TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

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Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Has Green Ronin released that timeline that explains everything yet?

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 02:47

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 18:57

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Plutonis posted:

I posted on the other thread that those dudes would try that sort of stuff. I warned ya!

Still not a case of a victim of abuse documenting their own experience, but good going at being really hung up about women being honest about being molested as a Great Fear

# ¿ Feb 24, 2018 06:39

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

They're not going to say it was a bullshit swipe or a real issue while they apply for another visa from the same government.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 01:52

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Having read the F&F as it you were doing it, seeing it compared to Spire really puts it into frank relief that the part that is compelling and interesting- the act of rebelling against a repressive regime- wasn't as important within Stigmata as being a retread of a Stranger Things suburban 80s wunderlend where you're more likely to run into a racist than a person of color.

"Write what you know", indeed.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2018 19:15

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Lemon-Lime posted:

This is completely meaningless unless WW are made to actually publicly decry those writers and apologise for hiring them and standing by them. Until that happens, this is just a PR guy making his company look good, and will have no detrimental effect on the careers of any of those people, because the same allegedly progressive bystanders who keep giving them the benefit of the doubt because "there's no proof" will continue to do that.

The problem I've been told, by people related to former freelancers and/or actively writing themselves, is that any degree of 'gently caress this guy in particular' from the company is an opening for litigation of slander/libel.

This doesn't mean that a pointed 'wish well on future endeavors' can't be done, but this is all rear end covering by people who want to keep being invited to parties hosted by people who wish the worst for Zak S anyway, so grains of salt and all that.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 09:22

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Ultimately an TRPG project for a company like Paradox is essentially a vanity project / IP farm, I'm not certain sales would be that big a deal as long as it least turns a profit. The thing is, I'd presume they were probably being tossed more money than most RPG companies would know what to do with - or, at least, the amount of publicity spending they were doing seemed to well exceed what they were actually releasing? I can't speak as an authority, but they were going around doing international flights to shows for years trying to hype folks up before they had even an inkling of a dead tree product to show off.

The first few months, before they even ran their premier blockbuster physically-accosted-from-behind send-your-headshot-to-be-cast LARP, was to license the IP & imagery rights to a slot machine; I imagine such an early windfall got them a lot of rope and budget.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 18:42

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

One of the most frustrating issues with forums is that even setting someone to ignore still requires a degree of extra scrolling, especially when the idiot will post quotably idiotic screeds and then pretend anyone who replies to say they find them painfully tiresome is "obsessed" or "carelording" about someone who is being a forum metaphorical incontinent hippo in a narrow hallway.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 07:00

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Its also an undeniable fact that Howard was big into the Aryan myth seeing as Conan was explicitly one, and the critique of "civilization" was really just that it allowed for black people to pretend to be as good as white men, which was why Howard was avowedly pro-lynching as a way for white people to sidestep the justice system to punish black men.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2018 07:11

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Speaking of RPG companies laying low to wait out the controversy of defending and providing targets for a sexually abusive writer:

Has Green Ronin released that timeline that explains everything yet?

# ¿ Feb 13, 2019 00:56

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

MonsterEnvy posted:

Even years back I explicitly stated that him not believing people about Zak S and telling him about his harassment accusations was wrong. My only constant has been that malice was not behind his decision then. As it does not fit with pretty much everything about his character.

After meeting the guy in person I became pretty certain it was an act of incompetence, not malice. He should apologize for not believing people about Zak.

You realize first that your personal interpretation of a man you claim to have a personal relationship with is not a strong defense against nor a nice statement about yourself for his remarkably lovely and toxic behavior acting in alliance with an abuser, and secondly that he will never ever apologize because it would mean, if he is honest, be he would be fired and completely dismissed from the status symbol that makes people give him the time of day?

# ¿ Feb 20, 2019 03:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Mearls 100% was working in concert and alliance with an abuser and went out of the way to break policy to defend him as stated by Wizards Social Management workers. He needs to be fired for making the game industry a worse place by purposefully working with and uplifting abusers.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2019 05:25

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

To the people that did skim, did he have a better refutation about him being accused of choking a woman without her consent than "she was dressed in a way that suggested she was into it"?

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 20:27

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Kurieg posted:

To his statement, they were out in public and he asked her if she liked to be choked, she said yes, and he immediately started choking her against a wall.

