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Arivia posted:Again, this is not your presentation in general. This is specifically a penalty when using the Impersonate action. The action language in 2e is a LOT clearer than it was in 3e/PF 1e, and this is referring to a particular action previously called the Disguise skill. Honestly, there's a bit of a disconnect between the mechanics and the fiction of the feat and it's reminding me of nothing more than that one gnome feat about pretending to be knocked out* and how it implicitly makes it impossible to pretend to be knocked out without taking that feat. Because you're right, mechanically the effect is fine. If the fiction was just "you've trained to be good at this kind of disguise even though you're not suited to it" or something like that, it would be fine. It's boring, but this is a boring feat so it fits. But by making the feat's fiction "you're androgynous/look older in the right light/are maybe a bit orcish but are generally human-passing/etc" it's implicitly saying that you need this feat to say that you're that and that's just one of my personal hangups about how Pathfinder does feats even if it didn't intersect weirdly with a lot of character identity things. *Probably misremembering what exactly the feat did, but it was definitely something out pretending to do something while captured.
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Aug 6, 2018 07:40
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Jerik posted:Hm. I wonder why other companies haven't moved to a similar model, then? I guess maybe because you'd need to hit a certain threshold of loyal customers before the subscription model becomes viable, and that threshold's hard to reach...? The way I see it, there are two main things a company would need to set up a subscription model now: 1) They need a system crunchy enough to support this many supplements. You need to make things meaty enough to justify spending that much money a month, and the supplements you make need to be meaty enough that you don't burn through all your content in a few months, and making a system with that much crunch to it is hard. 2) You need to have enough resources to make enough stuff to set up the first few months of your subscription model to make sure it's a good investment for customers, and you need to be able to do that without having your company fold entirely if your subscription doesn't find an audience. This is the hard part, because the RPG market doesn't exactly have great profit margins. This was a safer bet in 2009 when Paizo started their subscriptions, but times have changed. (And, as others said, this wasn't even that safe a bet at the time.) Of course, you could go for something smaller-scale than the full Paizo subscription model, but at that point you're just running a tabletop Patreon and you probably aren't going to fund a big, glossy RPG supplement just from Patreon money.
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May 1, 2020 00:24
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Lemon-Lime posted:As a side note, this happened at least a year ago, apparently because they wanted to move into actual publishing and Cam Banks needed money and help to actually finish Cortex Prime. More specifically, it happened last September when Fandom bought the system outright from Margaret Weis Productions when Cam Banks was previously just licensing it from MWP. Honestly, as a business decision it makes a lot of sense assuming Fandom's willing to support this for the long term. Cortex has always been associated with licensed games, and Fandom has a lot of resources to invest in Cortex Prime. There is a conversation about whether Dragon Prince should be "rewarded" with a licensed RPG after the toxic work culture came to light, but that isn't necessarily a TG industry problem.
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Jul 26, 2020 17:37
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There may have been more of a OSR/storygames split back in the day, but imo by the time Mark Diaz Truman made the blog post that started all this it mostly died out beyond the Zak S (and similar assholes) vs People Who Don't Like Assholes rivalry.Josef bugman posted:So, to go back to the thing that started this all off, what is the quorum on choosing to support the kickstarter? Everyone has to make that decision for themselves, but as a huge fan of what Urban Shadows 1e did and someone who still actively loathes Zak S and Zak S defenders, I want to support it but the sting of Truman defending Zak and how long it took for his non-apology means I personally can't justify giving them money for what is essentially a preorder. It took me this long just to feel alright about giving Magpie Games money in the first place, and they've published some of my favorite PBTA games. EDIT: FMguru posted:Wasn't it one of those shake-n-bake PBTA adaptations that was put together without really understanding how PBTA ticked and what made it different from other RPGs? Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 21:45
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DoctorWhat posted:Am I out of the loop wrt Magpie? Masks came out great. The short version is that a few years ago Magpie Games' CEO, Mark Diaz Truman, made a blog post talking about how we as a community need to welcome Zak S into our communities to heal the rift between indie games and the Old School Revolution. (Note: There is no actual rift between indie games and the OSR. Also, this forum is one of the main groups arguing for Zak S being an abusive piece of poo poo who constantly starts harassment campaigns, so you hopefully heard about him already.) Truman has made apologies for this post, but they've been very late and very middling apologies. So, Magpie Games makes good games but it always makes the SA tradgames community wince when they put something out because no one really wants to give Mark Diaz Truman money. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 21:27
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thetoughestbean posted:Which I think you can get in the US if you buy Collector boxes or something? Basically, regular Strixhaven packs come with one old staple spell with fancy art like Opt or Swords to Plowshares. They aren't standard-legal, but you can use them in drafts and they're a decent way to get a bunch of old cards everyone wants into the economy. If you buy a collectors' pack, you get three of them and one of them will (probably?) be one of the Japanese alt-art versions.
