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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HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Kai Tave posted:

poo poo like this happens all the times in all sorts of fields. It could be that one person at WotC was in charge when the license was first made, and then later someone else was in charge and decided they didn't like it so it got pulled. It could be that WotC has secret plans to roll out a new Netrunner of their own. It could also be that they raised the price of continuing the license agreement and FFG declined the arrangement.

The same thing happened to FFG with Games Workshop too, where one day FFG was the place to go for licensed GW games and then the next day they weren't, which killed a pretty successful at the time LCG and scuttled an in-progress expansion for the Forbidden Stars boardgame, and it was similarly speculated that someone at GW either decided they didn't care for competition or they'd renegotiated the license arrangement with unfavorable terms.

WotC made a habit of publishing CCGs/buying CCGs and giving them a base set and two-three expansions, before killing them off because that put the message out into the universe that �only Magic lasts forever, so thats the only CCG worth investing in�

They killed the Harry Potter TCG off in that timespan just as the movies started to come out.
They did it to various Star Wars CCGs, they did it to Transformers, they would have done it to L5R but they had to sell the game back almost immediately even if AEG bought it back on layaway.

It�s contemptible, but it worked, every new CCG is tagged as �It�ll never last�

I can believe either FFG screwing up their Netrunner license or WotC raised the renewal fee to an unreasonable level as they wanted it back in house for potential Netrunner/Cyberpunk 2020 cash ins.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 11:24

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:34

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Jimbozig posted:

I'll admit it is convenient to have a philosophy that says "I don't have to try and anyone who thinks my obvious lack of effort in this area is a flaw just doesn't get it, maaaan."

Woah, who leaked the 5e D&D design document in here.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 11:26

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm very leery of getting into any game that really needs software to manage it. It's my biggest problem with D&D 4e, and a big part of the reason my ideal game is something with similar tactical depth while being much simpler.

How is Call of Cthulhu so popular, by the way? I mean, I like it, I've run/played it, and there's definitely more Lovecraftian stuff in pop culture now. But I always figured it for a niche interest, if a very well-supported and venerable one. I've read that it's very popular in Japan?

It's core system is simple, percentile d100 tests are about as transparent as you can get in RPG probability.
It's simple to GM, players almost never have weird powers and its period nature lets you side step some of the more annoying technology of the modern day.
Period setting means you can get interesting real world details easily and photos are simple to come by.
No classes, no races, no levels, so a very different feel to D&D.
Great line up of adventures and campaigns, with extensive advice available if you know where to look.
Combat is dangerous but also fairly simple.
Investigatory focus means it appeals to a different set of players than the tacticians or the theatre kids.

Its just got a very different flavour to D&D while still having gravitas of being long running.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2022 16:44

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

I�m sure it will also take a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.

Also lightning fast and deeply intensely strategic.

Intricate detailed mechanics and completely stays out of your way to let you just play man.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2023 12:14

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

hyphz posted:

Yea, with all this rush to create new systems it'll be interesting to see if any of them actually bother to mug up on game design from the last 22 years.

It astounds and appals me how resistant the RPG sphere is to trying to learn from the rest of the gaming spheres work on game design.

If you compare how boardgames have spent the last twenty years evolving compared to RPGs its stark.
D&D 5E basically thumbing its nose at game design then succeeding wildly by accident was enraging.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2023 16:32

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Chatbot GMs are the kind of thing that theoretically might work and as AI improves, could become viable. Also:

�Watching the players with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Mercator would never stop GMing, it would never bail on them... it would always be there. And it would never TPK them, never forget a rule or take a hard day of work out on them, or say it forgot to do session prep because it was too busy and it would die to protect our profits. Of all the would-be GMs who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.�

# ¿ Jan 17, 2023 10:45

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

So I was thinking about the likely One D&D business model and I started thinking about Destiny 2.
I can�t play Destiny 2 anymore, at least not the Year 1 version of the game, I can play the last two expansions, but the original content has been pruned off the game and vaulted for later reuse.
That had me thinking about them moving content to D&D Beyond and making physical books rare treasured artifacts.
You can�t vault a TRPG, you can stop making content for it, but people can still use the physical books and pdfs to play old games.
You can take down the servers, people can still gather in their homes.
So if they produce an Unreal powered D&D VTT, people could still play 5E, more pertinently they could make new 5E content using the OGL.
And if you decided to not print OneD&D or only print it in limited quantities, someone could make a clone One D&D with the OGL. Then when you decide to shuffle One D&D to new content and remove old content with a seasonal churn model, people could make clone content using the OGL.

