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dwarf74 posted:I seriously don't know why they just don't go and make a Driz'zt/Icewind Dale movie already. Drizzt would be a... problematic character to portray on screen. Drow aren't black in the "person of African descent" way, their coloration is downright inhuman, although in what way depends on the artist / writer. Whoever was cast as Drizzt would have to wear what could easily be interpreted as (and arguably is) a form of blackface, even if they were actually a person of color. It's a bit more complicated territory than getting painted blue for Avatar, and there really isn't any way around it: you can't even just cast all the drow characters with black folks and ignore the makeup, because then you've said that the black people in your universe are literal demon-worshipping psychopaths, with One Special Exception who ran away to the whitest place imaginable. Icewind Dale would have to be animated, and animation for adults never does well.
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Mar 12, 2018 18:42
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TheChirurgeon posted:Might lower the stakes of the show too much for some people, though. The drama would have to focus on the players at the table, using their characters as a lens through which to view their interpersonal relationships. This can be done well - if you ever get a chance to see the play Of Dice and Men, do it, it's remarkable - but it probably couldn't sustain more than a miniseries without wearing out its welcome.
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Mar 12, 2018 19:40
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Comrade Koba posted:Nah. If Greg doesn’t approve of playing Pendragon as Sir Frodo-Wan-Kenobi, Zoroastrian cheesemonger from Constantinople, he can respectfully gently caress off. Alternatively, play a game that actually supports what you want to do.
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May 24, 2018 08:38
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Serf posted:It's almost as if tabletop RPGs are a hobbyist industry where getting people to pay you is hard for like a million reasons. I personally blame the willingness to work for free on foolish hope of "making it" and having more passion and creativity than business sense. In fairness to those who harbor that foolish hope, there are only two ways of "making it" in this industry right now: 1) Making free content that gets your name out there enough (via established people in the industry liking it on social media) to let you start releasing content people will pay for, eventually-maybe-possibly-but-probably-not leading to employment. This also includes doing transparent, public design work on your games and, again, getting people to retweet / share it on G+ where the mavens are. 2) Streaming, which is basically the same thing in a different hat. Virtually nobody will buy random PDF from an author they've never heard of who has no discernible online presence, so it's necessary to generate your own publicity by one of the above. Anyone who goes into RPGs thinking "I'm going to make this a living" needs to recognize that their labor has no market value at first, both because it is probably Very Bad because they are Bad Designers who haven't done the years of thankless design work required to get good, but also because the industry is tiny and incestuous and name recognition is everything. It needs to be part of your game plan to do a great deal of unpaid work, because nobody is going to pay you a wage for the lovely heartbreakers or the magnum opus setting book that you have to get out of your system before you write anything worth paying for, let alone the ten partially-completed games you're likely to write for every one you finish. But if you work in public, someone might see what you've done and say, "I've got a project this person might be a good fit for." Frankly, if you can convince John Harper that your work is worth trading a favor for, and you're one of the many no-names whose only meaningful interaction with the industry is "getting John Harper to give you a Blades project," you just about got away with murder. It shouldn't be this way, no argument there, but as someone said upthread, this is a hobbyist industry and what constitutes "fair wages" takes strange forms here.
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May 31, 2018 17:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:So you are specifically defending offering people unpaid work for exposure? Heeeere we go. No. I'm specifically pointing out that breaking into tradgames is virtually impossible without exposure, and that getting exposure in tradgames is likewise virtually impossible without doing unpaid work. Is that desirable for a normal, healthy industry? No, obviously not, but if the last 42 pages of this thread have taught us anything, it's that TG As An Industry is not normal or healthy, and the people who choose to try to make it there should go into it with realistic expectations about what they're going to face.
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May 31, 2018 18:02
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moths posted:The same could be said for Hollywood, but that doesn't excuse any of it. Ya'll need to read my posts until you see what I'm actually writing, which is about the realities on the ground that aren't changing any time soon because of the structural constraints of a hobby industry, not the moral worth of the system.
