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neonchameleon posted:One place Babylon 5 was surprisingly progressive was on sexuality. It had a lesbian relationship (until one of the actresses asked to leave the show), and when two guys who didn't get along went undercover as a gay married couple the joke was in how they bickered so much that it was believable with the fact they were the same gender being treated as no big deal (and I don't recall any comments being made about the genders of the couple at all). Also, an original element of the planned plot was to have a trans-alien. Would have started as a male alien and would have been transformed into a female alien-human hybrid who would subsequently romance and marry another main character. They couldn't manage to get the make-up and voice processing to work for the actress cast in the role and thus abandoned the idea of the gender change. The show's more mixed on race, certainly, as it suffers from the "we explore race through aliens" phenomenon which was arguably necessary in the 60s and was arguably less necessary in the 90s. And the tendency to do monocultures in sci-fi is certainly on display. All I can say is that the one Black actor in a main role said he appreciated getting to play a doctor and not a Black doctor; for as far ahead of its time as the show was on things like pandemics, it wasn't especially interested in exploring racial prejudice within humanity. Politically, the show's a bit of a mish-mash, because most of the main characters are "connected" and the main human characters are all military or militarized. There's not much exploration of the downtrodden, aside from the telepath subplot spanning the whole show and unresolved on screen. But the show pushes back strongly against the "post-capitalism" narrative in Star Trek, and is pretty strongly anti-billionaire even if it never quite gets around to having one of the underclass as a character of interest. It's also very interested in establishing that institutions are a good thing so long as they are operated by good people. That includes institutions like the government, the military, the police. Zooming back out, it is interesting that much of sci-fi that concerns itself with race issues (between aliens and humans) is explicitly trying to establish some kind of parallel between those issues and issues within humanity, while most of the rest is concerned with extremely alien aliens and not addressing these issues at all. Meanwhile, fantasy tends to sustain racial difference as a threat or problem in order to justify acts of violence on both sides. I get the sense that Frosthaven is going to try to take up that issue by allowing you to ally with or fight the indigenous peoples, but as I increasingly start wondering about how to run a TTRPG without making combat necessary, I think about how the assumptions about violence as the best solution to a problem might feed back into aspects of our own lives.
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Aug 25, 2021 20:05
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Venture capitalists buy up Hasbro and we get the Monopoly-Magic crossover of nobody's dreams.
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Nov 19, 2022 19:33
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dwarf74 posted:The New Yorker did a profile of Isaac Childres, the dude behind all the Gloomhavens. It's wild to see their style applied to this niche and nerdy hobby. The introduction and subsequent constant references to BGG rankings is certainly a choice. My reaction by the end of the article was that nobody has ever told this writer that the clever thing he thinks he's doing isn't.
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Nov 28, 2022 19:06
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King of Solomon posted:She posted another thread with some speculation about why this happened: CR thread has multiple posts on this suggesting Tess Fowler is not a good source for this information. I wasn’t around for the drama discussed there when it happened, but I’d say wait until more people come forward before making any assumptions about CR. (For that matter “the company for CR” isn’t just one company.) Thread discussion starts here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3982508&pagenumber=151#post528068913
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Nov 30, 2022 00:54
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Mors Rattus posted:Things have come out before - this isn’t even the first time with Tess Fowler. There’s a reason she asked them not to use any of her art. Like, are you thinking she mocked up the legal did she was sent and is lying about this? Has anyone asserted that she falsified the NDA? Based on a Nuggan post in the CR thread, here’s a plausible scenario: 1. Crit Roll puts together art books, including some Tess Fowler art. She starts putting “official CR art” on all her stuff. CR tells her she can’t, and she pulls all her art. 2. Time passes. CR develops business arms which now handle publications and the like. 3. Derrington Press decides to reprint some of the older stuff. Some intern is put in charge of communicating to contributors and setting everything up for the release. They know nothing about the individual artists or the past history. The contact info for contributors still includes Tess Fowler. (It is possible she was removed from one spreadsheet and not another, meaning that she didn’t get previous e-mail.) 4. Intern shares out the NDA to everyone on the list. Fowler receives NDA out of the blue despite having previously terminated her business relationship with CR. 5. Fowler communicates with intern, who has no idea of the last history, with a “WTF” and intern responds “If you want to get paid, you have to sign the NDA.” She interprets this as a bribe for her silence and tweets accordingly. I suppose CR could be just as abusive as Satine Phoenix to their collaborators, but I’m having trouble seeing a misunderstanding as a clear pattern of abuse. And I don’t see how this explanation constitues awful or aggressive pushback against negativity, though I’ve no doubt toxic Twitter fans are taking care of that at this very moment. I linked to the CR thread discussion because it includes some accusations about Tess Fowler’s own behavior and I’m in no position to assess the truth of them, but this can just be a reasonable misunderstanding that blew up because of the past bad-blood between her and CR in the past, without anybody being av villain. Narsham fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 30, 2022 16:06
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Magnetic North posted:Maybe it's because D&D is old enough that each individual shithead feels like just a blip, even if a consumer wasn't personally around for all that history? Not making excuses, just trying to imagine why it might be different for some brands as opposed to others. I am guessing that, for some of us, it is age coupled with awareness. I started reading Tolkien young. My parents bought me the basic D&D box when I was 7. I think I was 9 when I bought into AD&D 1E, and probably 10 or 11 when the D1-3 series introduced the Drow in detail. To use modern parlance, I did find them a bit sus racially, but I'd not learned about a lot of the cultural history behind this sort of depiction. And frankly, at that age it was very easy to get distracted by the drawings of mostly or entirely naked women, and also very easy to miss all of the sexual dynamics and stereotyping going on there, too (right down to the "in the tradition of Conan" excuses for such art). High school was 2E, and 3E didn't hit until grad school. The people I gamed with upgraded to 2E, so I went with them. By 3E I was GM'ing and had some say, but while I was somewhat more cognizant of the problems with Gygax and the earlier editions, he was out and 3E is much more aware of the problematic cheesecake art, racist depictions, and so on. You also have to factor in that I bought a lot of modules in 1E, very few in 2E, and none by the time of 3E. When you're just purchasing the base rules and applying everything else based on your own 10+ developed game world, you don't run into the problematic aspects of the official material as often. I'm not sure I even bothered reading the fluff on most 3E monsters; orcs were well established in my setting, ranging from scattered "old school" tribes to a Soviet-like high-tech empire that was in an uneasy Cold War with another nation to an oppressed group of orcs living in a forest in an elven nation that had more in common with the fey and the wood elves than the MM orc descriptions. The last factor I suspect people are forgetting is that information wasn't always Internet-easy to come by. When 2E was around, you were maybe using AOL or Prodigy (I was on AOL but wasn't in a TTRPG forum there). I'd say 3E was the first time that you could start easily finding consumer information, instead of having to rely on word of mouth. If you only ever gamed within your geek social circle and nobody went to conventions or was active online, you'd never come across anything, much less something like the OP information in this thread. For that matter, I was actively online starting with 3E and was reading these very forums in the 00s (not as a member, initially), but I wasn't reading the TG forum. I only learned about all the problematic Mearls stuff in the late 20-teens, well after 5E had been released. My PHB has the Zak S. credit, but I'd never heard of Zak S, and for that matter hadn't read the credits anyway, so why in the world would that mean anything? And do I halt 5E purchasing now because of the past? WotC has a spotty diversity record at best, but their hiring practices have improved and something like Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a step forward. I can imagine my dollars going toward the legal team suing "TSR" and not towards ham-fisted edits that make mini-adventures more racist.
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Dec 1, 2022 18:22
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joylessdivision posted:He'd write the best, the hugest RPGS. Game store owners coming up to him with tears in their eyes saying "Sir, Thank you for saving rpgs" "It is an oddity in the new Trump-written Castle guide that while constructing keeps and moats can be very expensive, walls are essentially free because Mexico pays for them."
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Dec 8, 2022 20:00
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Kai Tave posted:e; I think people are being more skeptical about the possibility of WotC achieving this stuff than it deserves, to be honest. It's one thing to think the odds of the upcoming D&D movie generating MCU levels of hype are unlikely, but WotC wanting to find ways to extract monthly transactions from their ride-or-die consumer base is, from a pure soulless money-extracting perspective, not just their next logical step but one I think a lot of people would be perfectly happy to do. Microtransactions and monthly fees aren't on the same level of pie-in-the-sky speculative bullshit as something like, idk, NFTs were, that pump has been well and truly primed by now, and for every person who says they'll just go off the elfgame grid and play D&D for free using the books they already own, I don't have trouble believing that there are more people who would pony up a Discord Nitro-esque payment every month to use the branded D&D virtual tabletop and get access to special emotes or something, and that's just the most basic level of what they're probably hoping for. In theory, 4E already had a subscription-based digital platform that was making money. But even setting aside the unique problems with the 4E digital tools development process, I think it is a massive mistake for the executives to assume that somehow all the technical problems can be resolved cheaply as if turning D&D into a digital platform for online gaming is basically the same as developing a single CRPG. Assuming One is developed alongside digital tools, Hasbro will either have to delay the rules release for 2-3 years because the digital development will take much longer and has to be accurate to the in-print rules, or release hard-copy and tell everyone to wait on the digital platform (which didn't work out so well in 4E), or spend massive amounts of money to rush the digital development, because rushing and then firing most of the people who developed your digital platform always works out without any hitches. Any Hasbro exec who believes that acquiring D&D Beyond means that it will be quick and easy to leverage the existing platform for anything beyond record keeping and providing digital access to rules knows as little about computing as they do about RPGs. All that sweet MMORPG money takes a lot of time, investment, and hard work to start earning, and even more to maintain or grow.