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Feb 21, 2021 05:28
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Liquid Communism posted:I think a lot of that is the result of games like D&D owning most of the mindshare. To be fair to wargames, D&D did strip out stuff like morale rules over time that did give them an implicit end state besides Dead for being clunky. (Which they were, but it's still on the designers for not replacing them with a better alternative.)
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Mar 25, 2021 00:51
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I wouldn't go as far to say that Mike Mearls was actively trying to kill 4e with Essentials, but WotC's developer churn at the time really made sure that all the designers that knew and understood why 4e was designed the way it was left and gave power to a lot of designers that really wanted a surface-level similarity to previous versions of D&D. Also, as someone who's been reading through Pathfinder 2e lately, I'll give them this much: it definitely feels like they're trying (and sometimes failing) to make each feat an interesting bit of mechanics instead of just making a bunch of boring circumstantial bonuses. I've only looked at the ancestry and class feats so far, so this could change, but their design ethos seems to be pointed in the right direction.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:07
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Ego Trip posted:I am a solid 80% shitposting here. Because even if everyone leaped onto changing how our economic system operates, it would take a decade to actually get to the other side where we have a decent system and abandoning the current corporation-dominated system to become even more corporation-dominated would make everything loving miserable.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:50
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hyphz posted:I don't think anyone's seen the actual product yet, the only thing that's been released is a quickstart. But it was kind of my issue. I'm not as worried as you are, for two main reasons. Dungeon World had a lot of people who missed the point, but Dungeon World both didn't explain itself very well because it was the first major PBTA hack and it was attracting people who came into it with D&D-based expectations. For this Avatar RPG, Magpie Games has already proven they're better at explaining why things are the way they are than Dungeon World, and the people they're attracting are from the Avatar fandom. Say what you will, fanon and headcanons are a much more established concept among the kind of Avatar fans who would back an Avatar RPG kickstarter than they are among random D&D nerds who get huffy about what is and isn't in Toril.
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Aug 29, 2021 22:08
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So. Doctor Who: Adventures In Time And Space was a really neat game, with some good mechanics to make sure things actually felt like a Doctor Who story. It also got off to an incredibly bad start, because the first edition was themed on the Tennant era and it was released just before he regenerated into the Matt Smith era and all of those books they just printed became obviously old and out of date. (They've made four editions in total, which is two more than I was expecting after how fast they had to whip up a Matt Smith edition, so I guess they did something right despite their timing.) Are there any other good examples of licensed rpgs that ended up being jerked around because the license holders weren't really thinking about them? (Listen, it's business chat, it's kind of relevant to this thread. It's just a question that kind of links into the previous Doctor Who chat.)
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Oct 6, 2021 04:05
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Kai Tave posted:Do you have any experience with the League of Legends card game? It looks like Hearthstone with a lot less swingy RNG, and while I'm loath to recommend anyone play anything League related, I'm curious to hear your thoughts if you have any (online card games are basically tabletop games, I swear it's on topic). Not Tuxedo Catfish, but in my opinion it's still a bit too new to get a good handle on how it handles its hardcore vs casual playerbase. It cares more about retaining serious TCG players than Hearthstone, but it's still only a year old. The biggest differences that are relevant for this thread are that it's one of the first digital card games to move away from the pack model as how it makes money. I mention this because traditional booster packs are, objectively speaking, kind of a hosed up way to sell people cards that we only accept because of the limitations of distributing physical cards and because it's already established. Digital card games remove those physical limitations, and so getting a reasonable collection in them is always kind of bullshit. Runeterra's cosmetics model of monetization isn't great, but at least if you play regularly you can easily make a new deck every month or so without having to worry about it.