That absolutely doesn't make him sound like a reasonable person. Who snap chokes anyone on such a flimsy pretense?

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 20:54

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

FMguru posted:

Heh, look at this sad little prudish Tipper Gore wannabe.

Look, a boring vanilla square like you couldn't possibly understand, OK?

Sidebar the fact that I'm not 47 enough to know what a Tipper Gore reference is off-hand,

If Zak's immediate response to someone verbalizing an aspect of what they like doing intimately is to physically abuse them because he could possibly get away with it, that's a pretty clear signal that he is a violent and abusive predator, by his own admission!

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 22:31

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Hey, I'm pleasantly surprised that Dysopia Rising is being noticed for being comicly poo poo. Yes, they are a cult, in that they are a venal and craven for-profit scam wrapped up in LARP tropes 'inherited' from Fallout and White Wolf games and zombieworld Libertarians.

They had to pull back on demands of their staff because, well, labor laws.

They don't run out of America because that would threaten their Very Very Critical control over IP (Fallout).

They've had to start removing Slavery as an option because their players realized that slavery was objectively mechanically profitable.

They explicitly push the XP for money sceme to a degree that lootboxes look more humane.

The 'night attacks' elements is surface-level about being loving Intense and de facto about encouraging loving In Tents. Both rape and really skeevy sex-work adjacent scenarios are features, not bugs.

"Franchises" are only barely regulated and not at all secured, but getting a clearance to not have to sleep with one eye open for medical reasons is a Top Approval procedure.

Its a loving boffer larp with zombie rules and resurrection based on what racist stereotype you choose. Japanese Seppuku to prevent evil ghosts included.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2019 06:17

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Darwinism posted:

I'm not sure "but what if the convention suffers" is a great reason not to hold a supposedly women-friendly convention to task for their association with sex pests, like if ConTessa as a whole is willing to go down in flames instead of just... doing some basic good-faith poo poo, maybe we should break out the torches and help out

Speaking of companies that allegedly only signal and represent a wholesome and inclusive image in order to be more effective sexual abusers, has Green Ronin come out with a timeline yet, perhaps even one that defends them from the accusation that they were providing a known sex pest C A Suleiman an exclusive rolodex of new vulnerable female writers?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2019 00:32

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Y'all have to remember that suing some enemy in a different state and causing stress and monetary strain, even if the grifters and victims alike involved see only minor chances of the suit being upheld, is absolutely in line with the modern crypto-fash movement: The Cruelty Is The Point

# ¿ Apr 24, 2019 19:12

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Lets not ignore that he also was the Grand Interpreter Of The Old Values in that, oh so convienently, every single unbearable cruft of ancient D&D was also perfect for his Porn Star Game because they (as told to him) liked all of it exactly as Gygax intended.

The guy defended the old damage notation because Girls Are Bad At Math; he was always conciously pitching to the fanbase he gained.

# ¿ May 14, 2019 15:08

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

TheDiceMustRoll posted:

Gary "OD&D + houserules forever but please understand that true and proper roleplaying is whatever book Im shilling this week" Gygax?

What Gygax actually says and wants is not as important as affirming that which appealed to the 47-year-old never-moved-on-from-old-school-D&D fanbase was Always Good

# ¿ May 14, 2019 16:05

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Dawgstar posted:

Right. He was super into his whole The Second Inquisition and those results were absolutely not typical.

Pretty sure the only people into the Second Inquisition were the people who were passionately into the writing of Tom Clancy and also not against advocating for the CIA-supported fascist governments of South America

# ¿ May 15, 2019 18:34

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Cessna posted:

All this talk of Lou Zocchi and no one has mentioned the Zocchihedron?

I own two because I always have to loan out one. Doesn't work on all the Stolze games that are built around two d10 dice tricks but it more than makes up for the ability to count your roll immediately.

# ¿ May 21, 2019 19:02

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

LatwPIAT posted:

Which dice tricks don't work? Adding the digits together works, reversing the digit order works...

Physicality flopping the dice so that the red is on the other side of the blue forever and always is so significantly more satisfying that I exaggerated in saying that the other method of flopping the digits in your head while leaving the golf ball in place doesn't exist, mostly.

Warthur posted:

I dunno, in my experience most people find it really fiddly to figure out which number is actually on top of the Zocchihedron, plus the drat thing keeps rolling and rolling forever because it's basically a golf ball. I think for most people when you take into account rolling time and figuring time two D10s are a way faster way to do percentiles, especially if you have a "tens" die or a clear "blue is tens, red is units" system or whatever.

