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To continue the discussion of indie publishing from the prior thread, I backed the Stars Without Numbers revised kickstarter, and not only is it the only kickstarter I've ever backed that delivered ahead of schedule, it also gave out regular updates without missing a beat, and they were all helpful and informative. So yeah, if Kevin Crawford is going full-time off his work I'm really not surprised why. He also didn't address his backers in a creepy wizard voice, so that's a plus.
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Feb 15, 2018 13:30
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senrath posted:Pretty sure it was just that ARB typoed it once and it stuck. I assumed it was him implying that Starfinder was a big middle finger to innovation, but like any true art multiple interpretations will occur. dwarf74 posted:I can believe that Starfinger is doing pretty well. Time will tell if it's a long-term success, but I think it's smart to focus on sci-fi since D&D is evidently eating their lunch on the fantasy side. Starfinder is also useful as a back door to retcon in middling rules updates when they inevitably publish the adventure path that explains what happened to Golarion. Plenty of opportunity there to include supplemental books with "conversion guides" to port all your favorite vanilla Pathfinder classes, monsters, and items to new Starfinder rules. Wow!
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Feb 15, 2018 20:56
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Captain Rufus posted:50 bucks is expensive as poo poo for a book to a normal person as even most gorgeous coffee table books don't get past this normally and even videogame strategy guides are cheap as hell. And then told you might need more of them and still just get berated for not playing Popular Thing X? Yeah. And don't forget online isn't the real world. Even most gamers never go to RPGnet or listen to Fear the Boot, much less know or give a poo poo about the smaller places. (Which may be a good thing in the former. Not so much in the latter unless they all lost their minds over the last year or so.) "Normal" people don't buy the PHB when they're jumping into a friend's D&D game after The Adventure Zone made it sound fun. They borrow the book from the GM or maybe if they're lucky one or two players have a copy, too. In online games everyone just shares the PDF that someone (maybe) bought.
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Feb 28, 2018 13:36
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Dancey left Goblinworks to go back to AEG. Lisa Stevens had some consultant come assess the disaster. The consultant told her to finish the game in-house because nobody would want to buy it from them. I think their dev team was reported to be like 5 or less people at this point. The consultant also gave them some optimistic line about how the finished game might find a tiny niche to sustain itself in.
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Feb 28, 2018 13:46
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Lemon-Lime posted:The setting doesn't have to be particularly dystopian for them to exist as entities that are distinct political/economic international actors from governments, have their own private armies to project force with, and interests that they act on that at best don't align with national interests, and at worse are intrinsically inimical to them (which is what they are, which is why they get compared liked that Technically, House Deneith is the only dragonmarked house that has a full, open standing army since that's their whole deal is. It was part of the agreements set up after the War of the Mark that no other houses would maintain their own military force. The big issue is that those rules have started being bent by the other houses over the period of the Last War. House Tharashk has started offering up mercenary groups of monstrous humanoids thanks to their ties to Droaam, and a few other houses are quietly but obviously building up forces, too. The houses are also supposed to be slightly distanced from the royal families of the continent of Khorvaire, and if there's any intermarrying then one side is supposed to give up all claim to their family's fortune and political ties, but people are also doing that a lot less. Like a lot of other elements in Eberron, they're clearly right on the precipice of transforming into full-blown international megacorps, and will probably go that way without PC intervention.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:40
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). Them being cyberpunk-style corporations doesn't require anyone to be *punk, either.
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I hope Paizo takes this time to make an innovative, balanced, streamlined game that is fun and engaging for everyone to play.
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Mar 7, 2018 03:00
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dwarf74 posted:Uh I bolded the big issue here. I will maintain hope that the game is well-designed and artfully executed until the playtest book is leaked and it turns out they just repackaged Pugmire or some unholy crossbreed of 5e and Starfinder.
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Mar 7, 2018 03:36
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Sinteres posted:Yeah, and it's not just because D&D the RPG is its own distinct thing, but because D&D the RPG also became D&D video games, and D&D books, and inspired other games and books, so even people new to roleplaying can come with certain expectations when it comes to what makes a game D&D. I never played 4e, and maybe I would have enjoyed it if I had, but reading the PHB my first reaction really was 'this isn't D&D.' What exactly are the trappings here that 4e dropped that made it so alien and un-D&D-like that Pathfinder/3e retained? What makes Pathfinder/3e a truer inheritor of D&D than 4e? Does 5e bring any of these elements back? Are there any elements that make 4e different besides the whole "a clear attempt to balance the martial and caster classes" that apparently everyone is sick of being dragged up because it's true, and we're not trying to pretend we care that some characters can throttle a game to death easily anymore by existing?