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Oct 16, 2021 06:40
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:So apparently, an RPG company I never looked into is shutting down, citing low sales and lack of interest. It was discussed in here a few pages back, over here. As far as I can tell, the general opinion of Degenesis on the forum is that it invested in a good presentation, but it wasn't anything special mechanically and the lore had too many fascist undertones to be worth buying. It probably would have failed with a better business model too.
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Oct 26, 2021 02:43
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Also, to paraphrase some points Nuns With Guns made elsewhere, people can think "it's funny that notable Proud Boy Tiny Toese got shot in the foot" and "if you shoot a man and then use your alt to talk about how cool shooting that man was, you're a loving creep and worryingly dangerous" at the same time.
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Oct 26, 2021 16:35
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alg posted:Leading from behind maybe? Who has even heard of this software? I'm looking at their website, and it kind of looks like the only thing they do that Discord plus any virtual tabletop doesn't is have an attached store for buying adventures. I'm not surprised they don't have much impact on the market, but also not surprised that Paizo's willing to work with them if they already have an established payment process for all of this.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:52
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CitizenKeen posted:I've been following Demiplane pretty closely - Adam Bradford (co-founder of D&D Beyond) left Fandom and Cortex Prime to go work for Demiplane. I have no idea if he went from Fandom or to Demiplane, but Demiplane has some veteran chops. I don't know what they're doing with their chops, but Bradford ostensibly knows what he's doing. I've been following Cortex Prime closely, so I'm pretty confident that he left to join Demiplane, instead of being kicked out from Fandom. I didn't know this was where he ended up after that, but at least we know competent people are involved. (I will agree that it's weird that they're going with Demiplane instead of any of the other many people making Pathfinder stuff already, though.)
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Oct 27, 2021 03:40
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license In addition to what everyone else said, Paizo was best known for making 3.5e adventures. When they lost their magazine licenses, not even WotC knew how to write good 4e adventures. If Paizo followed them into 4e, none of their encounter design experience or expectations about player power would carry forward. Sticking with the OGL and releasing their own unique reprint of it is, at the very least, less risky when you look at it from that perspective.
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Nov 13, 2021 03:32
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CitizenKeen posted:The "no Kickstarter" and "no DriveThru" clauses are not great. They were obvious to anybody who was paying attention (Fandom didn't buy a house system to get that D&D Beyond money to let it go elsewhere), but they're still not great. On one hand, I don't mind the "no Kickstarter/DriveThru" clause, because the point is that this is the noncommercial license and "you can't sell things with this" is kind of the point of the non-. On the other hand... Well, everything else about this is making me want to just never publicly post any Cortex hacks I'd make in the first place. EDIT: Kai Tave posted:If that's the case, and it may very well be, then it seems to me that Cortex isn't actually as useful as a licensed system for indie creators to play around in since those creators aren't likely to have a bunch of IP licenses on hand waiting to be adapted, it seems more like the sort of thing for a publisher who has the resources to throw at stuff like that. Which describes Fandom itself pretty well, but then I'd have to wonder what the value is for someone who doesn't have a Leverage or Marvel Comics in their pocket. I mean, you say that but a lot of game ideas start as "what if we play something like Property X, but it's also Y". From a design standpoint, Cortex does give you a really solid base to work from. It's just that there's never been that big of a community making homebrew for it that would be turned into new games, partially because Cortex keeps having licensing agreements like this. ANOTHER EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is, the reason you'd specifically want to use the Cortex license is because Cortex already has a lot of mechanical depth put into how to represent a wide range of concepts in it and it's nice to work with, not because it actually makes your audience that much bigger. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 08:24
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Kai Tave posted:A lot of people, myself included, do put things up on DTRPG or itch.io for free, though. Like even for a noncommercial license, this is incredibly user unfriendly to how a lot of the indie RPG/game-hacking scene works. I didn't think about how that. Okay, it's definitely hosed up.
