trying to get at big time national differences in a scale where they wouldn't always come out so easily, and in a way that 'pops' rules-wise. And generally, their response to the limits of archetype in the nations is to try to offer different options- there are odd duck German companies that are mostly Reluctant Trained fortress troops or captured French tanks in the late war, as well as Soviet hero companies which have fewer models and work closer to what one might expect. They have a similar comic book mentality toward other nations, though I do think the solution in some forces being to have a battalion(this is how Italian regulars, Romanians, and most Soviet infantry lists work) is not ideal. The Italians actually roll for their training and morale and pay a lot for the potential to be above average. I'm not sure portraying Nazi inefficiency in additional surcharges in points 'just to make a point' would do much to improve anything- in games like FoW, especially in the late war, playing a panzer company is going to be more interesting than playing a volksgrenadier company consisting of Polish conscripts, just from a strict Xs and Os, player agency approach. In the cardboard world, I don't really see all that much that i'd chalk up to bad historiography in modern designs. OCS The Third Winter is based on a modern understanding of the Soviet forces in Ukraine in 1943-44, for example, and does a pretty good job of capturing their strengths and weaknesses, same for the Axis forces.
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Nov 19, 2021 20:31
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Do people actually play paper historic?
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Dec 14, 2021 22:49
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Bottom Liner posted:Except 40k has done exactly that, just in a way that's counterproductive to their claims of satire and cautionary storytelling. "Everyone is a bad guy and this is all satire" doesn't square well with literally every bit of art direction being grand epic heroic badassery and glory. The only way it could come full circle at this point would to have 40k end and have the bugs just devour them all in the most comical over the top way that makes everything that came before it completely pointless and moot. Yeah, this is the push to make things people want to buy and paint. You can say in the backstory all you want how it's a deep commentary on fascism or whatever, but ultimately you gotta make appealing models for people to buy, paint, fight, etc. I respect people who engage it on that level way, way more than people who engage it like it's the best story and most thought-out universe ever, how their giant cathedral meme-imagery is cutting commentary.
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Dec 17, 2021 01:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Goons: "How can we make this game about fighting your way through skeleton-infested ruins of a bygone age, measured against a limited attrition-based healing system, in order to fight a big monster at the end in a climactic boss battle, thereby gaining both treasure and an abstract magical currency that increases your personal power, into a TTRPG? Truly, it is an insoluble, unprecedented problem. Oh well, better go with a rules-light meditation on loneliness!" I'd do it in gurps for maximum tactical realism, 150 point characters, go. But yes, the notion that everything just needs to be a PBTA/FITD hack is kind of absurd to me.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:01
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The solution to modern: more scarcity.
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Feb 12, 2022 02:16
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Warthur posted:Historical wargames is a different market entirely but a good example of how a hobby can happily sustain itself on more modest presentation. I can't rule out that the RPG market will sooner or later have to correct itself in that direction outside of the Wizards and Paizos. Generally speaking, cardboard wargames have gotten much better production values since the 80s, including full color rulebooks now, but they also cost quite a bit more than they used to. 70-120$ prices are not unusual for a company like GMT games.  This is what a modern rulebook from a publisher known for questionable quality looks like- it blows anything from the 80s out of the water. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Feb 25, 2022 |
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Feb 25, 2022 11:56
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moths posted:As a counterpoint, consider this screenshot taken moments ago from https://www.peterpig.co.uk/: miniatures wargames are the dregs of design, just a worthless industry, wipe it off the map
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Feb 25, 2022 13:00
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I don't really think it's all that wrong to make a distinction between, say, D&D and Blades in the Dark in what they're trying to do. Some people really do just not go for controlling things outside their character's actions and mentality. A guy in a game I RP with compared playing GURPS to Blades in the Dark as something akin to playing Captain Kirk vs Captain Kirk's director.
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May 31, 2022 09:27
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I just use owlbear rodeo because getting people to use the other automation features in the more sophisticated VTTs is difficult, especially if it's a system like GURPS.