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May 31, 2018 19:03
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sexpig by night posted:You know why the conditions on the ground don't change 'any time soon'? Because every time someone says 'this is lame' when poo poo like this happens there's people who pop up saying 'actually it's fine I didn't pay my neighbor for walking my dog when I needed it so that's the same of asking for hours of work from a friend after raising money specifically off them adding their effort to the project' It's actually because there are deep, structural issues with the industry - the, again, and I can't emphasize this enough, tiny hobbyist industry - where your work has zero monetary value until you've proven your merits to and been adopted by the community in some way (see above). But we're at the point where we're just shooting past each other to score points, so, nah. Edit: Serf gets it. Good post, Serf.
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May 31, 2018 20:07
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Serf posted:Kevin Crawford actually did a pretty good interview with Adam Koebel recently about how he was able to succeed at making RPGs into a career. This interview is great, not least because Kevin Crawford's voice is magnificent  "I worked at the Yale Divinity School's library, down in special collections. And it turned out that the way you represent an item that doesn't have a known publisher is, you write 'Sine Nomine' in the entry. So out of a general spirit of malice toward future librarians, I decided to name my publishing company Sine Nomine."
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Jun 3, 2018 17:53
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bewilderment posted:In my head I like to pretend that D Vincent Baker was slightly chafing at being "the influential storygame guy" so he co-wrote a lego mecha wargame just to say he did. For anyone wondering about the actual backstory there, Vincent hints at it in the dedications of the 2006 Mechaton rulebook. It seems to have been a thing he, one of his sons, and his brother whipped up during a family get-together on Labor Day 2002 to play with the family (Meguey, another son, and Vincent's sister are mentioned as "indulging them" in that instance). Later, Joshua A.C. Newman of Shock: Social Science Fiction fame persuaded him to make it into a full-blown thing and became his creative partner, with the whole Baker clan and Joshua's wife as playtesters: one of their kids, I believe Vincent's younger son, was apparently murderously good at the MFZ version of the game at age 11. Later, Joshua (with Vincent's blessings) did the Kickstarter to turn Mechaton into Mobile Frame Zero. Then Vincent wrote a GMless storygame RPG in that setting because the man literally cannot help himself. Edit: Also, Mobile Frame Zero is Creative Commons and freely available, so if any of you like the sound of a LEGO mecha wargame with campaign play, here you go. Kestral fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jul 1, 2018 |
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Jul 1, 2018 18:09
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Flavivirus posted:And then that same son made a vehicle-based mad max-themed version of MF0, and they're kickstarting it soon as Tiny and Chrome. The Baker kids are kind of amazing. Meg and Vincent must be so proud of them. Kurieg posted:I imagine Vincent Baker has a copy of the DMG, except the word "Dungeon Master" is scribbled out so hard it's gone through to the cardboard of the cover, the Lich has X's drawn over it's eyes and a bunch of daggers drawn into it's back. I don't think it's a coincidence that his recent mania for GMless games coincides with the public activation of his and Meg's political side, which is essentially "full communism now," and not even in the joking way that phrase often gets used.
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Jul 1, 2018 19:17
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Hite's contribution seems to be mechanics rather than politics. He's said a fair bit about the project (notably how heavy-handed some of the editing and direction have been), and discussed his political leanings and thoughts on the current US administration a great deal more. Based on that material, I'd be shocked if he were involved in the actual Nazification of the end product. Dude's a Republican with all the baggage that entails in this day and age, but he's not alt-right. It's also worth noting that he was attached to the project before the world started tilting into Full Nazi, and bailing from it mid-stream would almost certainly destroy his career.
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Jul 9, 2018 20:57
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It's still up on the Wayback Machine. I've saved a copy from there in case it becomes useful for some reason.
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Jul 10, 2018 16:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:hahahahahaha of loving course he is Hite finished his work on V5 months ago, and White Wolf owns that work product. He can't "un-involve" himself at this point aside from refusing to work on future material in the line, which is what he should do.
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Jul 14, 2018 01:51
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Pope Guilty posted:Okay but, like, would he? Probably not, and I doubt many people would in his place. It's one of those scenarios you could have taken out of an Ethics textbook: "You get a job offer from one of your dream companies, and do contracted work for them on one of the most significant IPs in your field for nearly two years as part of the relaunch of a flagship product. After you complete your portion of the work, but before the product is released, the public discovers evidence that your employers and co-designers hold problematic beliefs which will affect the final product, and reflect poorly on the company. Because the industry is small, job offers rely on leveraging networks of personal connections, and reliability is highly prized. Further, the companies who have the greatest capacity to hire you are the most tolerant of the kind of behavior which is now causing controversy. If you issue a public statement condemning this behavior, you will damage your reputation, possibly severely and irreparably, in the portion of the industry that can pay the fees you need to earn a living in the only field your resume will support. If you decline to issue a statement, your reputation among a small but vocal selection of customers will suffer badly, and you will be complicit promoting a hateful ideology which you personally find reprehensible. What do you do?"
