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Thread title should be "TG As An Industry: Failing Forward" imo.
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Feb 15, 2018 10:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Surprised nobody brought up Paizo when it comes to profitable RPG companies. Paizo is a successful RPG company and they're also something of an outlier these days, they aren't a model that anyone else can really hope to replicate since a fair chunk of their success is largely due to unique circumstances.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:21
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Every successful RPG company has unique circumstances. Only one company got to sign Eastman & Laird before they were millionaires. Only one company figured out how to get punks with literal mohawks to color in multiple-choice character tests. Only one company had just gotten enough money from colored cardboard to buy out TSR when they were failing. I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement. Every exceptional success is an exception by definition. My point is that Paizo can get away with having a more traditional, older style business model of having full time employees, an actual headquarters, etc. because of the circumstances surrounding their establishment as a breakaway RPG publisher. The post which kicked off this tangent about what constitutes a successful RPG business was one that held Onyx Path up as an example of a company "on life support" which is pretty foolish and short-sighted imo, defining success in RPG publishing terms as "has an actual headquarters and full time employees and a CEO" means that nobody except Paizo and WotC qualify as "successful," which is obviously not a very accurate way of looking at how the hobby had transitioned into a different sort of model over the years. No, I doubt that Kevin Crawford brings in as much money as Paizo or WotC do, but claiming that he isn't successful because he does his thing thanks to crowdfunding is wrongheaded, and the same goes for Onyx Path, Arc Dream/Greg Stolze, Evil Hat, etc.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:26
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Rose Bailey was in charge of spearheading the Scion revision, wasn't she? Is that all wrapped up then, or did she hand it off to someone else?
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Feb 28, 2018 21:51
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Mors Rattus posted:Scion has been under the direction of Neall Price since basically the start. Ah okay, my mistake then, I remember her releasing some statements regarding their efforts to not make it a total fuckfest with racist undertones like the last one and so I assumed she would be supervising it.
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Feb 28, 2018 21:59
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Xelkelvos posted:You'd also think that the religion/mythology that's based around being an organized and bureaucratic system would also be extremely organized, but that's not quite the case either. That actually makes sense, though.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:43
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Oh Kevin, no sweetie.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:27
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LuiCypher posted:I feel like dieselpunk is a term that the designer of said bad RPG created because he wanted to do steampunk... but better! And different! Nah, it's been around for a while. A decade at least, maybe more.
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Mar 2, 2018 23:23
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palecur posted:Best advice I got from this forum was running Eberron with the Marked Houses as cyberpunk corps. Tbh I see this as kind of an odd fit. Eberron isn't really dystopian enough out of the box to really make that take work without changing some things, and while the Houses have a lot of power they aren't really supplanting the governments of the world the way the quintessential cyberpunk megacorporate entity is. Eberron isn't really very punk in general imo. It has some elements you could play up if you wanted to go for that angle, the disenfranchisement of warforged and the various "monstrous" races within the Five Nations are the main thing that spring to mind, or maybe if you set a game in Riedra you could do something along those lines although that's much more out-and-out espionage/resistance against a psionic nightmare cult masquerading as a benevolent nation.
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Mar 4, 2018 11:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You know, when Palladium started selling "Raw Preview" editions of their books - basically the final draft without the art or layout, I was like "Ha ha, that's so funny, that you would think I would buy an unfinished book, ha ha, what a ridiculous company. Ha ha." Steam does it all the time.
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Mar 7, 2018 22:23
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Are we really going to rehash the greatest edition warring hits of 2008 a decade on? It's kind of mind-blowing how much traction the "it's an MMO!" meme has.
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Mar 10, 2018 09:07
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Sinteres posted:It's definitely normal to be this pissy about a dead game. Maybe, just maybe, consider the possibility that you're saying really stupid poo poo instead of being the One Insightful, Rational Poster in a room full of people so dumb and goddamn crazy.
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Mar 10, 2018 09:19
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Sinteres posted:I admitted I didn't play the game, so I'm not claiming to have any special insight here. No, you're just regurgitating the same dumb bullshit from 10 years ago then acting like everyone's being unreasonably mean to you when they don't decide to give it a fair shake this time. Nobody here is impressed in the eleventy millionth "I never played [GAME], but let me give you my personal hot takes on it."
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Mar 10, 2018 09:23
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Sinteres posted:Where did you get the idea that 4e was the best selling edition of D&D at the time? The only quote I saw was someone saying the industry goes through highs and lows and 4e wasn't selling as well as 3e had. Per Mike Mearls, every edition of D&D has sold more than the edition beforehand. 3E sold more than 2E, 4E sold more than 3E, etc. His stated aim with 5E was to magnify that growth instead of simply the small but steady rise that's standard, but whether or not they've actually succeeded at this is speculative because no sales numbers are ever released.