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Jul 18, 2022 15:06
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Chakan posted:On one hand, $25 to play a session is pretty reasonable. On the other hand, if I paid $25 and there were 8 non-GM players at the table I would be a little miffed. I've been thinking about doing it as a side gig but i think i'd have to DM stuff that's d&d to make it reliable and i'm just not sure i'm down for that.
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Jul 19, 2022 13:05
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CitizenKeen posted:Crap, startplaying.games is a paid service? Modiphius is running a giveaway if you GM through them, and I was like "I'll GM for some randos, maybe make some friends, maybe get some swag". But I don't want to get in to the whole paid-GMing space. Yeah, there's way, way more players than DMs so i kinda find it inevitable.
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Jul 19, 2022 15:11
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hyphz posted:I don't think there's any business in GMs charging per player. The more players in a single session the more diluted the experience between them, so they shouldn't be more expensive. A lot of these are bringing in players as individuals so you have to individualize the price. Usually there's a seat limit to prevent huge games.
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Jul 19, 2022 16:14
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ItohRespectArmy posted:Hey everyone, I know this chat ended a few pages back so if this is a derail feel free to ignore but I did want to chip in my 2p and share my extremely anecdotal paid gming experience. Good post, yeah, it's one of the things that has me wanting to get into it on a paid basis- just a more engaged group of players who are here for it.
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Jul 21, 2022 13:39
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Late TSR getting into setting books as a business model is what killed them, I think. They ended up having to publish a lot of poo poo that just didn't sell like it needed to. There's a reason I think the current ownership is focused on being more directed at what they publish. Birthright's interesting, and in a lot of ways unique in just the way play is expected to go, but it dovetailed with the piece of D&D that was kind of neglected and rarely used- domain-level play. I think it's kind of inevitable that it and its products would've mostly failed(though it'd work great for a computer game, and they did try that). It kinda reminds me of today's Traveller Mercenary trio, which has a ton of material for large scale combat that i've never heard any Traveller group ever use. I wonder how Mass Combat supplements for RPGs really sell/sold. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 17:46
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FMguru posted:My favorite example of TSR overproduction was a series of linked adventure modules for the Maztica setting, where you would have products that TSR paid full price to write, edit, layout, art design, print, market, ship, warehouse, and account for, but were only bought by 1) DMs (not players) who 2) bought pre-pack adventure modules, who 3) played in the Forgotten Realms and, more specifically, 4) played in the Maztica sub-region of FR, and who had 5) already played through the first module and wanted to continue on to the second. Someone who didn't meet ALL FIVE of those requirements would not pick or even look for more than a few seconds at the product. Spending all that money to make something that literally 98% of your target audience had zero use for or even the ability to use. Multiple that times a dozen products every month, month after month, year after year, and it's easy to see how TSR drove itself into the ground. Yeah, there's a reason the edition after, WotC was like "ok, we'll just make a license situation where we pawn these books off on other people so we can just sell stuff that sells" and, you know what? It worked.
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Jul 21, 2022 17:59
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FMguru posted:OA was also an AD&D 1E core book at a time when there weren't many of those, and unlike a lot of its contemporaries (Wilderness Survival Guide, Manual Of The Planes, etc.) it was full of usable (and official) crunch (new races, new classes, new spells, new monsters, new magic items, etc.). Plus, pretty decent cover art. Definitely- OA was a lot more unique when it came out. It was dumb, but it actually fit a lot better into how people played than the other stuff.