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Jul 14, 2018 17:19
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Zereth posted:Isn't Kenneth Hite pretty right-wing, too? He's just one of those rare people who can actually keep their personal views on such out of their work. Hite appears to be one of the equally rare, indeed nigh-mythical "sane Republicans" who didn't completely lose his poo poo when Obama was elected or Trump came on the scene. One of the interesting things about this whole situation is that a central figure (Hite) has far more information about their personal life and views available to us than we're used to, by virtue of around 400 hours of wide-ranging podcasts with a liberal co-host that have segments developed explicitly to politics and world affairs, and how they might be turned to gaming purposes, recorded during both the Obama and Trump eras. Among other things, we know he's a hawk, said the GOP lineup for 2016 were not "actual Republicans," has an immense hate-on for Stalin and Hitler and their followers, believes in anthropogenic climate change, openly mocks MRAs, did an entire segment on the absurdity of Pizzagate, believed Trump was a dangerous buffoon before the election and is completely convinced he's a Russian asset of some variety now, and makes despairing commentary on the slide of America into dysfunctional Fascism for Dummies on a weekly basis. In short, he's what we would have considered a "moderate Republican" in the pre-Tea Party era (a thing that has virtually ceased to exist now) by virtue of his climate change beliefs if nothing else, and is being left further and further behind by his party, but who hasn't had the Overton Window shift far enough to turn him into an actual Democrat. Qoey posted:I like this as an ethical scenario. Is it cool if I borrow it and throw it at some of my friends to see what they'd think? Go for it! I'd be curious to know their answers are, too, if you and they are comfortable with that.
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Jul 15, 2018 19:21
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With Burning Wheel, it's important to keep in mind that yeah, your campaign setup and chargen is going to take an entire session even with Charred helping out, and if it takes less than that you're probably doing it wrong. BW is a game meant to be played in long campaigns though, unlike Mouse Guard or Apocalypse World, so the "chargen to time played" ratio comes out pretty favorably if you're using the system as intended.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:33
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Engaging with the OSR community also runs you into the problem of finding great creators who seem like they're people you want to support and even have discussions with, only to discover that they're friends / acquaintances with or quietly supportive of absolute scumbags, either because they don't want to be blacklisted or because they have blinders on.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:47
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Mors Rattus posted:(Ender's Game is, funnily enough, extremely easy to read Ender as gay, but Card would and has outright rejected this reading with intense anger.) The anger is intense because it hits too close to home, given that Card is likely either a bisexual or gay closeted pedophile. See: Songmaster.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:53
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moths posted:Mearls also tried to recapture that lightning in 5e with Penny Arcade (and the other webcomics guy I forget,) which led to them being bored and disappointed when their (non-Wizard) characters lost all agency. This is also because Mearls is a terrible DM. I vividly recall the one and only time I attended a live Acquisitions Incorporated show at PAX, where the start of the session had the party being flown by dracolich to the adventure site - and Mearls had the players roll to get on the dragon. Naturally, at least one character failed, I think even repeatedly. The session came to a screeching halt because they had to make numerous identical rolls with no stakes, in a venue with sharply limited playing time, in front of a live audience.
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Mar 19, 2019 07:41
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thefakenews posted:That was Chris Perkins, not Mearls. Thanks for the correction, I have a bad habit of conflating those two in my head. thespaceinvader posted:Mearls was the one who, in the playtest streams, had players repeatedly attempt, and fail, WIS checks to look at walls, to find the plot. ... and apparently there's good reason for that.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:51
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moths posted:Here's a good example of Luke turning a basic mechanic into a TED Talk: Except shade actually does have a number of mechanical interactions beyond difficulty, which can get extremely consequential, like weapons of a higher shade ignoring armor of a lower shade, and damage of an insufficiently high shade being incapable of harming things of a higher shade, etc. Advancing your abilities and items into higher shades is the ultimate form of advancement in the game. Burning Wheel with all its bits and bobs fully engaged is complex, and it's impossible to learn the system without actually playing a lot of hours and reading the (thankfully now-restored) BWHQ forums, but the shade mechanics aren't exactly complicated: they're just clearly part of content you didn't read.