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Mar 10, 2018 05:27
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Sinteres posted:I just had the unoriginal impression that the class abilities seemed to be drawing from MMOs. Maybe that's not how it actually plays, or maybe I saw someone express that idea beforehand and it influenced my thinking, but that was my initial impression either way. If the mmo-y stuff you're talking about is the powers, 4e's clearly delineated at-will, encounter, and daily powers, but that wasn't anything more than a formal, consistent designation of stuff that was already happening constantly in 3e (mostly to casters). People talk about the defender classes having an aggro mechanic, but the way defenders work is actually the opposite of how tanks in WoW work. They're also the most well-designed of the 4e class types, each having an interesting way of reinforcing their defender's mark. Sinteres posted:Abandoning Greyhawk and nuking Forgotten Realms with a bunch of weird poo poo kind of added to the impression that it was a major break with the past (including the numerous books and video games people had read and played set in FR), which 5e obviously tried to remedy by undoing those changes to make FR normal again. Did anyone actually care about Greyhawk? I mean, clearly not because it's still in the pile of abandoned settings for 5e and nobody ever complains about that. I never had any deep attachments to the Forgotten Realms, but I don't see how "rewriting the Forgotten Realms lore.... again" makes 4e not-D&D. Ferrinus posted:The problem is, fans of those games actually and specifically like that the fighter is bad. It's mostly this. You could kind of track fissures forming during 3e between different fan reactions to the balance issues inherent in the system. After a while people tended to fall into one of three camps: 1. The system is broken, here are some extensive house rules to fix it. 2. The system is broken but I love it so much, look at all the wacky things I (probably a caster) can do by stacking a half-dozen prestige classes that were never meant to meet! and 3. The system isn't broken, it's working as intended! And where it's not I can fix it myself! And I think a lot of the differing reactions and the games people drifted to in post-3e impacted how you coped with the system while it was the main game. Zurui posted:No, but I'm saying that it might have been better received. I mean, this is basically how Tome of Battle is written. There were a ton of people that hated the Tome of Battle and everything it stood for. The blowback wasn't massive, being a smaller splat that came in in the later portion of 3e, but it was definitely common to hear people vocally hate on it. It probably would have drawn the same level of rage if they'd actually implemented the rules in a core rulebook like they were soft-tested for. Come to think of it, The Tome of Magic never drew as much heat for its scaled-down casters. Sure, you'd get people who would rightly call the Truenamer a hot mess, or be disappointed by the Shadowcaster, but the Binder got a lot of love. Nobody ever went on huge rants about what a break from tradition the classes were, or how ridiculous and unrealistic their powers were. Any negativity was heavily directed at the lack of playtesting, and even that was a lot more muted. I wonder why... 
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Mar 10, 2018 14:06
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grassy gnoll posted:Ryuutama. No it doesn't. Not in the core book at least.
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Mar 10, 2018 17:44
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spectralent posted:The Binder was cool, to be fair. Oh, yeah, the binder was awesome. I just thought it was interesting that people had no real issue with with the constant attempts to reinvent spellcasters in 3e, but any attempts to give martial class interesting stick hitting stunts gets read as an attempt to turn them into wizards (swordsage's explicit supernatural tricks notwithstanding).
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Mar 10, 2018 21:02
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You can tell a group roleplaying game is good when it gets people into arguments about the semantics of "objective" versus "subjective" rather than discussing how the mechanics of the game undermine its ability to be fun for the whole group.
Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 01:43
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I like the idea of having "simple" classes, but yeah there's no reason that the fighter should always be the simple one while the wizard is the complex one. Then again, it feels like a huge waste to design major mechanical subsystems and only allow one or two classes to engage with a quarter of the rulebook. Let me pitch something: maybe just make every class simple to start with? And then as you level up you can get some kind of advanced class that lets you select extra abilities, unlock some magic, or other powers? And then you hit a higher level and get to choose again? Oh, and drop like, the entire back 10 levels because that just draws poo poo out. We also need.... *peeks at another page of Shadow of the Demon Lord* a small but vicious canine.