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Mar 10, 2018 09:57
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Xae posted:And the balance issues don't become super blatant until fairly high level. This isn't even true though. One of the more popular houserules for balancing 3.X characters was to stop level growth at 6 out of 20, which is hardly "fairly high level." If a game requires the GM to step in to ensure it works without going off the rails, it's not well designed. That's not really a very controversial statement either, and yet.
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Mar 10, 2018 20:43
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Xae posted:I was replying to something about 5e though? In that case the latter part of my statement still applies.
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Mar 10, 2018 20:49
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One of the issues with 3.X and 5E both is that a game ought to be transparent and they often aren't. They present a big wad of stuff, tell you "oh this is all fine," and then leave it up to you to untangle it and figure out all the ways it's actually janky as hell and then you have to fix it yourself. Nobody here thinks that a GM shouldn't be allowed to adjust the difficulty dial on a game up or down if they want, but the problem with these games is they get in the way of doing that with a bunch of, yes, badly designed mechanics. Gradenko_2000 has infinitely more patience than I do to delve into the nuts and bolts of why 5E's encounter design math is bad and outright misleading, 3.X's isn't much better, and this applies to both sides of the table. One doesn't have to be a degenerate min maxer to go "hey a druid with a bear companion would be pretty fun" and then inadvertently discover that whoops, you just invalidated the Fighter. So now the GM has to pull triple duty as not only the guy running the game but also the guy fixing the game and the guy trying to find some way to finesse the player side social contract so Bob the Fighter Player doesn't feel like a 5th wheel while at the same time allowing Dan the Druid to continue playing his character without feeling like he's getting punitively nerfed over an innocent decision and oh yeah, don't forget Clerics and Wizards and whatever else, and maybe you shouldn't play a Monk, yeah I know it sounds cool but trust me.
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Mar 10, 2018 21:43
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Nuns with Guns posted:I like the idea of having "simple" classes I don't. My personal experience is that in general games that try to present asymmetric choices to players in the vein of "this option is real simple, while this one is more complex!" invariably gently caress it up somehow. I feel that games ought to establish a targeted baseline level of complexity/interactivity for all choices and design things around that level, and if someone thinks the game is too simplistic or too complex then they can play a different game, of which there are many to choose from. I don't think it actually benefits a game to try and cater to both, to go for the stereotypical example, someone who's really invested in the game and consequently knows how to exploit the hell out of all the tools at their disposal and the guy who shows up just to drink beer and occasionally hit stuff with an axe when he remembers it's his turn.
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Mar 11, 2018 02:28
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Well, it benefits those games in terms of expanding their audience, but "expanded audience or better at delivering a specific experience" is a problem that video games have been stumbling over for over a decade, so it's no surprise it crops up here as well. Right, I mean I know why so many games try to do it, but I feel like those games which set out from a premise of "we're making a game that does X, for an audience that is interested and wants X" often wind up stronger for it. Like not every single option in Gloomhaven is strictly equivalent 1-1, there are some classes that are a bit more or less complex than others, but the range of variance is much narrower and the experience is very much tuned around players who want a thoughtful, tactical dungeon crawl that requires everyone to be on the ball. If it was simultaneously trying to cater to the beer-and-pretzels Munchkin crowd somehow, I don't think it's reaching to say it would probably be a much weaker game for it. theironjef posted:Like in 3.X where the Fighter was the simple class, so all you had to do to play it simply was make sure your stats were exactly right to pick the definitely correct feat choices that you wouldn't have to make til much later in play. Simple! Ugh, of all of 3.X's many, many sins, making people plan out character builds in advance is near the top of the list.
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Mar 11, 2018 02:39
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gtrmp posted:Guardians of the Galaxy has the Marvel brand name attached and was the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series of films. No D&D product could possibly benefit from anything comparable. Yeah, as funny as it is to think about a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, of all things, becoming a hugely anticipated hit movie, the fact is that it's not really all that unusual. If it had been the very first Marvel movie, sure, it would have been a weird choice, but GotG benefited from nine previous movies which ranged from "merely decently successful" to "record breakingly successful," all wrapped up in the Marvel brand which is way, way bigger than D&D. GotG was built on an extremely solid, successful franchise six years in the making at that point.
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Mar 12, 2018 23:36
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Someone really needs to let GMS know that there are plenty more varieties of fruit besides sour grapes.