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Dec 10, 2022 20:02
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The biggest problem with a VTT is who is actually making all the decisions. The CEO-level people are on record as not caring about the system much: they want to monetize. If they call all the shots, we'd end up on the NFT side of the spectrum, most likely, assuming their expectations aren't so unrealistic that the project never gets completed. But at the design end of things, you need a single vision and not a bottom-up development process. For example: We know the VTT will be 3D. What are they going to do with spell effects? I'm expecting miniatures that can be recolored but not otherwise customized, so they can sell "high elf with crossbow" and "high elf with two short swords" as separate items. If we're going harder on the VTT versus rules-enforcing, will Hasbro be happy with miniatures and 3D terrain but simple box-drawing for spell effects? Imagine the digital artist making up the Wall of Fire 3D art. You'll end up with a ring and a wall. Will it be animated? Will it give off light? I can't imagine any digital artist coming up with the static Wall of Fire and not pushing for an animation instead. But if that gets in, do you end up with static PC and NPC miniatures in static environments but with animated spell effects? Does that push things toward animating everything? What about light effects? The digital artist is probably going to think an animated Wall of Fire ought to be a light source, but RAW, a Wall of Fire is not a light source. If they don't model light/darkness effects at all, then it won't matter, but that's a distinctive option in Roll 20, so there will be pressure to implement some form of light and LoS in the D&D VTT. If you do, though, you're probably getting behind-the-shoulder environments instead of isometric 3D, or you're increasing the load on graphics cards and the expense of development. And that's just one little choice. If you animate Wall of Fire, you'd want to animate Evard's Black Tentacles. But how do you do that? Have the tentacles clip through the PC figures? If someone fails a save and gets restrained, do you animate a tentacle actually wrapping around them? If the tentacles flail around, doesn't that make it harder to see the precise edges of the spell effect? If you're having to hover over the effect to see where it actually is, your nifty and flashy graphics have actually made it less easy to play the game on your VTT. And again, that's a decision related to a single spell and a single spell animation. The far broader questions involve the level of automation, ranging from a "full rules enforcement" VTT which loses you the subset of homebrewers, to a "no rules enforced" approach that echoes back along all your implementation decisions. If the VTT doesn't enforce rules, do you still want a player to be able to click on the Wall of Fire spell in their PC sheet and then drop the graphic effect on the map? Because either the effect observes the existing spell rules on shape and size, or you can "free draw" a Wall of Fire, which is great for a subset of homebrewers and a source of error for those playing RAW. 3D complicates matters already, but I predict a strong temptation to design the VTT as locked to One D&D only, with Hasbro uninterested in building a VTT that allows their competitors' products to be played. The odds of Hasbro getting and keeping a good project manager for the full period of development are low, IMO. But even if that happens, it's likely most of the development team will be released once the VTT is up and running, meaning that even if a consistent design policy was in place concerning, say, animation, that decision will constantly be revisited over the life of the platform. Even if you dodge the most likely problems and complications, Hasbro will want continued product for sale. If they hire a team to convert an upcoming module to the VTT for sale, will that team operate under the auspices of the original project manager, or their own management? All it takes is one team deciding to change the VTT policy to open up a can of worms. In a CRPG, the game designers make the decision, create and set the rules, and that's how everything is. They might allow for certain kinds of customization, but their vision is what holds. A VTT has to be much more flexible, but you can't design one without making some of the decisions, and the flashier and more feature-filled you make the platform, the more decisions are getting made. The existing D&D Beyond platform is going to push towards user-created options within a more established framework, but more to the point, its monetary structure demands a set framework. If you allow any user to import a spreadsheet file for classes, powers, and spells, how do you ensure that somebody doesn't create a freely available spreadsheet that duplicates the books you want to sell to players? Conversely, if players are locked into RAW classes, feats, and so forth gated in the ways D&D Beyond already gates them, you're already turning off the homebrewers and encouraging the rest of the VTT to be more directive and less DM-adaptable. D&D Beyond could walk the fine line more easily because, while they were making money off the sale of D&D resources on the site, they weren't producing those resources nor were they primarily focused on monetizing them. But the existing user-base is already accustomed to the ways in which they can add custom magic items (for example), and taking away options will turn them off the VTT.
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Dec 11, 2022 20:10
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Xelkelvos posted:It definitely feels like people are assuming that this VTT will have AAA design on it with every bell and whistle to attract people when all they really want is TTS but not janky and with a clean and user friendly UI. Do I understand you correctly that you're suggesting the VTT Hasbro/WotC will produce is going to be produced with the intent of what "people" want? If "people" means the Hasbro and WotC executives, maybe. I bet we're lucky if "people" means the D&D development team, and that means Crawford would be in the lead. Dexo, are you posting materials from the promotional stuff? Is there an announced team or project manager for the VTT? If not, then it's too soon to assume anything. But the combination of executives who don't care about the game system itself, know very little programming, and have dollar-signs in their eyes doesn't bode well for a simple and practical result. Absent a project manager who can run interference for the team and maintain a clear vision, we could be in for anything from an overproduced interface to having to purchase miniatures in booster packs.
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Dec 15, 2022 01:17
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Besides licensing access to the platform, selling custom dice (which I suppose means 3d dice rolled on the table and not in a chat sidebar), and selling miniatures and terrain features, how else can a simple VTT get monetized? Magic was already a well-tuned loot-box before that sort of thing existed virtually; if Arena is pulling in the big bucks, what can be done with the VTT to make it even close to those levels of profit?
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Dec 17, 2022 16:03
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Ultiville posted:People do buy them as blind bags, though not at a super rapid rate. I sell 1-2 bricks of them a month or so at my small store. Generally folks want them because they like the figures and don’t mind what they get, or because they like the gambling aspect (that we should really regulate but these aren’t even the worst offender in tabletop for that). I still vividly recall being a teenager, opening my third MtG booster pack, and thinking “the satisfaction of this physical act must be just like pulling the lever on a slot machine.” Those boxes don’t look as satisfying to open.
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Dec 19, 2022 16:23
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Deptfordx posted:Yeah 5 games and 15 people suggests mobile shovelware to me as well. Story names two independent game developers who were affected; the 15 people were WotC employees. “At least” five projects were canceled.
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Jan 4, 2023 15:32
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Comstar posted:There are so many people defending Hasbro right now - It's fake! It's not the full license! It's not possible! It won't apply to the thing/product/company I like! I didn't engage before with this conversation, but thought about it not because "Hasbro good" but because this is an example of the worst of the Internet toxic rumor mill. All we have are rumors and the actual document is supposed to be released soon. Spending this much time discussing information that may or may not be accurate does have one point, I suppose. If the leak had been internal, I'd expect that someone at WotC is unhappy with the revised license and leaked it to create so much buzz against it that Hasbro might withdraw and reconsider. But if we are to believe the reports, it was a non-WotC partner (like Kickstarter, though probably not Kickstarter as they seem happy with their favored status under the new rules) who leaked, assuming the leak is accurate. A WotC source would provide the genuine document because their purpose is to create pressure to change it before it becomes official. Releasing a false document would accomplish nothing for such a person. For that matter, a "trial balloon" leak might be a case of a "not authorized" move on WotC's part. A non-WotC source might have reason to tamper with the document, and it's impossible to assess their motivation. It could be simple maliciousness. There's plenty of that in the industry. Ultimately, we don't know what's happening next, we know it will happen soon, and we know what sharp questions Hasbro needs to answer once they release the new license. Parsing the legality of a leaked or faked document which has no legal standing whatsoever seems fairly pointless to me, but I guess a lot of people on the Internet find this sort of thing fun. There's not a lot of room for constructive conversation, hating Hasbro or liking it is a related but different conversation, and like many Internet things this seems like an excuse for abusive behavior, toxicity, and aggression over something we can genuinely get upset about next week, maybe. Discussions in these forums tend to be less awful than elsewhere, but I can find the current conversation irritating without being a Hasbro fanboy. I have no doubt we'll all soon have something to be justifiably angry about and I don't understand the rush.