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Mar 11, 2018 02:19
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It's one of the many call-backs to WHFRP in Shadow of the Demon Lord, and also a required element of play 
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Mar 11, 2018 02:28
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Kai Tave posted:I don't. I agree that when you mix "complex" and "simple" classes together and try to have them achieve goals more complex than "about equal output in damage/defenses" you're going to gently caress something up for sure. Either the player who likes combing through 30 sourcebooks will get annoyed that all their hard work ends up with exactly the same results as the guy following along the auto-level path, or the "simple" class is really in a 3e fighter/rogue situation and gets overshadowed by more capable classes at every turn. It's still possible to have fun with a situation like that, of course, but bullshitting with friends over beer should always be fun no matter what you're doing. Ideally a game would elevate that fun through its mechanics rather than hold selected players back. moths posted:The best thing to come from this is the reminder that Shadow of the Demon Lord exists. 
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Mar 11, 2018 02:42
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Banana Man posted:What is lfqw? Also what is shadow of the demon lord and 13th age like compared to say dnd 5e? Like others have said, Shadow of the Demon Lord is a darker fantasy rpg. The designer, Rob Schwalb, wrote for both D&D 3e and Warhammer Fantasy stuff, and you can see a lot of elements blended into the game. 13th Age was a sort of simplified 4e D&D-alike from a couple of the 4e devs. Of the two, I'd say that SotDL does a better job on class design across the board, with a pretty simplified tiered progression (you can also just grab another class in the same or lower tier, if you want) and building up an experienced character in a way that feels satisfying without being too bloated. 13th Age's general class balance isn't terrible, but the fighting classes in the core book do struggle to be interesting compared to the casters, oftentimes. 13th Age's introduction of the escalation die during combat is great, though, and its icons are a cool idea that could use some more benefits to really make exciting. The escalation die is just a die you turn to a higher number as combat goes on, giving everone a +X to the roll, where X is the number on the die face. Often you get abilities that can't be used until the escalation die has hit a certain number, too. The icons are like major NPCs/factions in the game that might intervene in the story if certain results are rolled on the icon dice, but all of that is left uncomfortably vauge.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:48
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bewilderment posted:Johnathan Tweet was a lead on 3e, and I wouldn't call it a simplified 4e at all. It shares some bits of design but unless we call "decent power formatting" a type of game design now, it's not really the same thing. I'd call it simplified in that they abstracted the combat, removed skill challenges, cut down the level progression from 30 to 10, removed the skill list and replaced it with backgrounds, drastically cut down on the number of powers, removed the paragon paths and epic destinies in favor of tier talents, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. A lot of the changes in general seem to be a direct response to the assorted, and sometimes contradictory, complaints people had specifically against 4e, too. Fair point though, I misremembered what stuff Jonathan Tweet worked on.
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Mar 11, 2018 04:05
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"I'm terrible at communicating to other humans, or providing simple pitches explaining why these legacy games are bloated messes and more modern games are available within the same genre but with more accessible rules, which is why Pathfinder must continue to exist, you see."
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Mar 12, 2018 02:02
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remusclaw posted:"Why I don't like your favorite game and why mine is better" has never really been a winning pitch. I assume there must be a way to explain stuff to people who want to try a new game that doesn't involve a breathless rant about how terrible everything is, but I have also grown into my couch so it's hard to go outside and test this
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Mar 12, 2018 02:38
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remusclaw posted:Yeah, but as someone else put a bit differently, you gotta put the time in with folks playing the popular games before they like you enough to listen when you tell them that there is a better way. Last gaming group I played with put me off of them before the game did. But well, no gaming before bad gaming, I suppose. I dunno I've never had trouble getting people to play different games, but I'm usually the GM in whatever gaming group I play with. It probably also helps that most people I game with aren't hardcore lifetime D&D players with deep personal investment in the system. I'm sure you'd have a similar problem getting a group that's ultra-deep into the Old World of Darkness setting and system to try out something else. Maybe it's a good reason to pull in new people who haven't sunk a lot of money and emotional energy into their library of wizard tomes?
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Mar 12, 2018 16:08
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The drow themselves pose a problem when adapting their appearence and lore to a film.
