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Alien Rope Burn posted:Surprised nobody brought up Paizo when it comes to profitable RPG companies. Yeah, Paizo are a pretty interesting case because they're clearly in the business of selling RPGs, not designing RPGs. They've twigged that a good product is less important to the bottom line than a good sales engine, and they're riding that train as far as it'll go.
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Feb 15, 2018 15:25
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Kurieg posted:I think she put a lot of work into making sure the right people were hired to write the right things. Yeah, I dimly remember Whitney Beltran being included and that would be a seal of quality even if mythology wasn't her specialist subject.
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Feb 28, 2018 22:28
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Paizo have a huge, loyal fanbase, and they've worked out the best way to monetise that is to exploit them as cynically as possible. A part of me is kind of jealous of how easily they can make bank on this stuff, but I also figure that if I was in a position to do what they do I just wouldn't do it so I still wouldn't be making the fat stacks.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:26
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OneBookShelf (the folks behind DrivethruRPG and its various cousins) recently published a blog post on price data regarding roleplaying games. I've only skimmed the post and don't quite follow the statistics, but there seem to be some interesting points in there. Also, actual statistics are so vanishingly rare in this business that I thirst for them like a man lost in the desert.
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Apr 20, 2018 08:50
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quote:I suppose at least one approach would be to do something like the indie music label/publishing house routes of yore, and try to set up a collective oriented specifically towards publishing and promoting more diverse materials. Getting the company name up as one of the "big ones" on drivethru might help. At least, assuming the whole thing doesn't implode; my experience with some of those indie groups back in the 90s (for punk music and rabble lit anyway) was that they were notoriously volatile. New Agenda Publishing is already starting something like that.
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Apr 25, 2018 13:11
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I've only just skimmed that, but in the middle there does he name one of his anonymous accusers? E: No, he doesn't. My fault for skimming potatocubed fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 19:17
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Evil Hat did get some stick when they put out their first call for writers for Fate Worlds and chose no-one but cis white men (me included). Then when people pointed this out they said 'oh yeah, that kind of sucks' and set out to intentionally hire women, people of colour, etc. for the next rounds of Worlds, and have tried to keep that up going forward.
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May 17, 2018 19:42
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Inspired/reminded by all this, I finally got around to writing a breakdown of where all the money went on Pigsmoke. tl;dr: Art and taxes.
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May 29, 2018 23:01
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https://twitter.com/ZweihanderRpg/status/1009650595538653184
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Jun 21, 2018 08:27
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Leperflesh posted:What is even the bar to clear to get a nomination? I can't imagine it takes all that much. The shortlists are chosen by the judges (from all the products that are submitted to them by publishers). 1. Is your game D&D or D&D-derived? If yes, you'll probably get on a shortlist. 2. Does your game have Cthulhu in it? If yes, it might get on a shortlist. 3. Is your game a runaway success that cannot be ignored? If yes, you have a chance of getting on a shortlist. Then anyone with the time and inclination can vote to pick their favourite products from the shortlists. potatocubed fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 22:24
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LGD posted:without invoking false equivalency or taking a position on the validity of the claims, you're going down a very bad path if you start assuming people who are nominally aligned with your politics couldn't have possibly been ultra-lovely online and it therefore it must have been a false flag Yeah. I would like to believe that no-one on the left would pull that poo poo... but I've been online long enough that I absolutely believe someone did.
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Jul 10, 2018 19:39
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It's about this: https://twitter.com/EricVulgaris/status/1028130802570121216
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Aug 12, 2018 00:25
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Meinberg posted:I found the results of [url= http://roll1d100.blogspot.com/2018/08/survey-results-watching-d.html]this poll[/url] on twitter. I think the guy who took that poll is a twitch streamer of actual players, so there’s probably some inherent bias to the readership involved, but I think the information is interesting as is. A few of the questions in that survey were pretty badly constructed, but the free text fields at the end make for a fascinating read. Lots of people want more diverse casts, better LGBT representation in cast and game, that sort of thing. An encouraging quantity want 'no more D&D'. And a surprising number of respondents hate fun and wish people would table talk and crack jokes less.
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Aug 25, 2018 14:22
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And my boss was surprised when I turned down a business trip to the US. It's just not safe to go there any more.