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Apr 11, 2019 00:57
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Leperflesh does technical documentation for a living IIRC so frankly, he knows what he's talking about and John Q. Gamer probably doesn't. At that price point, I'd buy it and I don't even intend to publish anything.
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May 9, 2019 23:09
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When I was a tiny babby D&D player I bought one of early-90s runs of the Zocchihedron, the red one with the white numerals, after being enthralled by the sight of it under glass at my comic store. D&D parents, if your tiny humans also play RPGs I highly recommend a Zocchi d100 as a novelty gift, because for an eight or nine year old rolling a die that barely fits in your palm is a delight. Mine eventually broke open along the seam after a too-aggressive roll sent it flying off the table and into a wall. Mom glued it back together, bless her well-intentioned heart, but she misaligned the casing and the inner sphere, and it never rolled properly after that.
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May 21, 2019 19:36
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Angrymog posted:It goes off on a 40k derail in the middle. When you find that, skip ahead a few pages. Repeat these instructions every time this derail occurs.
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Jun 3, 2019 08:19
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FordCQC posted:Yeah this made me not want to buy anything Larian puts out in the future. The odds are good that no one at Larian has any idea about Zak, or Mearls, or that whole disgusting mess. Letting them know on Twitter would be amusing though, since it might force them to acknowledge it and keep Mearls off of future stages, or even provoke his long-awaited response. Not super likely, I imagine, but you never know.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:48
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Some big blowup happened on Twitter regarding John Harper and DungeonCommandr, which was significant enough to cause Harper to issue what looks a comprehensive apology, but somehow left no trace of the actual... Argument? Comment? Behavior? Both people seem to have deleted the original tweets. Does anyone have any idea what this is about?
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Jul 11, 2019 18:08
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Liquid Communism posted:Tolkien was trying to write them like the Eddas. They need to be read aloud. This is especially the case for The Silmarillion. On the page, it has a reputation for being inaccessible and dry, but it absolutely comes alive when read aloud. Thankfully, the audiobook version is one of the best audio adaptations I've heard in two decades of listening to the drat things, I can't recommend it highly enough.
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Jul 17, 2019 02:13
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Say what one will about filk (my guilty pleasure), the end of Dawson's Christian is genuinely chilling in a spooky campfire ghost story way, and if I ever get a chance to use that scene in a game I'm going to do it.
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Jan 4, 2020 19:17
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Leraika posted:Carmen Miranda's Ghost is great and I will near nothing bad about it. I of all people will not throw stones about filk. The very first album I owned as a little kid was this magical thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9NPlbTyU40 Meguey Baker has mentioned talking to the creators of ElfQuest about doing a modern RPG for them, one that isn't using the Runequest engine of all things, but they haven't been able to make it happen yet. Talk about a game whose time has come, culturally. There was a time when "our elves are universally pansexual, frequently polyamorous / engaged in relationship anarchy, and have notable trans themes" would have been unpublishable; now, it's something you can put in bold on the Kickstarter.
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Jan 8, 2020 07:05
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Absurd Alhazred posted:He's literally still GMing on streams, so I don't think he's taking any steps at all. He's sure not making the apology prominent on his twitter feed, either. It's understandable that he's still GMing on streams, because those streams are contractual obligations, and they're how he makes almost 100% of his income. Adam's one of the vanishingly few RPG streamers who was successful enough at it to quit his day job, so it's no surprise that he needs to keep doing the thing he's being paid for even in the midst of a PR crisis. Watching that scene, it strikes me that I have been at tables that could have worked their way through it to an end people were comfortable with, whether that's through safety tools or a hard break in the game to talk it over. It is profoundly uncomfortable content, but not unapproachable. But, those games weren't being streamed live to an audience of thousands, with a cast of people who are being paid to be on that stream, and whose strongest professional instinct is "Never Interrupt the Stream." Safety tools weren't developed for that environment, and I strongly suspect the ones we currently have don't work there. Hard breaks in a streamed game because someone is uncomfortable go against the nature of the cast and the format. This is weird new territory for the industry, a place where our tabletop instincts and the demands of professional independent broadcasting are incompatible, and it's becoming increasingly clear how far we have to go before we can reconcile them.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:54
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Absurd Alhazred posted:If One Bookshelf collapses I still have all my PDFs from them. When DnDBeyond collapses all the money you spend there is gone. How's that for accessibility? Fixed. If a file is not residing on your hard drive or in a physical backup medium in your home / storage unit / bank safety deposit box, you will lose it over a long enough time horizon, and D&DBeyond is doomed the moment it's no longer profitable. One day even Steam will go belly-up, and set off an archival disaster for video games. If you care about having something in the long term, you need physical possession of it, or the closest digital equivalent.