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Mar 12, 2018 18:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You're right, he should be happy to be paid in exposure! There's a couple special advantages podcasts of tabletop rpgs have over video game lps or live reads of books. First, unless you're doing a premade adventure, your story is unique and you're not "spoiling" the plot to you're audience. It's not really that different from broadcasting an improv story or radio play because either way you're drawing in listeners who are there for your particular adventure. Second, a lot of those listeners are going to be interested in making their own story with the game and probably base a lot of how they play or GM it on how the podcast ran it. It's a great way to help teach the game to others. But people doing the podcasts should totally be providing links to buy the game from, if the author consents to it.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:06
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Subjunctive posted:I don’t think most of the video game LPs I’ve watched have linked to the game, but maybe I’m misremembering. Probably not but it seems fair to assume people interested enough in video games to watch lets plaus have a pretty goof idea of where to buy video games from. hyphz posted:I think that can be the reverse. What GMing works in a podcast may not work outside one, and what works for people with the talent to be successful podcasters might not work for anyone else. There are some games that straight up wouldn't work in a podcast but I don't see how being able to keep a compelling conversation going on a podcast wouldn't translate well to GMing. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 18:44
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I know that Austin Walker, who GMs the Friends at the Table actual plays, has talked about how some of what they do is consciously about making for an enjoyable show and while it's still fun to play that way, requires effort or choices he wouldn't make if it wasn't being recorded. I mean, cutting out digressions and knowing when to table something in the interest of keeping momentum going are pretty valuable skills to have, even if it's done out of convenience for a podcast. I've listened to FatT and I never felt like something was cut unfairly short just to fit in a time slot. They also play their games in the 2-4 hour recording sessions you'd expect out of an in-home session, and cut them into shorter segments for more digestible episodes. So you reach the fairly natural breakpoints you'd get whenever there's a slowdown in a regular session anyway. Austin strikes me as the type that would probably sit there and go on about all the Deep Lore he'd scribbled in a notebook if he had the time, and even in an irl game it's important to know when to inject that and when to kill your darlings. Mr. Maltose posted:Another example from Friends at the Table, they stop playing Technoir in favor of The Sprawl because when Austin was working on editing an episode with the normal editor he realized that Technoir is a great game to play but pretty dull to listen to passively. The players talked in the postgame about how changing systems to The Sprawl changed how they acted and approached their characters because of the way the character mechanics forced them into approaches. Like I said, not every game is suitable to use in a podcast. The big issue with the Tech/Mechnoir game is they were clearly having trouble adjusting to the tag system and figuring out what adjectives to apply with each roll. Having to hem and haw over every adjective was slowing things down too much. Switching to The Sprawl was more comfortable for all of them because they were already used to playing Dungeon World from their main game. Subjunctive posted:I think Steam for one and DTRPG for the other, if not just googling the name outright maybe with “game” or “rpg” if needed. It would be really good if that was in reality a big barrier to growth, though, because it could be so easily addressed! Is it really that controversial to say that the vast majority of adults and children old enough to hold a controller could name 5 different places to buy or rent a video game easily, but would have no idea where to get 13th Age? Yes they could google it, that was already brought up. It's also easier to convince people to try out an obscure product if it's linked right there? I'm not siding with GMS on how this will be the death of RPGs. It's a nice courtesy to link if you like the game enough to promote it like that. hyphz posted:Player (and GM) motivation, for one thing. If a player’s favourite PC dies in a private game, it’s annoying and upsetting for them. If it’s a podcasted game, they can spin it as a “plot twist” for podcast listeners. A few free copies and advertising bucks make up for a lot, including - possibly - not really liking the game that much. Cynically killing off characters or pulling punches because of fear of fan backlash isn't really what I was thinking of when I meant it would help people GM better. I meant getting a basic handle on the rules themselves. Some of the GMs and players on the podcasts are pretty great at improv or creating interesting character motivations that could help new players out a lot, too. theironjef posted:This is tricky for us because a lot of the games we review are legitimately hard to find anyway. But when they are on DTRPG, we have a link right there on the site and we know people are using it (because we get 5% if they buy something). Feel free to not link to games that you hate or are provably trash in some way! That is a perfectly legit reason to refuse to do so. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 00:36
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That video stripped the outer layer of my skin off my body
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Mar 14, 2018 05:14
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Does Green Ronin still have some sort of working relationship with Suleiman? I don't get why you wouldn't drop his rear end as fast as possible at this point. Oh right, then that'd be them admitting some kind of serious fault.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:22
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Warthur posted:If they think CAS was behaving acceptably, then why don't they just continue working with him? The obvious answer is "massive public disapproval", but they're incredibly naive if they think that this policy would be welcomed with open arms, and since they're giving every impression of not really believing that what CAS did was harassment they just look like they lack the courage of their convictions. It's because at least a few people are aware that there's too much evidence against CAS to dismiss, but they don't want to admit that working with him has publicly undermined every progressive gesture they've made in recent history, or deal with the fallout on all sides from roasting his rear end. This terrible harassment policy lets them claim they're listening, and any criticism of it can be met with "Woah, look, this is just a draft! At least we're trying!" while also producing a policy that would retroactively vindicate them because the case against CAS didn't follow it at any step.