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Aug 27, 2018 18:03
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I didn't even realise nuVamp had been released. Thought it was still in development. =/
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Sep 22, 2018 12:44
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From their website:quote:Most of the members of the Diana Jones judging committee are anonymous, but Peter Adkison, Matt Forbeck, John Kovalic and James Wallis have all revealed their membership. New members are invited at the discretion of the existing members. RPGs desperately need a new and better award.
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Oct 17, 2018 09:31
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I was looking for more information about the DJA and I discovered that last year the winner was Gen Con. Gen Con. The other nominees were The Beast, End of the Line, Terraforming Mars, Gloomhaven, and the Romance Trilogy, any one of which would have made a vastly superior winner. Sage LaTorra was tweeting earlier that the DJA makes great shortlists and terrible winner decisions, and the more I look through this list the more I'm inclined to agree. E: In 2013 Dog Eat Dog, Love Letter, Metatopia, and Playing At The World all lost out to loving Tabletop, the Wil Wheaton series.
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Oct 17, 2018 19:40
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Piell posted:The intro is some dumb bullshit full of OSR/grognard signifiers. Christ. I would have read three paragraphs into that, put the book back on the shelf and spent my money on something else. Never mind that I think Erol Otus is hugely overrated, the phrase 'visual hieroglyphs' is not an indicator of quality. (Like the time I read a scifi thing where the aliens used 'bio-organic' technology. That was not a good use of my time.)
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Oct 24, 2018 22:48
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I suspect a lot of GDPR vagueness is intended to be whittled away by precedents as they get set. Sucks to be the test case, though.
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Oct 30, 2018 19:33
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The fundamental notions behind the GDPR are good ones. The way it's written primarily harms good faith actors in the system while not really doing much to curtail abuses. European Law in a nutshell really. See also the VAT changes of a few years ago.
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Oct 30, 2018 20:33
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My 'favourite' part of that whole shitshow is that no writer will admit to writing it, and Ken Hite won't admit to developing it, suggesting that the section somehow self-actualised and inserted itself into their document files without human intervention.
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Nov 11, 2018 23:22
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Wow. That is some scorched earth brand management. I'm pretty sure it's the right decision from Paradox though, assuming they want to salvage as much of the IP as possible.
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Nov 16, 2018 18:31
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It's one of those 'having money makes it easier to make money' things. Like, my RPG business makes me ~$50 a month. I absolutely cannot scale to warehousing and fulfillment -- which means I'm stuck with POD for the moment.
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Nov 19, 2018 12:51
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paradoxGentleman posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/stuartdraws/status/1063235167265935360?s=19 Update: After several days of being shouted at by the worst elements of the OSR Robertson's decided to bin the whole concept. https://twitter.com/stuartdraws/status/1064580029542252544
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Nov 20, 2018 23:58
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Arthil posted:Given the first knee-jerk reaction to him going "Hey guys, please don't use my creative property on your products if they involve hate speech or openly support it" was to have his twitter DM's slammed with slavering vitriol, the idea of there being much good in that community should probably be put firmly to bed. Anyone got any thoughts on whether the few good elements in there are going to try and cut ties after this? There are a bunch of people on his G+ and Twitter talking about creating a new old-school community but without the lovely parts. I have no idea if it'll take, or if they'll just fall back into orbit around the same old bad stars.
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Nov 21, 2018 16:55
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Didn't we have that discussion already? Maybe? I've got a lot on my mind at the minute. v  v
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Nov 21, 2018 19:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:lmao. Like I said, they can't manage to form a "good OSR" because they're not willing to admit that there's bad parts of the OSR in the first place. Yeah, I dunno. I want to be hopeful. On the one hand there's at least one guy in that thread who used to be part of Zak's dedicated harrassment crew back in 2014 but seems to have come to his senses since, and there does seem to be a good-faith attempt by some of them to sever themselves from the bullshit... but on the other hand the community owner has just posted a new rule which requires people to post 'gameable content' if they want to talk about anything other than games (e.g. politics, harassment, etc.) and that seems entirely counter to their basic ideals. Like I said, I want to be hopeful.
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Nov 22, 2018 09:33
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This industry needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
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Jan 7, 2019 16:30
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Warthur posted:SJG lashing themselves to the mast of e23 has been so, so bad for them. I get why they'd be reluctant to come to DriveThruRPG - after all, SJG had the idea first, you can imagine a certain stubbornness setting in under such circumstances - and whenever I've talked to Phil Masters about it on RPG.net he's had this very stubborn perspective that it surely isn't much to ask people to use two different online stores for their RPG PDFs. On the one hand, you're not wrong. On the other hand, the RPG industry desperately needs a second large-scale pdf outlet. Having Drivethru as an effective monopoly isn't good for anyone.
