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

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

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Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

In some ways, it's not really surprising that we're seeing more professional Kickstarters. It's no longer a new model so the pitfalls are more clearly known and there are increasingly formalized best practices. You also have a lot more KS veterans coming around to their third or fourth campaign, and you're seeing more cases where those experienced campaign runners are helping out new creators too. That's more prevalent in the video game space, where KS manager is rapidly becoming an actual job title, but you do see it in table top as well. And creators who had the chops to succeed without KS are turning to it, and they generally start at a more professional level in the first place.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 14:28

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 20:21

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Not in this timeline.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 03:02

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Chapo Trap House got accused of being ableist for not having podcast transcripts.

It happens.

While there�s something to be said for accessibility, there are so many other things those idiots are actually guilty of, there�s no need to gild the lily.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2018 08:53

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Captain Rufus posted:

You really don�t have the first clue what you�re talking about, do you?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 05:55

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

Apparently not on a 1 for 1 exchange and in some cases only $30 for several hundred dollars of pledges. There's also, allegedly, half a million dollars in unaccounted for money that hasn't been commented on too. I'm pretty sure this will kill Palladium because people are already talking about class action lawsuits, which they have a very strong case for.

Worse it pretty much admits outright that they were acting in bad faith regarding the Wave 2 stuff. All the KS caveats about risk etc., are pretty strongly predicated on good faith effort. Based even on the sanitized for public consumption version, there�s a strong whiff of malfeasance going on here, over and above the usual incompetence driven cratering.

If Siembeda had a corporate lawyer - which I doubt - they�d be pulling their hair out over that post.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 19:14

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Pretty much the only pantheon that's anywhere near as clearly delineated as the typical TTRPG example is the Greek one. And even that is largely due to two layers of obsessive categorization and rationalization (first the Academy and then the Romans) that came in long after the basic structure of the mythos was laid out.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 17:57

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Scott Westerfield's Leviathan series is pretty good, Cherie Priest's stuff tends to be solid, China Mi�ville's Bas-Lag stuff has a lot of steam punk in it. It's not the core pitch for Dread Nation but it's definitely of that era, and I've heard good things.

Basically there's still a lot of crap in steampunk and dieselpunk and as fashion/lifestyle movements they remain full of awful people, but there's an increasing body of works that are worth checking out. In part because people are pushing back at the white colonialist fantasy and using the backdrop to tell the kind of stories that should be told in it.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2018 20:05

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

It�s not that it�s just an aesthetic. It�s not as if *punk has a monopoly on its themes, it�s a matter of how those themes are implemented.

In Eberron�s case, the trick is that by default every time it can choose between the punk and the pulp presentation on a given theme, it leans towards the pulp one.

But a DM could pretty easily go the other with it.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2018 14:14

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I am deep in the schadenfreude now. It sustains me.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 02:37

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Saw my first "they turned PF into an MMO" take already, and I just live for this.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 17:56

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

LongDarkNight posted:

It's like a normal spell list, but it goes to 10.

Goes to eleven.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 18:08

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Thomamelas posted:

Link please? I know someone who would have so much glee at this.

It was in a Discord chat so unfortunately I can�t link it. The comment was spurred by the suggestion on Paizo�s podcast that they�d move away from spell slots to some sort of casting cool down mechanic.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 19:06

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

When wizards do everything, that's Pathfinder.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 22:07

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

LongDarkNight posted:

The D&D Next vs Pathfinder edition warring on Facebook is .

Let_them_fight.gif

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 22:12

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Liquid Communism posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzI1UvlQqw

I like this video as an example. Guys in firefighting bunker gear, modern military armor, and full plate run the same obstacle course.

I have got to keep that video in my back pocket, it's a great practical example for how hard it is to move in full harness. And I love that it draws a good comparison with modern military load outs and bunker gear, since for whatever reason folks tend to have a more intuitive grasp of what those are like. The bunker gear in particular makes me grin, because I used to game with someone who was a volunteer firefighter and did SCA on weekends, and he always made that specific comparison when trying to explain what wearing armor was like.

Though the major issue is people thinking someone in plate is nearly immobile and can't even get back on their feet if you knock them over, a lot of people swing way too far the other way when they find out it isn't like that. They act like plate isn't any worse than wearing a heavy jacket. Which is also bullshit - moving in armor is difficult and exhausting. That video really hammers home the right expectation level, and subtly makes the point as to why the trade off makes sense.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2018 23:38

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Darwinism posted:

So 2E AD&D had the player's options books that were very polarizing and morphed into 3E and 3E had Bo9S (and Star Wars: Saga to be fair) that was similarly polarizing and morphed into 4E and 4E had Essentials which was, again, polarizing and turned into 5E we must now put bets on what 5E release will be turned into 6E.