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Jul 21, 2022 18:05
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Halloween Jack posted:Hey, I'm still really confused as to how it was even possible for Neo-TSR to publish anything Star Frontiers related. Are they just blatantly violating copyright while WotC already has a lawsuit pending? Yes. It seems like they're trying to generate some cash for the legal battle, or maybe get while they still can.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:13
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Honestly the weakness of PBTA is if you're not in for the very particular fiction that the game is trying to be, it doesn't really have anything for anyone else. They are all super bespoke to what they can do.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:43
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Warthur posted:I think you're right about there being enough big tent systems already - I can't think of the last one which really got much traction. There's D&D, of course, and from where I am sitting the BRP ecosystem seems particularly healthy (especially once you fold in games which aren't strictly speaking BRP but are built along comparable principles like WFRP) - not on a computer mmercial scale as massive as 5E, but there's enough hobbyist creativity being applied in the field to keep it going a long time. I mean, I am kinda partial to GURPS but yeah the management of the thing kinda has left something to be desired. There was a 10-20 year period where a lot of things got adapted to it, and then nowadays the best GURPS stuff that gets released is the Gaming Ballistic Dungeon Fantasy stuff, other than that it's pretty much a holding pattern. The Bee posted:Oh, no doubt. PbtA games are for very specific moods and genres with groups comfortable about getting deep with each other, and that's practically the antithesis of your average pickup game. I still think focus is usually better than a lack thereof, and a broader game should be something mechanics light and simple, but there's a reason why it feels like the gaming sphere has stopped acting like PbtA is the insta-slam pick answer to everything (hello, Dungeon World). Yeah, my experience with RPG groups is that people tend to not exactly have the same thing in mind- so it's hard to get people together to, say, want to play Masks because I might get one or two who want that exact premise, and then the other three will probably be okay with something broader like Superheroes, and Masks is a very particular kind of superhero game, so it's not gonna work with my group- it also doesn't have enough 'game' there to keep somebody engaged who's not up for doing a ton of narration. One really good example is Band of Blades- it's a war story, but what people want out of it is going to very, very different from person to person. Some people want to really emulate a war movie, and that's great for it- once you understand which parts are critical and how it's GMed, it's a really good war movie simulator, but if you're interested in the tactics of situations, the fights, you're not going to get much out of "roll a Skirmish check".
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Aug 18, 2022 11:01
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Honestly i'm not sure people were really giving a poo poo about Jace or Chandra or their planeswalker super-squad, but it is super transparent. It's more of a laugh to see those kinds of cards than seeing something horrible that was lost. In fact, i'll go so far as to say no one has ever really cared about MTG lore.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:38
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I think Jones could've won a defamation suit if he'd actually tried to conduct a defense, but yeah, he perjured himself at the damages part a lot, so who knows.
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Sep 11, 2022 12:16
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Gynovore posted:Honestly player housing in MMOs is one of those things games have just to say they have it. Unless it's a super RP game, no one ever goes to other people's houses, ever. Yeah it's a relic of people thinking of the 'world' aspect of them as the part people are in for. In reality, unless it's the only one, people have very particular sets of interests in what they want in a game and it's not conducive to trying to 'live' in one of these things.
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Sep 13, 2022 00:26
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Honestly, the basic assumption that when you're playing a hex and counter wargame that you need to get yourself hyped up to play one side or the other is kind of the flaw, to me in the argument. Playing, say, the Germans in an Ardennes wargame doesn't really require you to spend hours lovingly modeling and painting and reading the lore in Sepp Dietrich or Joachim Peiper(kudos to the guys who whacked him after the war). You play the position, the game as itself, as a game. Playing something like Last Blitzkrieg, you get to see the SS units, and there's definitely some decisions i might call questionable. For example, putting the panzer-battalions of the 12th SS as action rating 4 is somewhat strange to me for battalions where much of its crew went into battle having only taken one or two training shots. But it is pretty accurate that their infantry is on the level of the garbage tier FJ divisions(the german 'paratroopers' in december 1944 were mostly airfield service personnel dragooned into infantry and were the props for a crazy medal of honor moment for a US recon platoon). In Third Winter, a game about the Soviet offensive across Ukraine in 1943-44, the SS units are basically portrayed as fairly similar to their equivalents- they have the white text on black aesthetic on their counter but have fairly average ratings for panzer-divisions and infantry regiments in the German Army which makes sense. Generally speaking, I think the decently researched games do a pretty good job of individualizing units, even if i don't agree with all the decisions made.