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May 9, 2020 19:52
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Zurui posted:I just wanted to interrupt this thread to say how sweet and wonderful it is that the Bakers troll the tags for their games on Twitter so they can like and comment (positively) on people's play experiences. Meguey Baker in particular is one of the nicest people on the planet, a whirlwind of positive energy. If you're ever at Big Bad Con and manage to get up on one of the balcony areas or have a room overlooking the lobby, you can tell where she is by the convection cell patterns of people swirling around her as she tries valiantly to cross a room in under 90 minutes while Vincent sort of smiles bemusedly.
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May 20, 2020 18:58
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Contract writing for roleplaying games has got to be in the top 10 worst ways to "survive under capitalism."
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May 22, 2020 18:00
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homullus posted:I think the point was that the way they treat you and pay you with that job sucks, and should be much better, which is why it's a bad way to survive under capitalism. It's not that DC made a bad choice in taking the job. This was my meaning, yes. There are maybe a couple hundred people on Earth, tops, who can survive in TTRPG production as a full-time living, and every single one of them would be financially better off doing something else. Frankly, they should be doing something else if it puts them in precarious financial straits - suffering for your art isn't worth it, go find a role that will pay you a viable wage and make your art on the side as time allows. That shouldn't be the way of things, but it is. As for DC, I don't know enough about them or their work to say whether they made a bad choice in working for WotC, though it wouldn't surprise me. If you have the resume to get picked up by WotC, you have the resume to go somewhere that will pay you better, albeit for non-RPG-related work. They're gunning to be one of those couple hundred people, and the odds aren't good.
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May 23, 2020 01:18
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I suspect these statements are written the way they are because no apology has ever been sufficient to actually improve the situation, so it's better to say something cautious, then drop off the face of the earth for a while. I'm curious, has there been a single case of someone loving up, issuing an apology that was actually broadly accepted by the aggrieved parties and the public at large, and then getting to resume their careers / lives while making positive changes in their behavior? Not just in tradgames, but in any field?
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Jun 19, 2020 07:39
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Thranguy posted:Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff isn't on the podcast list (wonder if they declined on the 'enough already' principle or fell off naturally.) So we'll finally have something else get gold this year. Ken and Robin are hosting this year, so I suspect they bowed out of being nominees. Great to see Sleepaway up there as a Judges' Spotlight winner, it deserves it.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:26
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I feel sorry for the people in companies like Games Workshop who are generating institutional change basically by sheer force of will, dragging these companies kicking and screaming against decades of cultural inertia, who then read threads like this and find that their efforts are considered all but worthless because it's not fast enough, or not happening in someone's specific area of concern. It must be exhausting to try to do good, and have negative feedback heaped on you by your allies. In conclusion, gently caress Arch, good job Games Workshop, keep it up, do as much as you can as fast as you can.
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Jul 5, 2020 00:26
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dwarf74 posted:the dude does a lot of stream of consciousness stuff, and probably found this a bit amusing. I really don't think there's anything more to it. It's this. If you've read any of his published work, none of that looks in the least bit sinister.
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Jul 15, 2020 18:31
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In an effort to nip this one in the bud and prevent a useless re-litigating of events on an offsite Discord, here's the answer to your question PST: the only other TradGames Discord is TGD Boardgoons, which is specifically for boardgames. If that interests you, someone can hook you up with an invite, I don't have the link handy.
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Jul 28, 2020 21:14
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Are we going to ignore the fact that the product is called "Stark Naked Neo Savages & Sanguine City States vol 4" ? Is savages a word we can still use, because I was pretty sure that one went out of use well before "mad."
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Aug 13, 2020 23:37
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