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Jan 6, 2023 21:37
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Megazver posted:And that's the fanbase. The topic is currently banned on /r/criticalrole, but based on the adjacent discussion the more engaged portion of their fanbase does seem to slowly turning against WOTC at the moment. The WOTC money must be quite nice, but if CR has to choose between the whole community thinking continuing to associate with WOTC is unethical and WOTC money, I think they'll go with appeasing the fanbase. quote:As many of you are likely already aware, earlier today a new report was released regarding the content of the new Open Gaming License (OGL) for D&D. In brief, the OGL is what allows third-party content creators to legally publish homebrew content for D&D, including material such as the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn. There is a significant amount of controversy regarding the content of the new OGL and apparent efforts from Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast to de-authorize/override the existing OGL with this new version. This may be problematic for future CR D&D content, but it is unclear what immediate impacts it would have on existing content like the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn (if any). That seems pretty measured and it directs people who care toward other discussions of the topic. The really big problem for WotC is that all their efforts seem directed towards grabbing ahold of the VTT market and monetizing it as much as they can. There’s going to be considerable overlap between that playerbase and the current online ecosphere that’s the focus of the current controversy over the license. Maybe they turn that around by packaging the VTT into the One rules, but my guess is they’re going to be forced to back off license revisions. The concern remains that the execs who pushed this idea through decide to ride this all out instead of backing down. If it was indeed just the WotC execs, Hasbro execs might be noticing all the buzz and asking some pointed questions. If there’s someone ITT who likes doing this sort of thing, check the WotC executive staff in six to eight months and see if anyone has “left” and we’ll be able to guess at the fallout. My guess is we’ll see their fallback position as a “One will work more like 4E” position (so revised OGL for One content) while stating that 3E and 5E will remain as they were. If they’re smart, they’ll strip out most of the restrictive language but keep the stuff about software/online platforms, but IANAL and I don’t know if “screw competing VTTs” can be worded properly without impinging on “selling OGL content online”, much less whether restricting VTT usage of One has any real effect if One is mostly a reskinned 5E.
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Jan 9, 2023 16:30
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Finster Dexter posted:What a crazy time we live in. So how many new Pathfinders is that in the last 48 hours? New OGL going pretty well for WotC. I doubt this was the original intention, but if we assume that getting VTT supremacy alongside One is the main objective, this situation might help WotC with that narrow objective. D&D Beyond will have a D&D-based VTT. They can focus on D&D-centric features, from integration with character sheets to D&D-specific condition markers to (possible) extra-fancy effects you can purchase. The other VTTs are faced with three foundational questions: 1. Can we afford to support one or two RPG systems exclusively? Maybe, but probably not. 2. Do we risk supporting WotC systems or just leave that to “user content”? If new OGL does happen, maybe you pull back on support, but that means losing market share for those D&D players. You’d need to make it up for others. 3. If we’re supporting lots of systems, how generic is our interface? The answer is “pretty generic”. So D&D Beyond VTT can have specific and targeted features and a very clear market. Meanwhile, the non-D&D market shifts away from third-party D&D material to a bunch of individial systems. Any VTT not supporting D&D has to try to serve most of those others. The more they diverge from the basic model, the harder it is to implement and maintain a VTT with any level of convenience beyond tokens, dice rolling, a chat, and a map. Take Roll20’s condition graphics which you can mark tokens with. In the D&D campaign I’m playing on Roll20, the GM frequently has to halt and work out which condition is closest to “charmed” or “slowed” and even “prone” because they’re such generic graphics. Now, a closed RPG ecology for One coupled with an open ecology for other systems is probably unhealthy for One over the long-term as a system. But between D&D’s market share and the desire of present executives to monetize via VTT, this closed ecology is good for them for a few years, and I’d wager neither of the new top execs at WotC plan on being in those positions 5-10 years doen the line. They’ll get bonuses based on VTT revenue through Beyond, then move to new positions at Microsoft or whatever and stick their successors with the problems their short-sighted approach creates. If D&D loses market share but increases profitability, Hasbro will be happy. Driving deeper wedges, getting D&D “brand identity” and cultivating whales who sink thousands of dollars into VTT features and cosmetics might be a goal. If your print products are coming out slowly, but you’re selling new character portraits and miniatures for the VTT on a weekly basis, your revenue goes up, and probably much faster than costs. Edit: There’s a decent chance that in the mid-run, assuming WotC’s VTT happens at all, we end up with their slick VTT aimed at the equivalent of the AAA video-game market, versus other VTTs running the equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. It isn’t that Dwarf Fortress isn’t good, it’s that it demands you bring a lot more to the table. Will casual gamers plus the D&D hardcore be enough to sustain the possible loss of some hardcore gamers who drop D&D? Narsham fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 19:20
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The Bee posted:Nothing short of a public cancellation and apology will be, tbh. And even that may well be too little, too late. If that is the case (and it may be, now), then I expect no apology and they will go through with the updated OGL. Whatever the anonymous employee believes (and their post reads like a D&D Beyond employee, not a WotC employee), there's an extremely narrow band between "this isn't bad enough that we need to do anything but ride it out" and "this is bad enough that we're taking the hit no matter what we do, so we may as well proceed as backing off and apologizing won't make a meaningful different." And nobody is in a position to guess where that dividing line will be. Absent some strong voices in a meeting to arrive at a decision, the WotC execs will proceed. If it looks like the plan will be an ongoing disaster, they jump ship to another corporation. The odds that their careers will be ruined by mishandling the situation are so close to zero that it won't be a factor in their process. Unless multiple people in the room push very hard for a big revision to the OGL, this will get spun as "a vocal minority on the Internet tried to stop our plan, and while *numbers* will go down for a while, we project that revenues will not be substantially hurt once the VTT goes live." Then they wait for a year or two and if things are looking bad for One or the VTT they can jump ship before the launch and their replacements will get blamed for the failure. So long as the execs need to please their superiors and "shareholders," and not their customers, there's no incentive for them to change their current attitude towards us. More to the point, we the Internet have even worse access to numbers than the execs do. How many Beyond subs got cancelled? How many will it take before the execs care? We have no idea. Will this hurt the D&D brand more than 4E's going off the OGL did? More than the glut of products during 3.5 or 2E? All they have to do is argue that it won't, with a side order of "we can't let a few Internet fanatics control our corporate decision making" and they'll have all the cover they need to proceed. At best, we collectively might provide ammunition for someone inside who wants to reverse this decision, but such a person would first need to exist. Leperflesh posted:Yeah the leaked draft 1.1 has explanatory language (which is weird) saying their "intent" is that since people might publish something similar to what they were already going to publish, they need to have it in the license that they can always publish anything that is a copy of what you published. This is all about the VTT, right? So this is a VTT-focused change. They don't care about 3rd party publishes adventure X. They care about their VTT graphics and assets. They have complete access to everything that every user posts there, and they're worried that this massively increases their exposure. "We didn't open the e-mail/letter and so there's no proof we ripped off the idea inside" is radically different from "yes, we can see every piece of data on the VTT, but we swear we didn't actually look."
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Jan 13, 2023 01:56
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sebmojo posted:https://arkenforge.com/what-does-ogl-v1-1-mean-for-vtts/ Don’t sleep on this link, thread. This is why Paizo will spend what it takes to fight if and when the new OGL goes up: it is an existential threat to both their web store and their ability to have their products involved in any VTT. This isn’t just going to establish D&D Beyond as an enclosed space with exclusive access to One content and adventures, it allows WotC to send takedown notices to other VTTs which have any OGL content, unless they have a separate agreement. And for the ones that do, I sure hope they are perpetual and irrevocable, or expect WotC to cancel them at the first opportunity once their own VTT is up. The hilarious thing to me is that there’s no system yet to build a VTT for and WotC has a miserable record with this sort of thing, both with the 3E “character builder” software packaged with the PHB, and the 4E debacles. They may have planned such an early OGL update so the lawsuits would be resolved before their VTT goes live.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:56
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quote:What it will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds. No insight check required: if this thought never crossed their minds when reading that provision, that's WORSE than if it was deliberate. Although it does explain some of the issues with the way the 5E rules are written. quote:Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that. We want to always delight fans and create experiences together that everyone loves. We realize we did not do that this time and we are sorry for that. Our goal was to get exactly the type of feedback on which provisions worked and which did not–which we ultimately got from you. Any change this major could only have been done well if we were willing to take that feedback, no matter how it was provided–so we are. Thank you for caring enough to let us know what works and what doesn’t, what you need and what scares you. Without knowing that, we can’t do our part to make the new OGL match our principles. Finally, we’d appreciate the chance to make this right. We love D&D’s devoted players and the creators who take them on so many incredible adventures. We won’t let you down. The opening part here is BS: the drafts were distributed to partners who would be affected and the "feedback" process led to things like Kickstarter negotiating a royalty discount for people using their service. They were on record as going to release the official OGL 1.1 last week. If they wanted "to solicit the input" of their community, they'd have left more than zero days after a draft release to get feedback. And we know this to be false because the leaked draft specifies the date on which it becomes effective. You leave a month if you want draft feedback, not a weekend. So yes, the response is self-serving and has some insincerity and some obvious revisionism. No way to tell until a new OGL gets released (for feedback?) whether the changes will actually accomplish what the broader community wanted. But from an executive standpoint, this is much better than I expected and suggests that we're going to get something small