None. 5E is the last edition of D&D, in fact the last RPG, WotC will publish in house. In a couple years they'll chop the property up and license out the table top portion to someone (probably FFG). They'll keep the books, video games, and other media part for themselves because that's worth way more than the TTRPG.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2018 21:29

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

Just make Drizzt purple and cast all the human & dwarf characters as black. I'm sure the FR grogs would be fine with it.

Sadly any chance of their heads literally exploding was dashed when it didn't happen due to Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2018 18:56

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

moths posted:

Didn't WW try to burn down their LARP communities for similar reasons?

It was more the reverse.

I think I covered that whole mess in the last thread, I'll see if I can find it.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 17:02

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Found it:

quote:

Essentially, The Camarilla leadership wanted to make money off White Wolf's IP and didn't want to pay White Wolf for that privilege, and they didn't think White Wolf could tell them what to do with the IP, or had any standing to say what the club could or couldn't do, even as they claimed to be the official fan club and thus directly benefited from that relationship.

Now, some of The Camarilla's concerns weren't totally crazy. There was an argument over whether White Wolf owned the member lists and some other documents and records that had been created entirely by the people running The Camarilla. That's an aspect worth thinking about. Fans produce things in parallel to the IP they're fans of all the time, and it's an important question as to how much ownership the IP holder can exert over that.

But where The Camarilla totally lost the plot is they essentially tried to operate as a separate business from White Wolf. Even if they really had just been an appreciation society, that's shaky ground. In The Camarilla's case, it was patently obvious that it's entire existence was based on directly engaging with White Wolf's product, and even the service they provided was impossible to disentangle from White Wolf's products. Everything they had was a derivative work. On top of that they wanted to bar White Wolf from setting up a new fan club operation. So they wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to make money off White Wolf's IP and prevent White Wolf from making money with the same service, and didn't want to pay White Wolf or take any direction from White Wolf while doing so.

There were a couple of legitimate grievances members of The Camarilla could bring against how White Wolf handled things, but most of those had been exacerbated by the club's leadership. Those problems were never really part of the disagreement between White Wolf and the club leadership, but got held up as pretty obvious attempt to gain sympathy. In the end the whole thing was driven by greed and a sense of entitlement by The Camarilla's leadership at the time, and probably fear that White Wolf would remove them for the lovely way they'd been running things (not misplaced, but also largely their own fault).

Sadly White Wolf really didn't do much to fix the legitimate problems the club had, though by accounts the leadership they put in place was less aggressively awful.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 17:40

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Nuns with Guns posted:

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.

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.

IIRC the particular thing he mentioned is that there's less room to meander around in the game/world, and that having to push things forward so much can work to the detriment of certain styles of play.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 19:01

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Wallis has more of a legitimate argument, though I think he's framing it the wrong way - both in terms of how he's making it and in how he's thinking about it.

Skarka is entirely and hilariously full of poo poo as per usual though.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 19:48

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Yeah I don't think that's a thing.

More realistically, you do get things like "I'm going to go along with plan X in the interests of getting an episode done and because we'll have fun shenanigans along the way and the audience will appreciate it" when maybe a non-recorded game you'd talk it out for another ten minutes.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 20:15

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Another thing that's different with actual plays that I've heard talked about: the GM has to be more cognizant of ending at a place that makes for a good episode. Not only does that influence pacing a lot, but it sometimes means the group will push through another half hour to get to an end point when in a home game you'd just call it a night.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 21:03

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

hyphz posted:

And that, from some casts, means more deus ex Machina episode endings - and players who are more tolerant of them, because they have an interest in the podcast succeeding too.

Honestly, it�s just a question of asking �would these people still play, and play like this, if the mic was gone?� And the answer is often, at best, �Umm.�

I think in most cases "still play" is a yes, and the "no"s are more about people who just wouldn't have the time if it wasn't also for a production, and to a certain extent they Trojan horsed some tabletop time into their schedule. You do get APs where they assemble unusual groups specifically for that, where you'd never have that collection as a home game, but even that generally has a lot more to do with logistics than anything else. At this point no one is doing APs just for the paycheck.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 21:27

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

6ungeons & 6ragons

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 16:21

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Again I feel like this has to be contrasted with the ~~Critical Role~~ One Shot situation, which had an wildly unexpected outcome but because of the pains they took to create reasonable standards and avoid conflict of interest, that outcome remains credible.