Perhaps my card-table is smaller, my eyesight better, the frustration of chasing down the second die and adjusting it to be next to the first is enough of a value-add, for me?

# ¿ May 21, 2019 19:29

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Cons are entirely low-key bacchanalias and as long as you brown-bag your drink and live in a reasonable doubt world the staff can get away with playing dumb.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2019 14:59

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I'd rather a game design around having two or three solid players and then a rotating cast of in-and-out mutual friends. I find that this is a similar enough problem that you can treat both issues- that not everyone wants to do the reading of the entire game textbook as if the table is a class- without trying to stretch out the anecdotal of a singular case into some universal issue.

The person that wants a class that doesn't require an immediate tactical success every round is looking for a system that doesn't treat each person's individual combat turn like a solo ship at sea. Lazylords and Voice-on-the-Mic tacticians and, at least when I played, a house-ruled combo Shadowrun Rigger/Decker that can both drive the car and do the hacking contributes without needing to be locked into what the person immediately before you did.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2019 15:55

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Jerik posted:

(One small example of the misinformation there: the book claimed that life violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is a sometime creationist talking point, but... isn't remotely true. Some of their other physics "facts" were even sillier.)

Let's be honest though, you have to be into deep postgrad to use entropy (the physics concept) correctly other than to flattly tell people that you can't make perpetual motion machines.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2019 20:06

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

You can add Kaladesh into Amonkhet into Ixalan as another data point of 'broken artifact set into weak parasitic set', but Amonkhet was fine if relatively uninspired mechanically (a sideways graveyard-cycle set with some No Untap mechanics), compared to Ix that had the shame of having it's one good mechanic stolen (monarch) and a really dumb proof-of-concept (can a 80% color pair supporting set work?).

One of the real lessons learned from was to go to the Big Block Every Quarter model, even more so than the return and now-evergreen nature of colored artifacts.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2019 19:16

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

GimpInBlack posted:

So, TL;DR, yeah, it definitely seems like around AD&D 1e a phylactery was meant to be a specific reference to tefillin, but somewhere around 2e, whether deliberately on the part of the writers or just by virtue of omitting the glossary, it seems to have been decoupled from its Jewish roots.

I wouldn't call it decoupled, as its still using the jargon of a Jewish faith-object to epitomize an evil pervision of death. Feels more like the 'Beaner is the name of people who live on the giant beanstalk' thing- the setting usage is still using a signifier that drags more subconscious references into it.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 15:52

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Jerik posted:

Basically a demi-lich is a lich so old it's collapsed to just dust and a skull. There's been some variation over the editions, and in 3E the demi-lich appeared in the Epic Level Handbook and was even more powerful than a regular lich, but as originally presented in Tomb of Horrors it was basically a cheesy trap monster. It couldn't actually hurt you in any way if you just ignored it, but if you attacked it you gave it power, and if you touched the skull it could start sucking out souls.

However, sometimes the skull gets bulbous up top,at which point you've got yourself a Hemi-Lich

this joke is old enough to vote Republican

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 18:00

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Belittling people's lived experience with controversial figures and then re-stating the question without the How part included doesn't count as an answer, pal

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 22:22

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Just to check, the Green Ronin Timeline (TM) still hasn't come out, has it?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 01:27

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I don't believe that a table-top game that has mechanics to execute the verb 'sexual assault' is actually doing good for anyone, irrespective of whatever semi-satirical point is being made.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2019 07:50

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I'm absolutely amazed that Zak's self-professed excuse, flimsy and specious as it is, no matter what exposes his ride-or-die ally Mearls as being actively complicit, completely in the wrong, and breaking all sorts of company policy.

It's like he can't lie without making it worse.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2019 04:31

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I have no problem with you believing that Super Mario World is part of a canon that will be copied into the future for the rest of your natural life and the generations beyond; but to say that an RPG product will be like that is a larger leap of faith because of a lack of Mascot IP value.

# ¿ May 9, 2020 22:53

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

To the chuds that engineered Ms. Monopoly, the confusion and lack of sense is the purpose. Having a purpose can be critiqued for its choices and logic; by avoiding interesting critique, you can sell to both sides by having one chunk of the memes packed within reach into the psyche of someone's rushed gift-giving relative.