and incremental. The Bee posted:There are definitely parts of this statement I don't care for. They immediately jump into buzzwords to try and position the OGL as a misguided attempt at fighting negative imagery ("we did this to fight the nazis and the NFTs and the megacorps!"). They call this an early draft when it sounds like it was further along the process. They throw in some twee joke about Nat 1s to seem #relatable. And by specifying existing 1.0 content won't be impacted, it seems clear that they have no intentions of the old license sticking around. Some of these complaints are fair, but only some. The "fighting negative imagery" thing is real; WotC is spending real money fighting the "TSR" "Star Frontiers" game, for example. That's as much about protecting the brand as it is genuine concern for social issues, as you can tell by their mixed performance on their own products, but it's a corporation, so of course the motives are self-serving. That doesn't mean it isn't genuine. Obviously this wasn't a draft, it was ready to go. And obviously they don't want the existing OGL to apply to One, regardless of how this plays out; if they did, the apology would have said "we won't be making any changes" or "we're making the original license irrevocable." We'll see how things end up worded, and it obviously doesn't matter now what they do in relation to the original OGL, because this sent a signal no 3rd party can ignore. I completely disagree when it comes to your interpretation of the Nat 1 joke. The wording and language in this release has WotC management buzzwords, but not executive buzzwords. In other words, this language sounds like something Crawford or Perkins would use when in their "brand manager" position. Whoever wrote this is trying to signal us that the balance of power has shifted a bit away from the new executives and back towards the experienced team. There's some hope present there, though obviously mitigated by your opinion of Crawford and Perkins. The RPG community that forced this change is still somewhat insular and there's millions of D&D players who've heard nothing about any of this. Don't think that WotC couldn't have just bulled their way through with a side of "sunk cost fallacy" to release the original document. This appears to be a meaningful concession, and if it's not being made entirely in good faith, it's still so dramatically better than the document we were going to receive that there's some clear commitment on the part of the person or people who wrote it to values we prefer to the values of the people who were speaking through the OGL revision. It's a step. We'll see what the next steps look like.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:28
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Roadie posted:The "TSR" grifters have nothing to do with the OGL, though. I am objecting to the specific objection that WotC is just using diversity and inclusion as a shield while having zero commitment to those values. They do have some commitment. Some people don't like that and will happily attack the corporation for being "insincere" in the hopes that they'll quit even paying lip-service to diversity, much less changing the game or spending money promoting it. Confusing the issue or treating WotC as if they are already doing nothing actually assists the people who wish they were doing nothing. A company that didn't care about diversity or inclusion, and there's plenty still out there, especially in the TG industry, would never have even made the attempt to invoke it. Fighting for diversity isn't like D&D combat: if you make enough successful attacks, you might not have defeated the enemy yet, but you have made its actions less effective. Gao posted:I'm watching The Rules Lawyer read and comment on this document, and he pointed out that "VTT-uses" could easily mean something like you streaming yourself playing a game on Foundry, as that's use of a VTT. This doesn't necessarily mean they're allowing you to make a commercial VTT with OGL content. Note that the other things in that sentence are things fans do with their content. I feel like we need to see the actual OGL document before really believing WotC meaningfully backtracked on anything. Very true. But as I've suggested already, WotC could have just brazened the situation out. Maybe the execs believe they can make small changes to the OGL they were going to publish, wait a few months, and then publish without complaint, but if the blowback was enough to halt the original release then a similar blowback is going to be as bad or worse for them. Screw this up a second time and the Hasbro senior VPs may start smelling blood in the water. I suspect they'll try to keep a few key items--in particular, protecting their as-yet undeveloped VTT from competition and trying to undercut the number of third-party developers pulling in millions from the RPG community for a D&D-derivative product--but it's unclear yet how many concessions they plan to make. I'd wager they'll give a lot of ground on in-print products, especially given the higher bar to get something into print, while trying to hold the line on "born digital" works. As there's no way they can allow the 1.0a license to stand if they want to do that, they are going to have to either revoke it effective a given date for all products released subsequent to that date, or they're going to have to release One as a non-OGL product. I'd think the latter course of action would be more reasonable at this stage, but we'll see.
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Jan 14, 2023 21:34
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Dexo posted:I mean, you don't need to be an ally or bastion of civility to come to the conclusion that having hate speech tied to your game is bad. I think the change in the fanbase is one of the contexts for this subset of the conversation that not everyone has the same understanding of. I started TT games in the early 80s, when I was still in the single-digit in age. Pretty much nobody my age was playing SPI or Avalon Hill games, though I did eventually get a few people to try D&D. My mom tried one time to take me to the gaming club at the local community college, which was college students and middle-aged men. No diversity in the group at all, unless you allow for several of the older men who were open carrying and wearing camo or motorcycle jackets with swastikas. I was uncomfortable, they weren't much interested in including a kid, and my main memory is of getting into an argument with someone over the stupidity of the maximum Str score for humans being differentiated by sex. I believe my argument was that if it is a fantasy game, why couldn't a woman's strength score be as extraordinary as a man's? Fast-forward ten years and one cross-country move. The first game I started running had a mother and her son and daughter as three of the players, as well as a man with a serious stutter who was simply accepted. But at the same time, I'm playing in another game and one of the adult (white male) players decides to play a Thief with the Thug kit... as a bald Black human man named Bubba who fights with a crowbar. I hated the character but I was in high school, so I just thought "WTF" and kept playing in the game. The original TT/RPG fanbase used to be predominantly hyper-reactionaries and chuds, along with some people who were indifferent or uncomfortable but didn't feel safe enough to complain. Things have massively changed in that regard, though the residue of a lot of this stuff lingers. After my past history gaming and knowing TSR/WotC's past history, I would be a lot more concerned about the chuds than I'd expect someone to be who started playing once they lost their stranglehold over the industry. Boba Pearl posted:It does feel like a bit of a moot point to argue how evil WotC will be, because I can't see anyone releasing under OGL now after they tried to skim so much off the top, and every single report says they're going to try again in a few months / few years. I know "This is the year of pathfinder" is "This is the year of Linux," but I don't think that Wizards has the lack of competition microsoft does. It's not two lovely operating systems and one Ok but fiddly one, it's one billion operating systems, and one giant is clearly superior, while the other one is bleeding. The Critical Role statement while kind of mealy and mushy mouthed I think it still is a shot across the prow so to speak. Critical Role made DND mainstream, not the other way around, and if they go to Pathfinder that is way more important than ORC. Like if Dimension20 and Critical Role 100% drop DND that's huge. That's a ton of people learning the existence of a new system, and how well it can work. Yes, I don't expect WotC to have many takers for whatever OGL they eventually release, because this might happen again. But OTOH, I don't know whether Critical Role is in a position to just drop D&D: likely they have their own licensing arrangement with WotC and it may lock them into 5E for a certain period of time. Maybe their next campaign might use a different system, but I don't see them changing unless they release their own system. Dimension 20 I know less about but they've used different systems, IIRC. They'll still likely stick to simple and fast systems, and I'm not convinced PF 2 falls into that category. If your audience needs to learn forty keywords to understand what's going on, that's not a good show. I know more about PF 1, and my comment on why CR switched to 5E when they started streaming was "watching seven people spend twenty minutes figuring out what prep spells have been cast on the party doesn't make for a very exciting live-stream." Frankly, WotC can release an extremely generous licensing in the expectation that nobody is likely to use it. I still bet they try to limit CRPG and VTT implementations because they want a monopoly on One; I don't know if they can genuinely control for outright sexism, racism, and the like in works published under license and I'm unsure what mechanism they would use to do that, but some form of moderation is worthwhile so long as it doesn't become a lever or excuse to enable them to just grab stuff or deplatform anything they don't like on false grounds.
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Jan 16, 2023 02:33
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I do wonder if D&D Beyond "content" was envisioned to be stuff like shorter adventures produced more cheaply than their "headliner" books? Something more like what they're putting out for Adventurer's League, which I looked at briefly but noted involves GMs who are running open games at FLGS for WotC having to spend their own money to do that promotional work in exchange for their own AL PCs getting little benefits (that cost WotC zero dollars). From my limited exposure, some of the AL stuff looks better than most of their prestige releases, but that may just be the shotgun approach where the percentage of successes is low but the volume is much higher. I dropped off the Paizo subscription train when PF 1 ended. I assume PF 2 is operating pretty much the same way? Are they still doing that thing where their big splat-book releases end up featured in an adventure path that's all but unplayable unless you buy the new rules compendium or  or are they being more restrained with that cross-marketing? I admit it's a damned if you do situation, because releasing the Complete Psychic's Handbook and then never using that material in your adventures is going to irritate people who bought it, while using it might irritate people who didn't but might convince others to buy.If there's any truth to the high tier cost for a D&D Beyond subscription under their new system, I wonder how or if that relates to microtransactions? If there's lots of those and you can subscribe your way out of that ecology, that might be the "logic" behind such a high per-month cost. It's still really objectionable to me that they'd be planning the "licensed service" approach to their system in any respect. Why would I subscribe to something that holds my PCs and adventures hostage to my continuing subscription? The 4E platform means that I never purchased all the 4E print books and my PCs would have been locked behind the paywall if not for the work of the Trad Games thread and the people who updated the 4E character builder that ran on your own PC instead of the platform. That, in turn, means I will never play 4E again, because I no longer have access to all the rules. Why I'd convert to One to knowingly get myself into the same situation totally escapes me.