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Dec 4, 2021 14:59
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KingKalamari posted:I'm gonna be honest, Coville's weirdness on this topic all seems to be the product of a (troublingly common) attitude among tabletop players that racism and xenophobia are the natural state for society: That if weird bugmen or dragon people or robots powered by artificial souls existed then they must be seen as dangerous outsiders and met with fear and hostility. It's kind of a worrisome philosophy. On the plus side, one side benefit of the push against always-evil peoples in RPGs is that the game is no longer telling people that this position is actually right in-universe and that this weird lizard-person probably is an evil rear end in a top hat who wants to burn your inn down. I have high hopes for future generations of RPG nerds and their ability to move past attitudes like this. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 17:05
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GreenMetalSun posted:Is this a gimmick, or is this part of the story going forward? Like they find ancient tech (and it's mecha and lightsaber-katanas), or the Phyrexians invade or something? Cause there's already a bunch of sci-fi tech in the Magic universe, and there has been since at least the Weatherlight Saga (where they have a literal spaceship). It's just because they wanted to go back to Kamigawa but needed a hook, and the original sets were technically set in the past so they just advanced the storyline and improve the setting a bit. In any case, basically everyone I know had the same basic reaction as The Bee when it was announced, but now that the set's out it seems like they did make an earnest attempt to make the setting better and not orientalist. They also released a video on how they were updating the setting at the start of the promo cycle, and while it's what you'd expect a corporation to say if they wanted to look good it's still an interesting watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoDigd9xl_c
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Feb 7, 2022 19:23
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You know how one big warning sign on Kickstarters is when you ask what the risks to their project are and they just start listing off the risks for crowdfunding as a concept?
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Feb 18, 2022 23:43
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Leperflesh posted:Gripnr, as in the name, has to be inspired by Grignr, the hero of the infamous The Eye of Argon, right? It's named after Gleipnir, the chain binding Fenrir in Norse myth. Which Grignr was probably also named after, at least in a vague "mashing vaguely Norse sounds together" way. Crypto likes to name things ironically to pretend they're in on the joke, but I don't think that's the case here. Arivia posted:I hate this quote (which is from the article being discussed, to be very clear) because it's basically the new form of gatekeeping and policing who's authentic. You're not a real gamer, you're not in popular online RPG communities we recognize, you're not in any streamed games, and you don't even tweet about RPGs. It's gross and it's disgusting and it's going to hurt the hobby in new and horrifying ways, and it isn't excusable because this person is an NFT idiot. This is completely unacceptable. I disagree with this point, because a known problem with crypto culture (and investor culture in general) is that it barges into completely unrelated cultures, goes "hello fellow kids" and tries to sell people on their cool new idea without actually knowing what that culture values. It's why you keep getting these projects that are sold on "but you can turn your hobbies into money-making opportunities!", which are then met with everyone they're trying to sell it to that isn't already an investor telling them to gently caress off, because only people in that crypto investor culture actually care about monetizing literally every aspect of their life that way. So, "is this a D&D nerd who's into crypto, or a crypto nerd that thinks he can exploit D&D" is an actual question, because it's about whether he ever was actually part of the D&D player culture.
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Apr 10, 2022 03:21
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OtspIII posted:I don't especially disagree with most of what people are saying, but I did definitely feel a twinge of pain at this part. No design credits is fair, and no organized play experience is actually pretty dire for the type of thing he's trying to push, but conflating design credits with starring in podcast actual-plays and tweeting as ways to be taken seriously as a RPG designer just feels like a glimpse into a dark future I mean, now that you mention it, it is hosed up. But I feel like society at large pushing social media as something that needs to be a perfect reflection of your inner desires and also a public record which those with power will use to judge you is a bigger problem than this thread is equipped to talk about. (I don't think this article is a particularly bad example of that issue, though. Mostly because you can objectively say "I have control-F'd this man's social media presence and he has never talked about D&D before last year", but you can't objectively say "this guy sounds like someone trying to talk about D&D like a long-time D&D player, not like a D&D player", and they'd want this article to be relatively objective that way.)