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Jan 25, 2019 13:32
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I only just noticed that he specified "the last 20 years" and... Jesus he's so wrong it's unreal. Mechanial innovations in roleplaying since 1998 covers the d20 system, Burning Wheel, pretty much everything the Forge ever did, the X Card and its successors, PbtA, plus a bunch of other stuff that I've either forgotten or I'm not aware of. Love them or hate them, any single example from that list was a greater innovation than 'GM Intrusion', which isn't even an innovation. This is why you shouldn't listen to RPG theory from people who have never played anything but D&D or games one step removed from D&D.
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Jan 31, 2019 09:40
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Upon reflection, I'm looking forward to whatever the OSR is going to be in 20 years when it's made by people whose games revolve around disaster gay tiefling drama instead of 1970s wargames.
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Feb 4, 2019 12:59
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amenbrotep posted:I’ve seen this Zack S thing on twitter but have little engagement with the community in general. Apparently he has a history of this sort of thing and it looks like people have spoken up before without anything being done. Is there something accessible for an outsider that covers the whole saga? Short answer? No. The whole mess covers almost a decade of disconnected blog posts, forum threads, Twitter conversations, emails, G+ threads, and God only knows what else -- at least some of which were deliberately kept secret for one reason or another. Significant chunks of it have been memory holed by Zak himself, who at least once Kramered into a conversation about logic, got owned, then flounced out and deleted all his posts. Also when he harassed e.g. Terra Frank clean off the internet (for the crime of not liking LotFP) she deleted all her social media presences and so no evidence of the incident remains. As a slightly longer answer: He has performed every lovely internet act one can perform, including but not limited to harassing multiple people out of gaming and offline completely, serial stalking anyone who says a bad word about him, wielding his loyal minions like a loving battleaxe, maintaining secret G+ groups where he posts harassment targets, insinuating sockpuppets into the follows of people he dislikes, impersonating people, and naming paintings after the games of someone he didn't like in a half-assed attempt to break their SEO. As a reward he got a namecheck as a consultant in D&D 5e, hired to work on nuWW, was something of an eminence gris behind Contessa, and became a big name writing for LotFP -- because this hobby is loving trash. Then two days ago we all found out that he's also been physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing basically every woman he's come into contact with, and serial raping his way through his local BDSM scene. Sooooo... gently caress that guy.
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Feb 13, 2019 14:27
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I'm particularly fond of how he set his fake woman's location to 'somewhere I belong'. Zak, I suggest you start walking west. When you find the sea, get in it.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:43
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You know... assume for the sake of argument that Frankie and Mandy's accounts are mutually exclusive, and only one can be true, and onlookers like us need to determine which it is. Which story gels more with Zak's observed behaviour from the past decade? You know, the lies, the intimidation, the harassment, the impersonation, the ego as large and unassailable as a Dyson sphere... all that. Is it the one where he's a chill dude controlled by his girlfriend (who at the same time he used relentlessly as a shield from online criticism)? Or is it the one where he's an abusive piece of poo poo? I still believe Mandy.
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Feb 15, 2019 12:53
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Same! That's good stuff.
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Feb 15, 2019 16:54
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'Being a pedantic nerd but actually being wrong about whatever it is you're being pedantic about' is pretty much nerd behaviour 101.
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Feb 22, 2019 09:54
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I am legit envious of Monte Cook's ability to transform a loyal fan base into money. He's probably the best in the TTRPG industry at extracting cash from people.
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Feb 24, 2019 19:28
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My understanding re: Etsy is that they also have a significant problem with designers for large brands (Zara is one I remember seeing) just browsing through the site and ripping off anything that they like.
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Feb 26, 2019 07:55
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Serf posted:are there any clear examples you have for this issue? The one time I played RuneQuest our starting characters were laughably inept in pretty much all ways. And trying to make a character in the HERO system I think walks very similar lines, since power design is so mind-bending.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:58
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thespaceinvader posted:We had that at school (UK) but I can't for the life of me remember what we called it. It wasn't that, though. We called it a bundle.
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Feb 28, 2019 12:43
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