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Jan 17, 2023 21:55
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PST posted:Kyle's accout on D&D beyond was created specifically to post that message. Because D&D is so much a part of his life he didn't have a work d&d beyond accout despite that also being a huge part of the business. Brink's on Linked In. Mostly PC game design: started with Spectrum Holobyte and Microprose, did Sims Online for EA, then unproductive year-long stints with Cryptic (Champions Online), Activision, Sega (completed Iron Man 2), then jumped to iWin and "Viggle Rewards" (aka BS monetizing and gamification). Then almost 3 years as a "consultant." The two years plus at ArenaNet directing Guild Wars 2 sounds legit. Started at WotC in 2021. So he's got to be the lead on the D&D Beyond/VTT/"monetize that poo poo" project. Didn't complete his college degree to go into PC games in the 90s? Yeah, he probably has played D&D for a long time. That doesn't mean his past record should inspire much confidence. The VTT page is pretty bare bones ATM, but I have questions. It explicitly says "don't use our art for the Owlbear, but feel free to use other art for the Owlbear." And that's a good rule. But it also says "you can't do an animated effect of a magic missile because that's video-games and not VTT." How can WotC assert ownership of the animated effect of a magic missile, especially on the basis of a text description in the PHB? "Don't rip off the Magic Missile animation in our VTT" is perfectly reasonable, but saying nobody is allowed to associate any such animation with a spell in a VTT titled Magic Missile? I don't see that they have any leg to stand on there legally apart from "you agreed to the license and that's the only reason you can't," in much the same way that their SRD excludes some rules which almost certainly could be used, in their pure mechanical form, in a non-OGL product. All that said, the 1.2 draft is a massive improvement on the leaked version. And 1.0a is effectively dead now, anyway. Nobody with any sense would plan to release a project under 1.0a unless they planned to challenge Hasbro in court, and who has both the will and that kind of money? Unless the EFF or a similar group brings a lawsuit--and that could take years with no clear remedy beyond being able to publish under 1.0a again--a few publishers will opt for 1.2, and it may be popular with developers not presently in business or people posting things to D&D Beyond for nominal amounts of money. But everyone else has already abandoned the sinking ship. moths posted:Providing specific page numbers also reveals how seriously the D&D1 feedback is(n't) being considered. The previous SRD covers 5E. One doesn't exist yet. I'd wager actual money that they don't even have a complete draft written yet. These page numbers must refer to the next SRD they release. One will only be in the SRD if they include it. Also, the page numbers and Creative Commons statement appear on the "introduction" page, which is not part of the OGL draft. It's unclear how the CC license will interact with this material: CC says it is irrevocable, but if they can change the page numbers licensed then they can revoke the whole thing in effect. Or if they can change the SRD and start the page numbers at 500 or something like that. Maybe this language will get tightened up in future drafts.
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Jan 20, 2023 02:47
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Kwyndig posted:Oh I'm sure the VTT when/if it comes out, will be loaded with microtransactions, probably for the kind of poo poo they're disallowing on other VTT like animations. They want to be the only one that gets to charge for animated fireball, and by god they're going to make it illegal for anybody else to do the same. My bet is it will be a bunch of generic minis, one per monster type. You don't even get the monster minis unless you buy the associated book. Variations are microtransactions, but if you purchase an adventure you get the maps and stats pre-made, but you also get unique minis and some extra terrain features. If you want those without the book, microtransactions again. The idea is to get you to just buy all the books. I also suspect they will allow DMs to "share" with players, in limited ways. If the DM owns monsters or terrain, they can design maps with them. And players in a campaign have access to the player-associated things, like classes and species, which the DM owns (if allowed by the DM settings). But players have to buy their own cosmetic upgrades, special dice, custom options for their miniatures, miniatures other than the defaults which come with the various PC options, etc. And because it all exists in their walled ecosystem, you have to buy the books instead of borrowing them or finding the websites that give you the specific information you want out of them.
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Jan 21, 2023 19:37
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Cool Dad posted:I suspect that this frees their hands to do whatever they want with OGL 2.1 or whatever, which they will use with the next D&D. They've figured out that they can't retroactively close the floodgates on 5e, but I'm not at all convinced that they're going to let 6e remain nearly as open. Maybe, but with this move their very own SRD 5E system is going to be competing with One, or whatever they release next. They might be able to muddle through if their VTT supports One and is really impressively implemented. If they're smart, they'll support 5E there as well.
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Jan 28, 2023 01:02
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None of the groups I’m in ever had a discussion of the Mearls thing, and every single one has talked about the OGL drama. Awareness of the latter appears to be a 100% overlap with the people who were or are GMs. (The group with four of five GMs spent over an hour discussing all the OGL stuff.) And I think the discussion of why people play D&D is missing several data points. A lot of it is driven by some combination of liking 5E’s design decisions and of a history of failed attempts to get a group to play for extended periods in another system. The rest is a matter of what the people willing to GM are willing to run. And the reason other systems fail can be manifold. One of my groups was playing 4E, finished a grand campaign, then had player turn-over. I started two 4E campaigns that both terminated due to player turn-over. We had two semi-stable 4E campaigns after that which also died due to players not showing up/moving to another city. The grog player talked us into switching to PF (2 wasn’t out yet) and we completed a campaign, but several of us were unhappy with the system and especially the huge varience in challenge based on prep spells. So we tried multiple other systems, including Dungeon World and Red Markets, none of which hit. At one stage we tried the PF 2 playtest and nobody enjoyed it enough to continue past one session. Someone volunteered to GM Shadowrun 6E and we enjoyed our first two sessions, but he declared he didn’t have enough time to prep and that was that. We ended up in heavily house-ruled 5E and that’s persisted, to the extent a summer campaign in a megadungeon has turned into a four-year open world Greyhawk campaign. It isn’t merely the time required to learn a new system, complex rules or not. It is mostly about two factors: having someone who wants to GM, can learn a new system to the necessary level, and can prep and run it well; and having a result that the players enjoy playing. GM experience can be key, but some systems make things harder on the GM and some systems depend on different levels of player engagement. If half the players don’t want to do narrative role-play or enjoy sharing responsibility in every session for driving events, even the best system designed to do those things will fail. I took the small step of setting up a quest-based milestone system in my current 5E campaign, where players could simply propose quest objectives and they’d become major or minor quests toward hitting the next milestone. But it’s the wrong group of players for that system: they have proposed precisely zero quests that aren’t in my main plotline. I cobbled together a FATE-system version of the old Birthright setting for a group mixed between old school gamers and “anything but D&D” players. And it worked great until we got through my initial plotline and I had to develop another one. I was confronted with the problem that I wasn’t sure, on the one hand, how to handle the number of NPC nations and other agents that might play a part in the campaign, and on the other hand, how to design another adventure to take advantage of the nation scale, army scale, and adventuring scale opportunities of the system. I borrowed some published Birthright adventures from one of the old school players and it became clear TSR hadn’t figured out how to design Birthright adventures, either. Faced with needing to develop important NPCs and political actors in six different nations, plus churches and guilds and the like, I didn’t see a way to continue given life constraints on my time. Maybe the heavily online players and GMs can just pick a system and go: if the group’s a bust, find another. But when you have a stable group that’s been playing together regularly for years or even decades, system decisions come down to a mix between what players want and what possible GMs are willing and able to prep and run well. Even the best RPG system isn’t going to be a good fit for all tables, and 5E thrives not because it’s frequently the best fit for everyone, but because it is “good enough” to be a compromise winner, and not bad enough at many tables to run the risk of a campaign abort in the first few weeks of play.
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Jan 29, 2023 16:41
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Lamuella posted:This is where having a DM and players who are on the same page comes in, along with players being very clear about what it is they're trying to do. I can imagine circumstances where "you open the door and the alarm goes off" feels like a failure (as Hel outlines below) and also ones where it feels like a mixed success (escaping from a building you just robbed). And (not to start a “better/worse” discussion) I think that matters in assessing RPG systems in a more granular way than system 1 bad, system 2 good. Differing RPGs make different demands on players and GMs. Some systems are just incompetent as written, like a roll & move boardgame where you have to get to the “finish” to win but there’s an endless loop and no mechanism for escaping it. For the rest, some have higher or lower demands on players and GMs, but most also have different kinds of skills required to play. An improv based game demands something different and a great GM in one system might do a poor job in another. More importantly, people can prefer one system over another based on the demands it makes: I’m OK with a game with some amount of in-character negotiating, but if I have to negotiate results of my PCs actions with my GM on a meta-level I am miserable. Not everyone wants a game with lots of math or logistics, but some people very much want that. I also observe that player and GM expectations matter a great deal, as well as past history. “I try to open the lock but miss the DC” in a game based in Star Wars or Indiana Jones or the like, I’d be delighted by a result like “a massive bulkhead starts lowering on the party” because of course it does. In a Shadowrun game, “alarms start going off, two auto-turrets activate and you hear the sound of gas hissing, what do you do?” would seem appropriate. For a normal dungeon door in a D&D style game, anything like that on a simple pick locks failure would be more upsetting to me, in part because I grew up under the norm of “partly adversarial” DMs and unless they’re written into the dungeon that would seem like cheating, because the default narrative expectation is that failure to pick the lock means nothing happens. OTOH, if the result was “you hear the sound of heavy footsteps approaching the door and a key being put into the lock,” that would seem like a normal response in a case where there’s someone behind the locked door and I’d be fine with it. TTRPGs have a lot of moving parts and common expectations matter as much to the experience as the rules framework that dictates play.