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Apr 10, 2022 15:58
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Honest, in my opinion all they really need to do to fix alignment is acknowledge that it's complete nonsense that only exists to give the game a fun D&D vibe. These gnolls are chaotic evil 90% of the time because they're just kind of violent assholes, but that's not worth killing them or anything. These demons are chaotic evil 90% of the time because they're secreted from the Evil Hole. There is no contradiction, because there is no actual system to contradict. Just a series of vibes that your party feels out for themselves.
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Apr 14, 2022 21:16
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Kai Tave posted:At one point WFRP2E was out of print and it was unclear what the direction was going to be since WFRP3E was busily being derided as "too boardgamey" (my personal take is that it was kind of emblematic of FFG's later TRPG obsessions with funny dice as well as their love of fiddly tokens and other bits, but did some pretty interesting stuff that even other funny-dice games like Star Wars never really took advantage of), but then the 4th edition came out which is apparently rather well regarded and so no, Zweihander doesn't really bring anything to the table because the die-hard Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Grognard fanbase isn't nearly as robust as the same demographic for D&D, and it's not hard to find a modern version of the official game rather than needing to lean on a lovely knockoff version. I just want to emphasize that the only reason Zweihander had anything going for it was because 3e was cool but different and a pain to play online, and they weren't selling pdfs of 2e on Drivethrurpg. Ignore Warhammer Fantasy 4e coming out. Ignore better RPGs inspired by Warhammer Fantasy like Shadow of the Demon Lord coming out. Just giving people a legal way to obtain 2e would have been enough to make Zweihander irrelevant outside of Fox's marketing push. And now we have all three of those things, so now we have no reason to actually give this game the time of day.
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Apr 17, 2022 17:01
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Covok posted:This is like a random thought for something years down the line, but do people actually like the "if we hit 'X' stretchgoal, I hire a contractor to do a version in 'Y' system." I've never been the target audience for this sort of stretch goal, but they've always felt most relevant when you're selling people on a really interesting setting that people may not want to run in the base system. I like Inverse World, but I want to play it in Fate. I like The Day After Ragnarok, but I want to use a different generic system. If it's just that your version of Fate is mechanically similar to Savage Worlds, I don't know if there would actually be that much interest for that.
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Apr 29, 2022 00:37
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When it comes to institutional knowledge in RPGs, I think less about the video game industry and more about how fandoms develop. Both are decentralized groups of hobbyists who only come together to share knowledge and form connections through online communities and cons, and they both have to deal with a new semi-disconnected group forming every time a new game or show becomes popular. Culturally there's only so much overlap between new 5e fans and new WoD fans and older experienced RPG fans, so there isn't a great way to spread ideas between those groups and thus they're inevitably going to relearn the same lessons, hopefully with some guidance from people in multiple groups. It's the same way you have the Steven Universe and FNAF fandoms learning the same "it isn't worth it to send death threats over fandom drama" lessons that the Avatar and Harry Potter fandoms learned years ago. In the old, forum-driven days where everyone ended up crammed in the same rough spaces (rpg.net, fanfiction.net, etc), there was at least enough forced inter-community communication and enough permanence to what everyone was saying to make it easy to let these ideas spread. Today, when everything is just social media and everything is significantly more ephemeral? It's a miracle that we have as much as we do. (Also, having actual business interests involved wouldn't necessarily help this, because the needs of a business aren't actually related to actually making a good game. See the newest Marvel RPG, where the corporate interests of "hiring someone who will definitely get this done by the deadline" and "hiring someone the executives know" beat out the design interests of "not being a weird 90s throwback". Ultimately, the RPG industry needs what the board game industry had: a critical mass of players and designers who care about good design, so "being interested in RPG design" itself becomes a sustainable fandom.)
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May 27, 2022 16:50
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I could buy the argument that having character funnel levels of starting durability in games that don't sell themselves as games with character funnels counts as gatekeeping. At that point, that just ends up being a way to make new players have a bad time that just makes people respond to them with "well obviously, you need to start at level 3 if you don't want everyone to die to a stiff breeze". I don't think funnels are inherently gatekeeping, but they do make gatekeeping easy if they aren't explained properly.