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Mar 17, 2018 16:38
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Can we please do anything besides turning this thread into a something sensitive-lite for another website again? How about we drag the argument about the kickstarter for the "spanish conquistadors and aztecs fight dinosaurs" with its "I'm not a racist!" skill here from the kickstarter thread? It came with a side of "how Confederate-apologetic was Firefly, really?"
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Mar 17, 2018 17:29
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Kurieg posted:I mean, the guys from the New Day do let's plays in their spare time and once did their ring entrance in Saiyan battle armor. In Black Panther, Michael B Jordan had his Killmonger outfit modeled on Vegeta's armor. Yes, this does mean he was cosplaying for a large portion of a major superhero blockbuster film. dwarf74 posted:Yup! It's a small guest spot as a sage lady in one of the best episodes of the series, where we learned all about the first Avatar, Wan. She had a VA cameo in season 3 of the original show too.
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Mar 29, 2018 16:07
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dwarf74 posted:I'm impressed that ENWorld was willing to put itself out there, frankly. They probably felt compelled to act since they were running a weekly column for him and this prompted them to remove it
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May 1, 2018 21:46
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He does admit right at the end of his massive post that he's been an inappropriate creep before, but he knows it was bad now so there's no way those lying harpies are correct about the recent incidentsquote:Some, however, will remember my behaviors from years ago and have little difficulty assuming some of this is true.
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May 2, 2018 00:47
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Dawgstar posted:I have no idea what 'loudly woke' companies he's claiming have less representation that WotC but I will assume it's the 'ones he doesn't like' so all of them. It could be Paizo depending on how "indie" it counts as nowadays. Probably Evil Hat, too, because Zak has a special grudge against them and I've seen Zak defenders attack them for having a hypocritical lack of diversity. I don't know enough about their staff to say if that's true or not.
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May 17, 2018 19:31
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To turn this away from anime chat and back onto industry issues, John Harper just admitted on kickstarter and Google+ that all of the hacks that were unlocked as stretch goals on his Blades in the Dark kickstarter were actually unpaid favors between friends. The final rules took two extra years to come out, but presumably the unpaid nature is also contributing to the reason why only 1 stretch goal is near final publication, and only two others are known to be anywhere close to done. https://twitter.com/Ettin64/status/1001314763165515777 https://twitter.com/Ettin64/status/1001328539260538880 If anyone wants an idea of how many were promised, I posted the information in the Blades thread here So, I guess the lesson here is kickstarter backers reasonably assume if you unlock something as a stretch goal, money will be used to pay for it. Also, pay the writers you promote for doing a service to you? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 13:23 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 13:18
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That's true. There's been a ton of projects over the years that received intense backlash for reneging on stretch goals. I wonder if Harper can even account for where all the excess money went to if not for the stretch goal funding?
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May 29, 2018 14:12
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Mors Rattus posted:Wait, six are out? I thought most of them remained undelivered. Like Serf said, he's counting all of the stretch goals like adding the Leech and Spider to the core book, not just 16ish full rules/setting revision hacks.
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May 30, 2018 01:11
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potatocubed posted:The shortlists are chosen by the judges (from all the products that are submitted to them by publishers). In addition to this, last year there was a dedicated OSR judge on panel that helped lobby for OSR stuff, which was a big factor in how Blood in the Chocolate became an Ennie-winner. They probably still do. It's a system that has a pretty easy exploit that nobody really cared about before because the Ennies were just "best d20 thing" for most of their lifetime. e- Yeah, the same judge is on the 2018 list. Here's Raggi bragging about him last year:  Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 04:31
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Middenarde bought some ads on these forums recently and I can't help but wonder why
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Jul 6, 2018 19:17
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Kurieg posted:Midden nards guy requested purple to do a new f&f of his book and coincidentally bought an ad during that time frame. So no more dick shoes and bird-based labor forces? Why even bother...
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Jul 6, 2018 19:39
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Haha the article suggests SIGMATA as an alternative game to support
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Jul 9, 2018 19:38
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quote:Due to – What feminist gaming critic went off on the article?
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Jul 10, 2018 17:27
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