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Feb 3, 2023 17:53
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The Bee posted:Wasn't this back when GNS Theory was a thing people actually listened to? I feel like there were lots of people arguing about how 4E was gamey, unrealistic nonsense, as opposed to the True simulation of fantasy life that 3.5 . . . really, really wasn't, but people were insistent about. "Simulationist" is a misnomer and some of the things people complained about in 4E were silly even if you cared about such things. And you can care about mismatched systems in a game without being a huge jerk who is ignoring that the basic economics of your fantasy RPG simply don't work. For example, to go old-school D&D, if all the ranges change from feet to yards just because you stepped outside. (Spells suddenly tripling in their AoE was particularly jarring.) Or the original hit point mechanic, where your fighter might have 100 hp and suffer 85 damage but still be 100% capable of fighting. "So it's just an abstract way of tracking fatigue, luck, or other sorts of things, not actual physical damage? OK, I go back to town and take a rest day to recover. How many hp do I get back? ONE?! So these are superficial injuries but it still takes magic or 41 days of bedrest for me to recover to full health?" (1E PHB says after resting 30 days you get 5 hp back per day!) The term can also be applied to your expectations that dungeons will have ecologies because the monsters have to eat and drink to survive, versus just saying "it's magic" and forgetting the rest. But things like "shouting an arm back on?" 4E had a very clear (and clever) mechanic with healing surges. These represented a PC ability to get a second wind or otherwise be reinvigorated, and there were mechanisms for a character to trigger their own healing surge, so why in the world couldn't a Warlord do the same thing for someone? And none of the complaining players were playing in games where after suffering X amount of damage you could no longer use two-handed weapons because one of your arms stopped working, so the example didn't apply in terms of either the healing mechanisms or damage. There's plenty of room in the RPG market for systems that just don't care at all and apply the MST rule ("It's just a game; you should really just relax), as well as systems that want to model some aspects of the game world more carefully. Truly simulationist RPGs are arguably the only system that isn't very sustainable (or fun). Anyone want to track food & water in terms of weight, where it is carried, and spoilage? Keep in mind that weather conditions and storage are going to matter. And that first set of rations is going to spoil before the second set does, because you bought the second set recently. But not so for the set you purchased in town yesterday, as they're suffering from a mealworm infestation and you failed your check to determine that when you were negotiating to purchase supplies. Also, while your donkeys are perfectly fine grazing in this part of the country, the local grass is slightly poisonous to horses, so your mounts are going to be making Constitution saves because your ranger botched the Survival check when you set up camp yesterday. The good news is that the orc tribe you were paid to drive away from their homes was almost completely wiped out by botulism last week. The bad news: save vs botulism. You're two weeks away from the nearest city. Let's spend the next hour playing out the healthy PCs providing basic care to the others while you travel.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:55
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I’m sure someone will identify one or more games that already do this, but there’s ways to handle “advancement” in an RPG that go beyond the boundaries of a character sheet. AD&D had “name level”, where you were assumed to gather followers and have some sort of political presence, though D&D has never done a great job articulating these systems or perceiving them as being advancement in the same way as getting more powerful spells. I ran a Birthright adaptation in the FATE system. Individual provinces of a nation were essentially treated like improvable magic items with associated “skills” that represented resources, PC holdings, and the like. It’s a short step from that to treating a nation like a PC and treating national improvement like PC level-ups or skill increases. Or you could choose a Destiny at 1st level: waif to hero; ending the scism; making a name; slaying the legend… While you might have one or more PCs associated with the Destiny, the main campaign advancement system would involve the Destiny acquiring more resources or necessary elements. If your waif in the Waif to Hero destiny dies in play, it might trigger a “descent into the Underworld” quest to revive them, but getting your Prince PC killed under the Ending the Scism destiny might allow you to bring in and play the Queen, who has a different set of abilities and powers. You could even use the Prince’s death to advance the Destiny, meaning that you’d actively oppose bringing the old character back as the Queen would go back to opposing his involvement instead of furthering the Destiny in his memory. Telling an interwoven story built around six Destinies might be tough, but you could instead have some players act in supporting roles and shift into the spotlight later. And you’d have a whole hell of a lot of advancement options beyond “number goes up” on a character sheet.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:18
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The challenge is creating new rules and systems to make the game more fun/tactical/balanced/etc that don’t make it too complicated or break any of the stuff you didn’t change. And the tendency is to be incremental because if you make your own “5E” but it is so different it looks nothing like 5E, you’re just creating your own system. Plus, anything you do to, say, give martials more choices and abilities is going to be at least somewhat arbitrary. Here’s an incomplete list of possible options: Add a second archetype-like structure based on weapon specialization or power source (rogue dagger master, fighter swordmaster, barbarian who taps into elemental earth with his attacks). Add abilities to existing archetypes. Give all martials maneuvers and/or higher-level maneuvers. Create a mechanism to regain maneuver dice during combat. Or, make these new maneuvers work like spells do. Eliminate certain feats from the game and make them martial class abilities (like Sharpshooter/GWM/Polearm Master). Give martial classes abilities that work like legendary actions: choose one from this list to do after another person’s turn ends. These don’t take reactions. Or give martials extra reactions and new abilities that they can do as actions. Start all martials with a legendary weapon, shield, or suit of armor that gains powers as they level up. Some of these options take a lot more work than others. Many of them don’t address the “martials outside of combat” issue, though some do. All of them operate as add-ons; it’d be a completely different thing to add a full system for adjudicating social situations and then granting abilities related to that system to martials. Or doing the same with exploration mechanics. The tendency is going to be to rules that can be pasted on to existing 5E structures over completely new systems or dynamics. That’s why “new spellcasting class with new spell list that mostly works like existing casters but with new spells” is always going to be easier than “new class that is specialized at using this new system we designed, but which other classes can also use.”
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Feb 20, 2023 19:48
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Comstar posted:So if you don't read the kickstarter there you might not have heard, but it seems industry related. Reading the transcript of that video, yikes! My favorite is probably their addendum that states their investigation now (not three years ago when this went down) uncovered that the “alleged incident” took place on “company grounds.” How the gently caress do you do an investigation of an alleged sexual assault by an employee and never ask whether it happened in the workplace? Also, not a great look when they state that both fired employees had a history of toxic behavior. That’s not really justification when the company was aware of and had apparently done nothing about employees with his history of toxic behavior until it escalated to something that could hurt business. Toxic behavior in the workplace shouldn’t be tolerated to begin with; these guys seem to have a history of it themselves. Also giving the hairy eyeball to this assault being “alleged” after three separate complaints from three employees, plus whatever their investigation uncovered, plus they fired the accused employee.