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Mar 13, 2018 09:00
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RPG liveplay/podcasts aren't even the same thing as a Let's Play of a video game where you could at least argue the point that showing an entire video game from loading screen to credits hypothetically devalues the game in some nebulous "people might not buy it if they can watch the whole thing for free" way (which isn't even all that accurate anyway because a lot of video game publishers these days enter into arrangements with LPers/streamers as a promotional gimmick, though not every publisher is totally sanguine about it, but that's a topic for another subforum), it's using a game as a framework to create brand new content. If they're being paid more than the people who made the game they're running it's probably due to some combination of A). the fact that they're actually releasing content regularly (as Mr.Misfit points out) and B). more people want to partake of that content than want to buy a copy of whatever game it is themselves. James Wallace pops in to gripe about a Yogscast video where they play the Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen claiming that they never even name the game or mention it's a thing you can buy, except for the fact that they name the game in the beginning of the video, in the description of the video, in the title of the video, and at the end of the video. Maybe he's got a point in that they don't name Wallace or throw a link to where you can buy the game, but on the other hand we live in an age where Google exists and none of them were trying to claim they created the game themselves so. There's a reasonable point somewhere in there (give shout-outs to people whose stuff you enjoy, word of mouth is a great thing to give to creators, especially of the indie/niche sort) but it's buried under some self-indulgent whine.
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Mar 13, 2018 10:02
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Skarka already tried the "paid in exposure" argument in that twitter thread but it doesn't quite hold water because he isn't being paid in exposure, he's being paid for the work that he did making the game which was then bought and paid for. Nobody's demanding he make a brand new bespoke RPG which will be "paid" for in being liveplayed. I mean I agree that RPG writers get paid peanuts and that fuckin sucks. Thankfully there are means and methods these days to help ameliorate that, like crowdfunding where a designer can attempt to get paid what they feel their work is worth instead of simply hoping for a penny a word, not that crowdfunding is a perfect cure-all but it's better than the old days of self-publishing requiring you to buy 10,000 copies of your fantasy heartbreaker up front or freelancing and getting stiffed on your paychecks. Of course GMS pretty well burned that particular bridge to the ground and doesn't really have anyone to blame for that but himself. Meanwhile yes, giving shout-outs is a nice courtesy, and if GMS and Wallace had said "hey guys, do us a favor and drop some links when you do these podcasts!" nobody here would bat an eye, but that's not really what they're doing.
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Mar 13, 2018 19:37
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Google searching "baron munchausen game" immediately pops up multiple links to purchase it, and so while I agree in the abstract that giving shout-outs and links is a courteous thing to do the idea that someone might be internet and nerd savvy enough to listen to the Yogscast playing an RPG but be incapable of using a search engine in 2018 seems a bit suspect to me.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:22
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Eragon is "Dragon" spelled with an E.
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Mar 14, 2018 07:55
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I vaguely remember reading that some Middle Earth video game or another included pumpkin patches and they got very angry complaints from the Tolkien Estate because pumpkins don't exist in Middle Earth, since it's based on Europe and pumpkins are indigenous to North America, and they had to go back and remove the pumpkins from the game.
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Mar 14, 2018 09:02
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James Shipman wasn't just a thief, he was an unrepentant one who would email the people he stole from to publish for profit thanking them for their "contributions." Good riddance.
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Mar 21, 2018 09:47
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Reminder that this is what Lisa Stevens had to say about harassment at Paizo late last year:quote:My name is Lisa Stevens and I am the CEO and owner of Paizo Inc. Events of the past few weeks have compelled me to make this statement. So Paizo encourages their employees to come forward with allegations of sexual harassment or assault, except when they want to treat them like attacks against the company, and they promise to handle every issue with tremendous sensitivity except you'll have to take their word for it because they won't discuss anything publicly.
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Mar 27, 2018 03:18
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That Old Tree posted:The OneShot thing was found to be an attack against the organization, and it's entirely believable for trolls to do this. Just, not as often and credibly as a lot of people seem to think. Sure, but if this is the intended interpretation of Paizo's policy ("we're going to take every accusation of wrongdoing seriously and thoroughly investigate it") then that's one hell of a stupid way to frame it, and I can't say I'm inclined to be charitable towards Paizo at this point.
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Mar 27, 2018 04:07
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thefakenews posted:I mean, Phoenix: Dawn Command already exists y'all. I have only had the chance to play one session, but the rules felt pretty good and the PC concepts were all super rad. Sure but there's room for more games that explore the concept. Gloomhaven does some really nice things with cards, from the way you construct attacks each turn using the top portion of one card and the bottom portion of another which compacts a lot of possible options into a minimal amount of space while preserving diversity, to the modifier decks which are slim, minimal in overt randomness, and get modified as you spend XP on them (thinning out negative modifiers, adding positive ones, increasing your crit chances, etc).