# ¿ May 13, 2020 15:42

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

paradoxGentleman posted:

why are they doing that

For the same reason that Texas Hold Em television shows only focus on the 'top table': the expense to cover matches further and further out from the 'featured players' grows in a ratio like the surface of a sphere to radius. Its better for marketing to have a small group of stars to build a story, compared to selling a dream that a grinder nerds can see themselves as one of the 56 nameless shlubs of a top 64.

You offload the 'big' tourny scene to the secondary seller conglomerates who want to get as many eyes as possible on their bulk rare box.

# ¿ May 25, 2020 22:57

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

King of Solomon posted:

Setting aside DTAS for a second, why not just associate ability score bonuses with class and give races features instead (i.e. flight, fire breath, etc.)?

The whole purpose of Ability Scores is to permit for a bio-essentialist read of the game; A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court doesn't give the same power fantasy charge if it turns out that everything depends on your experience of being a knight hunting for the Grail.

Strip the second-order work and just make the math a single step.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 21:05

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Ferrinus posted:

In D&D and various D&D clones, "daily" is basically the "this is important" currency. If something is such a big deal that it'd be ridiculous if you could do it whenever you wanted, it's tied to a daily resource.

In other games, this obviously isn't true. Practically nothing is daily in Exalted... but a lot of stuff costs motes, willpower, or both. To signify that your character is trying really hard, you don't spend your dailies, but you do spend a crapload of motes, far more than you'll passively regenerate. So, the Exalted equivalent of the "no dailies" fighter that every single modern D&D clone features would be, like, combat Charms all exclusively have persistent passive effects and never constitute special moves or bursts of effort. No "spend 3m to reroll 1s on this melee attack", just, I don't know, "reroll the first [Essence] 1s you get on the first die of every melee attack you ever make from here on", forever. Quite possibly you could stack a bunch of these things together to make a character as or more powerful than a real Dawn would be... but there's something missing here. Other people are engaging with the game world in a way you can't. They get peaks and valleys, and you just get a plane.

My favorite games tend to be White Wolf fistful of d10s stuff, so I always conceive of this stuff in terms of vampires that don't spend blood, mages that don't risk paradox, etc. Can you balance it? Probably, but that's not the issue.

It should be noted that Daily powers in D&D aren't just the player signalling to the table that they really care about the action in a passive social allowance way, it is systematically built-in for the player to burst in and describe the world, a full seizure of narrative control.

As like in the olden days when the son-of-Gary would use his detailed grid-map to effectively teleport the group around the dungeon level and discover secret doors that were otherwise impossible to find, the system is built to have narrative control taken at intervals; the spellcaster interrupts the stream of room description (orcs guarding pies included) to tell everyone that the room is now full of mystic fire, or that they are contacting an NPC from months ago, or that for the rest of the evening the rogue will fly.

In 4E, the same narrative control was given to a fighter, Come-And-Get-It, and the direct seizure of narrative was seen as so untoward and unacceptable that ENWorld had its own silo'd threads for extended bitching.

Again, does anything about the routes that a fighter seizes narrative control make any more or less sense than HP or Initiative? No.
But on a very real "what is your system about" level, the martial player is not allowed to join the ranks of the system controllers.
And in a very real TG industry way, the game-buying community is very clearly able to understand the true issue and maneuver themselves against it, despite never actually saying the truth that they want to limit narrative control systems to an elect group.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2022 14:46

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

I mean unless they changed the dates on their hotel and flight they might just be avoiding the convention and enjoying all the other sites to see in *reads from card* Columbus, Ohio

# ¿ Jun 9, 2022 20:38

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

Commercialization of your hobby would be pro-DMing / AP with ads, not buying a character portrait that only you and three-six friends will ever see and care about.

Just like buying a decal to add to your skateboard and running a skateboard rental service are very different, and as such using the same term for both is very silly.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2022 21:45

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 18:57

Gerund: Sep 12, 2007; He push a man

^e: wait is your entire thing just about publishing an RPG book? is this the thing you're actually mad about?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

How is "exchanging money for goods and services" not commercializing the experience of getting a character portrait?

hey bud you literally said this, you're very silly because this means buying a decal for my skateboard is also commercialization, as you quoted me and suggested I was being 100% right but not actually contending what you said

Gerund fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Jun 16, 2022

# ¿ Jun 16, 2022 21:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

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