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Feb 22, 2023 17:21
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Kestral posted:Of course, they were never going to go anywhere even if WotC made zero changes, it just would have taken them longer to come back. It's just funny to compare the talk from a few weeks ago to the walk from today. People serious about their principles would be taking stock of WotC's behavior and saying, "actually, no, you're not a company I can ethically support, I will now migrate to some other game." But, lol at the idea of people being serious about the principles they proclaim on twitter. Some people's "talk" was "if WotC goes through with this, I'm done with D&D." WotC did not go through with OGL 1.fuckyou. So walking the walk could mean to reward them for being responsive to feedback, and for a major corporation, going from "we own your stuff" to "the SRD is now CC" is about as extreme a turn-around as it gets. There is enough range within ethical systems for two people to make ethical decisions that don't agree without one being perfect and the other being "worse than Hitler." It's possible to decide to keep purchasing 5E products while refusing to buy Hogwarts Legacy without being a horrible hypocrite; it's even possible for a gun owner to support gun control laws, or for someone to hate how the oil industry is spending billions of dollars blocking conservation efforts while driving a car that requires gasoline.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:00
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Lemon-Lime posted:Sure, but we already know it's possible to clearly communicate mechanics using keywords while also describing things, instead of having long-winded ~natural language~ descriptions that suck at relaying actual gameplay information, because that's what 4E power blocks do: 5E has keywords, of course, but in restrictive categories like "damage type" or "condition." If I see a spell imposes a condition, I flip to Appendix A, which lists all the conditions across three pages. A few conditions are simple enough to have a single line-item, but most have multiple elements. 5E has 15 conditions and 13 damage types. PF2 has keywords built into the system, and the keywords are merged with the actual index in the core rules. They are listed across 10 pages. Conditions are a subset of keywords: their definitions appear not in the index, but in the preceding appendix, which is 5 pages long and lists 41 separate items. I'm not going to count the number of items in the 10 page index. Number of items matters to a design: if you build your system with lots of bonuses and penalties, for example, you could decide that all of them stack, or that you receive only the highest bonus and the worst penalty. Or you could do what 3E/PF/PF2 do and label bonuses, so that unlabeled bonuses stack, but you get only the best labeled bonus of every type. If you have only four different kinds of bonus, that's a simple and effective system. If you have fourteen, it isn't. Let's compare mechanics directly: 5E Blinded. Two bullet points. "A blinded creature can't see and automatically fails any ability check that requires sight." "Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature's attack rolls have disadvantage." This is clear but not exhaustive, because other sight-related requirements are listed in their respective places, most particularly in spell descriptions. Many spells require you to choose a target "that you can see" and a blinded creature can't see. This requirement is listed in the descriptive text of each of these spells, and not as a keyword. "Can't see" may crop up in other places in the rules but not in a systematic way. The description does call out failure on sight-based ability checks and a modifier to attack rolls. "Does this ability check require sight" is a DM-level question; you might have to look up what advantage and disadvantage are, but it's a simple mechanic and 5E has few keywords so learning them is a fast process. PF2 Blinded: "You can’t see. All normal terrain is difficult terrain to you. You can’t detect anything using vision. You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to Perception checks. You are immune to visual effects. Blinded overrides dazzled." Not very complex, and less ambiguous than the 5E condition, but also requires more system mastery. You'll learn what difficult terrain does to your movement fairly quickly; dazzled is a bit further on the list so the override is easy enough to do. Knowing what it means to "critically fail Perception" and what a "precise sense" is makes that sentence more complex, and you'll have to watch for other "status" penalties if you're blinded, but OK. Now suppose my PC has the Wand of Putting Foozle in a Bubble and we're confronting Foozle in its lair. The lair action just spread out the party and turned some of the floor to lava, and Foozle blinded my character and shuffled around. Using the wand involves an attack roll. 5E: I'm at disadvantage on the roll, but I can still make it because the Wand doesn't say "target that you can see" and Foozle isn't hidden, so I can hear to target. But I don't want to risk missing, so I instead decide to throw the wand to another PC. The DM considers and decides that would be a Dex (Acrobatics) check. I'm blind. Does the ability check require sight? If it did, I automatically fail, but you could throw something to someone while blinded, so the DM rules it doesn't. They do impose disadvantage on the roll, but it's not a high DC and I'm more likely to succeed on this check than on the attack roll, so I throw the wand and hope it doesn't fall in lava. Is this an object interaction or an action? The system is ambiguous so the DM would decide that, too. PF2: I'm blinded, so I can't see. I want to shoot Foozle with the wand. What happens? Blinded doesn't mention attack rolls at all. "So I can attack at no penalty?" No, the GM patiently explains that "you can't detect anything using vision" means that everything is either Hidden or Undetected to me. "OK, so is Foozle hidden or undetected?" I'm off to page 464, Perception, to learn that hearing is an imprecise sense and so Foozle is hidden because he didn't hide and the floor is lava but not loud lava. (Or the GM, who has better system mastery, just says "Foozle is hidden" and I believe them.) I might ask if I can "Seek" to locate Foozle more precisely, but that requires using a precise sense and my only precise sense is sight, so I can't improve my chances with "Seek" and instead face the Hidden condition which says I can't target without passing a DC 11 flat check. Presumably even I can remember what a "flat check" is, and I don't like my odds, so I instead say I want to throw the wand to an ally. I'm not a PF2 system expert and I am only referring to the core rules, but there doesn't appear to be any mechanism for this action. Let 's assume the GM decides that's a skill check. But the Blinded condition doesn't mention skill checks at all. Clearly there should be some increase in difficulty, but what is it? Should the check DC be higher? Is trying to throw something to a hidden creature going to require the DC 11 flat check, in which case, I'm not going to throw the wand either because my chances are just as bad as with making the attack only if I fail the check the wand is probably falling into the lava floor? Should the GM use the bomb throwing rules to scatter the wand if I miss? In either case, the GM is ultimately having to figure out what happens. PF2 has a more defined system, but to me it looks like there's a greater likelihood of variance in terms of how the GM ruling will turn out from table to table. 5E tends towards "make a check at disadvantage" or "make a check" and PF2 is going to depend upon whether your GM thinks a flat check is appropriate or not. Is one system "better" than the other in this instance? Depends on what you are trying to design for. I find PF2 requires more steps and has a more complex system, meaning that it would take me longer to develop a level of mastery to know what the best solution is to a situation like this. But it isn't a simple matter of 5E uses imprecise "natural language" and PF2 uses precise system keywords. Designing a system means making choices, and it isn't always a matter of one choice being obviously superior. A last example: I discovered in writing this post that PF2 has "precise" and "imprecise" senses. So far as I can tell, only sight is a "precise" sense in the system. So why make the definition at all? Why not just differentiate sight from the other senses and use the word "sight" in place of "precise sense"? It's a system decision: at some point in the future, Paizo (or someone) might introduce another "precise sense" and the rules will just transparently work. If I were designing the system, I'd just use "sight" and the hypothetical new sense would say "treat prescience as if it were sight for the purposes of Perception, the Seek action, etc" because I don't like having a category like "precise sense" that applies to a single sense only, and because doing so adds confusion in every case where this new sense will only confuse things rarely. Which design choice is "better"? And is it "better" for new players if the system has no rules for attacking someone while blind at all, and the GM just decides (or negotiates with the player)? My guess is that in such a system, I'm more likely to launch (and land) an attack on Foozle instead of having to find a way around the blindness penalty, but maybe I'm being unfair in that guess.
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Feb 25, 2023 17:41
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Splicer posted:The biggest and most important actual combat effects are hidden behind what almost looks like flavour text. It's also unclear if being unable to detect enemies actually does lead to existing enemies becoming undetected, and I've a feeling the answer is "ask your gm". The problem isn't keywords, it's that the person who wrote this condition text is an idiot. Isn't that a claim you can make about any system? It's a good system, the problem is that some of the authors are idiots and so all the bad parts of the systems are just the parts the idiots wrote? The problem is that if you're going to construct everything in your system upon a foundation of keywords, you need someone carefully examining all of the keywords and managing them so that they function properly, integrate with each other, and don't generate unnecessary complexity, and you probably need someone making sure that you don't end up with too many. Those considerations matter at least as much as careful word usage in "natural language" systems. Take the problem of weapon attacks in 5E. There's a set of clear definitions for melee spell attacks, melee weapon attacks, ranged spell attacks, and ranged weapon attacks. But then there's "unarmed attacks," and because the system didn't employ "natural attacks" versus "weapon attacks," that's a floating category with a distinction that operates oddly. A giant ape punching you with a fist is making a "melee weapon attack" but if you swing back with your fist, you're making an "unarmed attack" which is in fact a "weapon attack" but not an attack with a weapon. The real problem here is that there are two distinctions to make: spell attack or not, and ranged attack or not. If it isn't ranged, it must be a melee attack. But if it isn't a spell attack, "weapon attack" as a category breaks down. Treating an unarmed attack as a melee weapon attack makes sense in terms of keywords but not in natural language. But keywords can plunge you into trouble as well, especially if poorly defined. Imagine the weapon situation in a keyword system that's all about adding keywords. A fighter might make a "Flyswatter" attack against a flying foe (which extends the reach of a melee attack and can try to knock the enemy to the ground), which has built-in keywords but then adds the keywords of the weapon being used to make the attack. Here's a possible set of keywords for the attack if it is made with a silver-plated Lucerne Hammer: Bludgeoning, Extended, Fighter, Heavy, Maneuver, Martial, Melee, Piercing, Polearm, Precise, Prone, Reach, Silver, Strength-based, Two-handed, Weapon. How many of the keywords actually matter in play? Do some matter in specific instances but never otherwise, and how important are they to include? Is it better to have a system that registers all the potential complexities or a system that tries to avoid complexity (say, by having the Lucerne Hammer deal only bludgeoning damage instead of a choice between blunt and piercing, or by not differentiating between polearm types, or by not differentiating between polearms and other weapons, or fighters and other martials, etc, etc)? Do you need to include all possible keywords in case some future writer/rules supplement makes their presence important? "This monster takes only half damage from attacks which have the Martial keyword." If your fighter is a dwarf fighter, should "Dwarf" be added as a keyword to all your attacks? hyphz posted:Several monsters already have precise senses other than vision. The problem is greater the other way - many regularly stated abilities (not including "blinded") use the word "vision" when they actually mean "a precise sense". You could avoid the whole problem by simplifying: just define other "precise senses" as behaving like vision for the purposes of the perception rules. A lot of them intuitively should, I expect: Truesight is sight, after all. Something like Blindsense or Echolocation or Tremorsense can just be written as "treat this sense as a type of vision for purposes of other rules" and you're finished. That covers both perception/blinding and anything else that requires sight (spell targeting, say). And if the "blinded" condition means "loss of sight or any sense that is treated as sight," then blinding effects work perfectly well on creatures with alternate forms of vision. For Echolocation, say "immune to the blinded condition, but treat the deafened condition as if the creature were blinded"; for Tremorsense, just "immune to the blinded condition." If you only increase the cognitive load in exceptional cases, instead of building a more complex system that differentiates when such differentiation rarely matters, then the system works just as well and you reduce the chances of imprecision elsewhere. If almost everyone uses vision as a sense, introducing "precise sense" applying to something everyone has but that also applies to these few exceptions means everyone has to track the keyword, instead of forcing such tracking only in the few exceptions that can sense precisely with a non-vision sense.