This STOP concept not only seems like it would require an even greater commitment of resources to enact while being way less effective.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Mar 14, 2018

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 17:30

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

gnome7 posted:

Did you actually mean the One Shot situation, or did Critical Role also have a harassment claim that they managed well that I didn't hear about?

My bad, I meant One Shot. Did not get enough sleep last night.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 17:47

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Bedlamdan posted:

What basically owns about this post is that even though Green Ronin may have gotten rid of the rape-man, they can still be treated as if the rape-man is still present and/or actively being endorsed because we can�t trust anything they may say after loving up the first time. Unfucking themselves is unattainable, any attempt is always going to be in bad faith.

In retrospect the last paragraph comes off as kind of bitchy sounding, but I want to add that I actually do this sort of thing all the time, and I love it.

It's kind of incredible how unaware you are that you're an evil piece of poo poo.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 19:19

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Bedlamdan posted:

I�m not even saying you�re obliged to trust Green Ronin, fam. gently caress them, I have zero investment in them as a consumer, and them being hated is at least at least funny for me!

It�s just that, even if they do try to change things now or later on, I can still continue to poo poo on them for loving up in the first place. They mishandled Suleiman, and being honest, no truly good person would have hosed up like that in the first place.

What the gently caress are you even saying at this point?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 20:08

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

dwarf74 posted:

Hah hah! It is funny you see! I was only pretending to be a bad ~~poster~~ person!

Ftfy

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 20:36

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Worth keeping in mind: Pandemic literally uses the Risk board and components and remixes what they're for, so there's definitely room for something like that, in terms of market and legality.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 17:00

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I think it's more that concept's equally evil twin, "sexual harassment is bad, but what my friends are doing isn't harassment because they don't mean anything bad by it, they're harmless really."

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 21:11

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Thesis: Character Sheets
Antithesis: Deck of Cards
Synthesis: Deck of Cards w/Character Sheet
Apothesis: Wearing a fedora with your character name written on an index card and stuck in it

This actually existed in a nascent form as the CCG Arcadia, which I still have fond memories of. It's also a White Wolf game, so possibly either the source of Rein*Heigen's idea or someone there heard one of his rants and decided to make an actual game out of it. A surprisingly enjoyable one too.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Mar 28, 2018

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 21:58

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I'm pretty sure Mark worked on that one (out of like four designers). It has a lot of ahead-of-its-time design but really suffered from the fact it was marketed to the CCG market yet really, really didn't fit the CCG mold. It really just suffered if you didn't happen to have a full set, wasn't particularly targeted at the quick head-to-head competitive play one expected from a CCG, and it had no real support or hoook to build the community it needed. It had neat ideas bolted onto some really bad trendchasing.

It would make a great LCG, but I have no idea what state the IP rights are in.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 03:00

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

The show suffered a lot from not knowing it was going to get a second season. It changed how S1 ended, then S2 was a mess because they didn't have time to really prepare, and then S3 ended up having to soft reboot a lot of things.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 14:30

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Slimnoid posted:

Yes.

Let's be honest, it should count twice.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2018 01:21

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

NinjaDebugger posted:

If liking jojos is wrong, I never want to be right.

It didn't say it was wrong, just that if it's Jojos and you're counting anything, Jojos counts as two.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2018 05:53

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I don't think either of the KS aspects are going to hold up or are even good ideas. A much better critique is KS should have hard limits about how many projects someone can start in a certain period of time and do some additional examination when someone who has existing campaigns in the fulfillment stage starts a new one, to make sure they're actually fulfilling their prior commitments. And to be more aggressive in booting scammers in general.

All of which KS has improved on in the years since Whitman did his thing. They could stand to improve further and be more transparent about their process, but honestly KS seems to be pretty above-board.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 13:51

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

Helping facilitate a backer-driven lawsuit in cases where one is appropriate seems like the least that kickstarter could do to combat grifters on its platform. That doesn't mean giving out contact information to anyone who asks but allowing messages to be sent to backers in cases of that seems totally reasonable.

I agree with this, my point is to the specific issue raised in the suit. I don't think KS is going to have much trouble arguing that it was in the right to not provide that list of backers. It'd be a stronger point if they flipped the priority. Stress the desire for communication between affected parties, and use the non-response to the demand letter as the specific incident - "KickStarter did not provide a list of backers, propose an alternative contact method, or provide any facility for affected parties to coordinate." As is the wording pretty clearly implies the list is the crux of their complaint.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 20:42

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 20:21

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

There's that too. Having a forum that isn't directly moderated by the project creator is probably something KS should do, but past that KS is not only exposing themselves to a lot of liability, they're pushing into territory I wouldn't want them making decisions on, even if was trying to deal with a scam project.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2018 03:12

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

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