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Mar 29, 2018 05:56
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Serf posted:Most of those designers I've talked with have described their profits as "beer money." While the odds of striking it modest as a self-published RPG author aren't any better than they used to be, I'll at least point out that the current state of affairs is substantially better than the days where doing so meant having to order $10,000+ worth of vanity-published copies of your RPG in advance only to have 95% of them lie around your garage moldering until you finally had to throw them away. That the barrier to self-publishing no longer requires a chunk of cash in addition to your time, and can even be made to pay for more elaborate methods of publication with the right crowdfunding pitch, may still not be ideal from the perspective of allowing creators to actually do what they love as a day job, but it's still a significant improvement over the way things used to be.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:55
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That Old Tree posted:EDIT: Wait this was something they needed to specify? Is there someone posting on RPGnet who works for ICE and they've been complaining about being unfairly attacked?
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Jun 20, 2018 07:31
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Also Dan Davenport is "finally done with RPGnet" after they made it policy they wouldn't mod "gently caress ICE/CBP" as a general attack.
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Lupercalcalcal posted:His argument seems to be transhumanist, not transphobic - expression of gender is one aspect of expression of identity. His argument appears to be that the attempt to imply that trans people are delusional by claiming an identity of an attack helicopter, which is assumed to be delusional, is flawed because there's nothing intrinsically delusional about identifying as an attack helicopter, and there's reason to believe that at some point in the future it'll be as legitimate to alter your appearance and physicality to reflect that as it is considered legitimate to alter your biology to reflect your gender identity now. He's not calling trans people delusional - quite the opposite, he's trying to point out how flawed and constrained the transphobic messaging is, and how it doesn't make any sense. The attack helicopter meme is basically a way of saying "lol trans people are delusional" and attempting to somehow, I dunno, "reclaim" it by going "no no, this time it's meant in deadly earnest, you can ACTUALLY be [thing which is associated with implying that you're a delusional brokebrain]" is, as Saguaro PI says, exceptionally tone deaf. There's been a great deal of medical and psychological research that's gone into gender identity and dysphoria related to that which is why it's not on the same level as somebody going "lol I'm an attack helicopter" so it isn't actually a great comparison to make even in the context of some made-up transhuman sci-fi setting. Is there a link to the reddit thread in question? I can't seem to turn up anything.
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Jun 20, 2018 09:07
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Yes. Well that sure is a thing. Good on that dude for pushing the mods into action, I guess.
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Jun 20, 2018 09:56
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Plutonis posted:The Last Jedi was real bad dude Who cares?
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Jun 22, 2018 03:48
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LuiCypher posted:At least Mike is trying to do right by his backers - just look into any number of failed video game Kickstarters that amassed $50k+ where backers are getting approximately zip in terms of refunds or communications from companies that mysteriously vanish into the wind. Honestly a Kickstarter that fails but manages to deliver refunds to backers is, at worst, a mild disappointment. e; I mean actually delivering refunds, not "says will deliver refunds, does it for about 10% of anyone who raises a fuss, then vanishes from the internet."
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Jun 26, 2018 22:41
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S.J. posted:Okay but is Mekton Zeta any good or is it as awfully 80s/90s as it looks? I wouldn't play it these days myself, but I wouldn't say no to a sensibly updated iteration of it either.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:57
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Cassa posted:Isn't Mekton Zeta the lego robot wargame? No, it was originally (back in it development) called Mechaton, but was renamed Mobile Frame Zero upon final release.
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Jun 27, 2018 04:10
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:There was also a weird semi-wargame/semi-RPG called Mecha which had a MesoAmerican themed vibe with Jaguar Warriors. I remember trying to get a copy of this off eBay and getting stiffed by the seller, that's my Mecha! (with an exclamation point I believe) story.
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Jun 27, 2018 23:00
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NGDBSS posted:To expand on this, I believe that all product has to be in physical form if possible. So there was one year in which a judge backed out halfway through, but when they were asked to return hundreds of dollars worth of free stuff they basically replied "nah, you can't make me". It was real scummy and a few publishers have since told them to gently caress off. In particular I recall that Privateer Press got screwed over in that particular fashion at one point to the tune of a bunch of miniatures, some of which may have actually wound up getting flipped on eBay.
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Jul 5, 2018 22:03
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