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May 29, 2022 16:24
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There's definitely a period during Pathfinder 1e where I would say Paizo was better at representation than D&D. Partially because D&D 4e had no characters period because they didn't do many adventures, partially because Paizo grew past their early "don't ask us about iconics' sexuality, we aren't getting into that drama" impulses and started including some good representation in their adventure paths. It probably helped that it felt like after a point Erik Mona was the only writer still invested in Golarion having a bunch of annoyingly direct pastiches of real life locations. Personally Paizo lost me late in 1e, after the Shifter iconic was asexual and her introductory fiction was really ham-handed about it. It just made it feel like they were only doing representation in order to check off a box. (This was also when they were running out of new content to make in the first place, as previously discussed, so it wasn't exactly hard to stop caring.) Now that it's a few years later and we're pretty deep into 2e, I feel like I can say that Paizo as a company probably isn't into diversity for the right reasons, but they know which way the wind is blowing and the people actually writing the books are invested in putting a lot of earnest representation in these books.
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Jun 3, 2022 05:45
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sasha_d3ath posted:a) how do you know this I'm all for making fun of TheDiceMustRoll for actually paying attention to LotFP, but it was actually kind of relevant. In any case, it's kind of heartening that even an edgelord prick like Raggi knows to treat his freelancers well. It gives me hope that this industry could stop being an exploitative mess at some point.
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Jun 12, 2022 15:29
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alg posted:well this is just...sad In the interest of getting the thread back on-topic, I'm just going to loop this into the chat about executives sucking. Not to imply there aren't executives in the tabletop industry outside of Asmodee, but the tabletop industry is small enough that, outside of a few big companies, the business people are usually either kind of incompetent or invested in the medium already. If they weren't, they'd work in an industry with actual money. But Asmodee is owned by an actual venture capital firm, and when they bought Fantasy Flight Games and broke it up into a few specialized sub-companies it got noticeably more corporate. Thus, products like this getting made which feel like they only exist because someone decided D&D modules would have the best return-on-investment.
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Jul 26, 2022 14:24
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Also, Spotify still has a bunch of weird oddities where everyone gets recommended something like a random Pavement b-side because the algorithm gets weird and think that fits with everyone's playlists. It's just that no one complains casually about that, because it's a pretty good song and the bar it needs to clear is "will you spend the next three minutes listening to this in the background".
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Jul 27, 2022 03:29
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moths posted:People's tastes aren't really that nebulous or unfathomable though. You only need to suggest the correct one (out of maybe three) new game in a genre to have a winning success rate. You know how video games all have relatively clear genres that should be easy to recommend, based on your argument? And how we just got done talking about how Steam's recommendations are almost always either free association randomness because something shares a very broad tag with what you play or "we know you like shooters, have you heard of this little game called 'Call of Duty'?"? Algorithmic curation is harder than you think it is, it just sounds easy because human-driven curation is comparatively easy if someone has good opinions.
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Jul 27, 2022 16:09
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OtspIII posted:Fair, and there are definitely a bunch of older monster design abilities I'd be glad to see never come back, like stat drain. The thing is, these more narrative twists players can use to grab an advantage in a fight are usually better when they're not the types of things you put in a statblock--they're situational, playing off the monster's placement in the larger story going on and facts pre-established in the scene or whatever. Which makes them awkward to cite in the abstract, but also actually pretty common and natural in actual play with groups that are into that kind of thing? I have a response to this, but it's going to be a bit of a journey. I'm a real Mage: The Awakening nerd, and one of the rules changes in MtAw 2e that I appreciate the most is simple: the amount of damage a spell can do is limited based on how many points you have in that type of magic. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but mages can do pretty much anything if you're creative enough and previous editions didn't have that kind of rule. So, there's nothing stopping players who feel clever from taking a brand new chemist-mage and going "I turn the air around his head into FOOF, that should be good for 5 Aggravated damage". That kind of thing's interesting once. If it ever comes up a second time, the entire game is going to fall apart completely, because the whole concept of the combat system has been destroyed and everything is devolving into rocket tag. My point is, RPGs need to allow players to do weird poo poo. Whether that means mages casting weird spells or GMs making unique monsters to freak out their players, games are only improved by explicitly giving people the opportunity. However, when you're dealing with a complicated subsystem (which combat is in most RPGs), you need to give people hard guidelines for what that weird poo poo should actually be capable of mechanically in that subsystem or the game is going to fall apart. (I say 'guidelines' instead of 'rules' because there's no way to stop a group from making an informed decision to break a rule for the sake of doing something cool. As long as those guidelines are there and everyone knows what they're doing, it's fine.)