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Nov 29, 2022 16:09
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neonchameleon posted:Couldn't you just give them low defensive stats and/or charge modifiers to make them good at what they actually were in real life. And if they try to dig in they are still using their defensive stats rather than trying to hit first so they take heavy losses? Although the broader point about wargamers valuing what wargamers value and it overlapping what the SS did is a good one. Yeah, that's the quandry of a tactical game- they're really usually battle construction kits which offer every side in varying levels of quality- see Advanced Squad Leader or Combat Commander, and they end up using a few generalities to flavor the different forces. In operational games, for example, Third Winter, the Waffen-SS units depicted are mostly quality formations- the Waffen-SS's units at that point in the war were either foreign legions or Panzer/Panzergrenadier divisions, and former varied wildly in quality, and for the period of 43-mid 44 at least, the latter were fairly consistently effective units. It's tough to talk in generalities for this reason. Stalingrad '42 has a lot of low-quality Soviet units, because, yeah, the Soviets were throwing a lot of stuff at the wall. Chuikov's 62nd army was grinding rifle brigades and divisions into paste holding a bridgehead in Stalingrad. The early counterstrokes often failed utterly because they were badly planned, and the early renewed tank corps just weren't very well balanced. I wouldn't call it playing into propaganda, so much as depicting a specific situation. They do get plenty of stuff to work with and can absolutely do Uranus, and the Axis have way too much to do in that game and not enough troops to do it. By the period of Third Winter (September 1943-April 1944), the Red army's armored formations in particular, have high action ratings and are quite capable. They have significantly improved over 1943.
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Nov 30, 2022 15:32
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Cessna posted:Absolutely. And even the "low number" SS Divisions were a shell of their former selves by the later years of the war. Yeah, so, LSSAH itself was actually a quality unit, even at the Bulge- it didn't have many veterans from 1940, but it got first-line replacements. However, every bit of the staff above the level was quite bad- the 6th (SS) panzer army was prone to remarkably bad staff work and executed its part in the offensive almost by rote from Hitler's operational direction which resulted in failure almost from the start. In fact, the rather infamous wandering journey of Peiper down various roads was very much a function of combat capability far outstripping any kind of staff work. One of the big challenges of modeling veteran units is in showing the Allies at Normandy- units with long histories and seemingly a lot of carryover often underperformed there, so it's difficult to rate them.
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Nov 30, 2022 16:18
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FMguru posted:RIP to classic wargame designer (turned academic and analyst) John Prados (1951-2022). Probably most famous for his influential 1974 classic for Avalon Hill, Third Reich. A game where they somewhat bucked the trend in color choices for chits and used white text on black counters for all German units, rather than the usual grey. Grey is used for the axis minor units.
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Dec 1, 2022 11:13
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Cessna posted:A whole string of wargames in the hex-and-counter days used a sort of "field-blue" color for German counters, notably Squad Leader and ASL: I think the "field-blue" kinda comes down to just the limitations of printing at the time. That color still gets used but for Luftwaffe stuff in games these days. Now you can use almost any color you want and everybody settled for feldgrau Germans, olive drab americans, khaki british, brown or sometimes khaki soviets, etc.
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Dec 1, 2022 18:35
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:strip_icc()/pic6521952.jpg) You can see how much better printing has gotten since then. The dark blue in this game Hungarian Rhapsody are Hungarian units.
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Dec 1, 2022 20:34
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Yeah, there's wargames of a lot of different complexity levels these days, it's really never been better in terms of how much gets published. There's stuff from Almoravid  to Empire of the Sun  Forgive the "strategic bombing" markers- they're marking the edge of the South Pacific scenario area. Which, by the way, is a really good way to learn EotS.
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Dec 4, 2022 12:24
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