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Feb 25, 2023 20:27
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Splicer posted:I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. If you do a thing badly it will be done badly? Yes! That's why I'm pointing out examples of it done well vs examples of it done poorly. Siivola's original statement was that 4E's keyword system would be a bad fit for modern day audiences because they make it difficult to parse what things do at a glance. I said no, they gave an example of PF2E's keywords causing the problem they were describing, a few people then showed actual examples of 4E keywords, and Silvona realised that the brutal technical incompetence of Paizo's design team had driven out the memories of how smooth an actually well implemented keyword system is. Conversation has moved on from here but I'd just as soon pretend it hasn't, so... My point is about the specific considerations that go into writing a good keyword-based system, and that to write an RPG with a good keyword system you need someone who is coordinating keywords. I haven't played 4E in a long time, but let's take a quick look at how they organized keywords for powers: Source Keywords: Arcane, Divine, Martial, Psionic; 4E registers the source of powers for PCs. I haven't played for a long time but these keywords don't seem very helpful when, say, Cleric powers all have the Divine keyword. I suppose they matter for multiclassing, but I don't think these keywords came up in play much, so they may not be needed. Focus Keywords: Implement, Weapon. Tells you what kind of item you use to focus the power. This matters, but listing the keyword is more convenience than anything else, because IIRC all weapon-focused powers dealt damage based on the weapon and all implement powers listed a damage die type for the power independent of the implement. Useful for whoever is coding the digital character sheet, no doubt. And very useful for monster powers. Element Keywords: Acid, Cold, Fire, etc. Logical, though powers with these keywords always deal damage of that type, so you could just use the damage listing instead of consulting a keyword here. I can't determine whether an acid-immune monster is immune to all effects from a power with the Acid keyword or just ignores the damage, mainly because I don't own the DMG/MM and MM3 doesn't explain immunities. 4E avoids the "different weapons do different damage types" problem by having weapon-based powers do either untyped damage or adding an element and that damage type. Type Keywords: Charm, Conjuration, Fear, Healing, Illusion, Sleep, Teleportation, Zone. Provide important information classifying the power. I'm a little dubious about "Sleep" as a type simply because it comes up so rarely, but OK. The others all clearly matter at least some of the time. Type keywords are necessary for gameplay. I'd argue that Element and Focus keywords are a matter of convenience, because they repeat information that a power gives you elsewhere in its writeup. Source keywords almost certainly exist as metadata more than anything else, as otherwise you could just define all "racial" powers as unsourced, and all other powers as sourced based on their classes, because this comes up hardly ever in play. But I don't know if WotC ever released a 4E class that had a mixture of arcane and martial powers, in which case you would want these keywords for everyone. Note that each category is distinct, and few categories have a lot of keywords. Element keywords are the most extensive, but you don't need to know any information beyond the keyword: there's no need to look up "Force" in the glossary to figure out what that means. Some of the type keywords work the same way: you shouldn't need to look up Charm, Fear, or Healing. Conjuration, Illusion, and Zone are a bit more complex, although Zone at least is also built into the power description in other ways. If you add keywords in the future to some categories, that doesn't really change the complexity of the system: adding Psionic to Source keywords doesn't matter much. Adding half a dozen more Damage keywords is undesirable because existing monsters can't be vulnerable/resistant/immune to them. Adding a half dozen more Type keywords probably makes the game much more complicated: for example, if you suddenly want to differentiate between an illusion and a phantasm, you're increasing the system complexity. But you also need someone supervising new keywords. Suppose the PHB 3 comes out adding psionics to the system, only the designers decide psionic classes should have the Source keyword "Psychic" and not "Psionic"? Suddenly you have a duplicate keyword! The longer a system exists and the more the designers rotate responsibilities, the more vital it is to have a master document that controls keywords and a lead designer who watches new keywords closely to keep things as simple as possible. Even 4E, which handled keywords as well as any system I've encountered, may have had more keywords than it absolutely needed.
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Feb 27, 2023 01:38
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Leperflesh posted:"our childhoods," oh dear I pulled up a file today in Dropbox and the app told me "Last edited 21 years ago." I don't know what the keyword should be for feeling ancient.
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Feb 28, 2023 20:12
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Anonymous Zebra posted:At this point the average Joe now can make art by typing words into a text box and seeing what comes out. I'm using it to make stuff for my D&D games (including massive backdrops for games on Foundry which I never could have done on my own), my wife is using it to make silly birthday cards (something she could have done on her own but it now takes her minutes instead of hours), my daughters use it to make custom filters over selfies they take. And that's not even touching on how ChatGPT has completely shifted how we create written content. Professors in the Slack's that I'm part of are using it to draft letters to administrators, political orgs are using it to create draft letters to members of congress, my students are using it to write their reports (with varying results). The genie is out of the bottle and it's never going back in. You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether it's RIGHT or WRONG, but that's essentially like getting pissed that Kindle has replaced physical books, or how streaming services killed physical media. Artists, whether they want to or not, need to find ways to make AI part of their workflow. Some are already doing it, but eventually everyone will have to, because AI art is only going to get more sophisticated and the entire system is now accessible to most of the population of the modern world. It's not going away. I think the thread can dismiss the "it's happening, so arguing about the ethics or morality is pointless." Insert your own joke about pointless arguments ITT if you like, but if "genie out of the bottle" precluded ethical and moral arguments and if such arguments made no difference whatsoever, then we'd have had a nuclear war by now. ChatGPT's presently a laughable tool, whose main problem is that it wants to tell you what you want to hear instead of providing accurate information. There's no evidence the language model understands what "accurate" even means, which explains why it is lousy at tasks like mathematics, and its supposed skill at programming simply demonstrates how much code these days gets repurposed. As far as I can tell, Kindle sales have dropped off more sharply than print book sales, though undoubtedly there are a lot of people reading on mobile devices predominantly. 788.7 million books sold in 2022 was a DROP from the previous two years. Add in that your average mobile device is going to quit working in 10-20 years while your average book will hold up much longer than that, and the numbers look pretty good for print. The "AI" art tools should remain just that, tools that human artists can use for inspiration or labor savings. And the concern ITT is clearly linked to the differences between independent designers or small games companies, versus megacorporations, versus venture capitalists. Replacing designers and artists with AI is the sort of idea that warms a venture capitalist's heart (assuming he still has one). I'm pleased nobody has deployed the "Wal-Mart" justification for AI art replacing human art, on the grounds that it really helps the poorer companies or individuals versus the big companies that can afford to spend on art. Because as others have noted, the real intent is to devalue human labor, and you can tell that because of the kind of labor that is being "threatened" here. Before the printing press, every book had to be hand-copied. This was, needless to say, very labor intensive. The early printing presses were also labor intensive, but much less so. Now you can print off thousands of copies of a book without the copying part involving a human being, but there's still a lot of labor involved in proofing, layout, even typesetting. There is a qualitative difference in saying that new tools can eliminate the need for human labor of the sort required to make thousands of copies of a single book, and saying that new tools can eliminate the need for human labor of the sort required to create the original book. Nor do I really understand why that would be desirable from a "consumer" perspective. There's plenty of human authors writing books. Why wouldn't I prefer their stories to the stories generated by an AI? There's plenty of human artists; why would I prefer AI art, beyond a brief "look what computers can do" thrill? I can articulate what I've gained as a viewer of art from all the tools which help artists create art; what do I gain from a tool that supposedly cuts human artists out of the equation? How does that lead to me having better games?
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Mar 15, 2023 19:22
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Drakyn posted:Waiting for Gygax. VLA: Let's go. EST: We can't. VLA: Why not? EST: We're waiting for Gygax. VLA: Is he supposed to be coming here? EST: We wait until we trigger a random encounter roll. If the roll comes up a "1" then we could get Gygax on the random encounter table. VLA: But... EST: What? VLA: What happens if there's sub-tables to the random encounter table? We might have a 1 in a 1000 chance of encountering Gygax. Or lower. EST: What can we do about it? VLA: We could wait somewhere that increases the chances of encountering him. How about Greyhawk City streets at night? EST: The last time we waited on the Greyhawk City streets at night we were almost torn apart by a pack of expensive doxies. VLA: That was bullshit! They looked like ordinary gentlewomen! Who puts doxies on a random encounter table? EST: Gygax. VLA: That's why we're waiting for him. I forgot.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:10
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Dexo posted:It's just tabletop simulator or talespire with built in animations for some spells. In a 3d environment. They mentioned changing lighting, the time of day, turning on rain, or turning on a rain of flaming embers. That sounds like a bit more than just lighting effects for fire.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:in this context, I'm fairly sure "walled garden" refers to playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as an experience that is very tightly controlled by WOTC itself Doesn’t that make every MMORPG a “walled garden”? Is Solasta a “walled garden” because it enforces 5E SRD rules, or is it just a 5E CRPG? Can anyone develop a “walled garden” for 5E or is it only Hasbro that can do that? Is the current DM’s Guild a “walled garden” and if so, how much more “walled” do things become if they shift that content into D&D Beyond? WotC tried to do a walled garden and the backlash was so bad that their rules are now Creative Commons in perpetuity. I don’t think anyone opposes them having a mechanism to sell third party content for their VTT. And if they pull all their content from other VTTs nothing prohibits the sale of third party content there.
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Apr 4, 2023 15:33
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