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Aug 15, 2022 15:52
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There's Cortex Plus/Prime, for another example of a house system that's essentially a big tent system. The only problem is that it actually takes a lot more work than you'd hope to get from the generic base system to something flavored for you're actually trying to do. If you're lucky you aim for something that already has a version that basically fits what you're going for, but it's still more work than most people want from a generic system that can kind of handle anything.
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Aug 18, 2022 16:38
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Dexo posted:The thing is, they literally, do this now, which is my point. My problem, personally, is less about this being unprecedented and more about how Hasbro is a serious corporation. I don't trust them to not take a monetization scheme that's relatively fine on the surface and crank it until the handle breaks off now that they have a system they completely control. Also, that a lot of people are going to walk directly into whatever system they make no matter how exploitative it gets because D&D has that much name recognition.
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Aug 20, 2022 06:23
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Leperflesh posted:I think a great deal of inspiration for this new direction is coming from magic: the gathering: arena's success. Arena is making gobs of money... and at the same time, paper magic continues to make gobs of money. I struggle to imagine the exact same branch of the exact same company somehow thinking that killing off "paper D&D" would be a good idea in any way. I think they just want to make gobs of money on digital D&D offerings that can both serve players who genuinely have little interest in playing tabletop pen and paper games, and, help pen & paper players spend money during the middle of the week when they're in between live games. There's Magic whales who play paper magic every friday at the game store and then also drop fifty bucks a month on Arena, there's players who have no interest in Arena (or only play free and never deposit money), and there's players who would never have played any form of magic before Arena lowered the bar to entry to its absolute minimum ever. I'm not saying they're going to cancel paper D&D for this. I'm saying that MtG Arena is designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And Secret Lairs are designed to Hasbro executives a lot of money. And the constant release schedule of new MtG products is designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And this system is going to be designed to make Hasbro executives a lot of money. And when things are designed for making Hasbro executives a lot of money, they aren't being designed for things like "properly compensating people" or "not exploiting addictive personalities". (The problem is capitalism and profit seeking, to be completely clear.) EDIT: This virtual tabletop system, to be clear about that too. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Aug 20, 2022 |
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Aug 20, 2022 07:09
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In the interest of calming the mood down a bit, here's my personal take: when they announced that new crossover cards were going to have a MtG-flavored version of them added to future set boosters as part of the reprint pool they insert into those packs (like how the Stranger Things cards are functionally reprinted in New Capenna boosters), these cards became... fine. There's going to be a way to get them for way cheaper and in a more thematically-consistent way in three months and no format-staple cards are going to get locked in the vault because WotC lost a license. Aesthetic tastes aside, they're just alternate-art cards. It isn't really the problem. The problem is that the Secret Lair program is all about throwing several hundred dollars of limited-time alternate-art cards at the MtG fandom every month, and it both leads to a content cycle that's desensitizingly fast and (more importantly) is designed to exploit players' "oh god, I need to get that now or it's gone forever" collector's instinct. Alternate art is fine to good, but it's still an exploitative system.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:44
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But seriously, outside of the "haha, Ermakrul got hit by a car" stories you develop in play, these cards don't feel like active crossovers the way something like Smash or Multiversus is. Saying MtG is a crossover because you put Dracula, Godzilla and a Fortnite dance in your deck feels like saying your Funko Pop shelf is a crossover. There's no crossing over, you just have some references in your deck.
Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 20, 2022 |
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Aug 20, 2022 16:43
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