I don�t think TRPGs have ever had someone close the servers on a TRPG before, will be interesting to see if it happens first with a version of D&D.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2023 11:50

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Its very much a thought experiment, but if you thought all gamers are the same and TRPG players will happily play an online version of the game, I can see how you might start laying those plans.
Step one of course is to get rid of anyone�s ability to make an offline version of these rules that they get to sell or heaven forfend, print and sell.

Imagine the churn though, 15 dollars a month, play the 4 quest games in a month and earn the new subclass on D&D VTT or it goes away forever.

I imagined a zen koan on a related topic last night.

�You can forget to purchase the latest book but you must remember to cancel your subscription.�

# ¿ Jan 23, 2023 12:36

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

The Bee posted:

Sometimes I wonder how much of 4E's controversy was from people that would have never given the system a chance, and how much was spurred along by some real bad first impressions. The player-based math fixes weren't implemented yet. Archetypes as common as druid and bard were missing. Old monster math tended towards fights being bloaty, and old skill check math never really added up. The adventure paths were not built to suit the game's strongest suits and it showed. The lack of natural language, while way better for game design, could make reading the book feel kinda clinical. And what language was there potentially turned some people off ("powers" as an overarching name felt like such an easy scapegoat for so many people).

The system ended up evolving into something really cool and expansive, but I'm almost curious how a no-errata, no-supplements, no-houserule or fix PHB and PHB Alone game would feel.

We tried 4e for a 6 months early on. GM decided to run the first adventure path from the online Dungeon. The fights were really cool but they took too drat long, with giant bag of hitpoint bad guys and drawing the maps took significant time (VTTs have massively cut down on this kind of prep)

I had to go away for work for two months as we are halfway through the first dungeon full of fel dark shorties of some kind. When I came back the GM was drawing out the battlemap and putting out evil gnomes and I briefly turned into Father Jack. �Don�t tell me we�re still in this fecking dungeon!�

# ¿ Feb 4, 2023 22:57

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Dawgstar posted:

"Disassociated mechanics" is such a cursed term.

90% of the time when I see somebody brings up Disassociated Mechanics, they are quoting a blog post they half understand while apparently having missed the last twenty years of game design.

When questioned then, on their opinion of hit points, they will act confused.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2023 02:04

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

moths posted:

It's wild because 4e is the JFK assassination of industry chat. It somehow managed to touch upon every industry issue, from missing stairs to the impact of piracy was present was abundantly present in some form.

It was the beginning of sponsored Actual Plays, the pioneer of disastrous online tools, and the first time since World of Darkness that gamers even considered playing anything else. (Even if it was just D&D by a different name.)

It's also the crossroads of batshit brand loyalty, semi-open licenses, peter principle, the first time inclusiveness was (apparently) prioritized and an unprecedented amount of gatekeeping. And it dropped like into an environment where Steve Bannon was weaponizing gamergate to radicalize nerds.

And while you had every industry and hobby touchstone exploding on this stage, it was impossible to talk about any of it. Most discussion was inevitably shitbombed with low effort TABLETOP WOW LOL snipes and an insane amount of tribalism.

Like, of course it still comes up here. This is the only place it even can. There's a story behind the LGS dude earnestly telling you that 4e is Communism instead of trying to sell you a copy. It's a wild loving story.

4E and its knock-ons are so fascinating to discuss, but you really can�t. Its a civil war where the participants are still alive and active in the community.

We still see the effects today. I know I took issue at the time with WotCs high handed behaviour towards Paizo during 4e, leading me to get on the Pathfinder side of the conflict, despite 4e being the more interesting game mechanically, but that�s apparently nothing compared to how prepared Paizo were for WotC to pull the same poo poo again. The ORC came across as something unearthed from a war chest labelled �WotC are at it again�

# ¿ Feb 7, 2023 12:04

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Splicer posted:

What makes Paizo bad guys here (not the bad guys, there's plenty of bad guys in this story) is where Paizo chose to focus their propaganda. They didn't go to war with WotC, they went to war with the concepts of rules clarity, class parity, rigorous design, and, let's face it, just the idea of change.

Everything lovely about the development of 5e, from the lovely fighters all the way up to the fawning courtship of pants making GBS threads serial abusers, can be directly tied back to Paizo weaponizing and signal boosting the absolute dregs of the hobby into public perception as the One True Way of D&D.

As an advertising campaign.

Definitely not ideal, particularly with hindsight, but Paizo were put on deadly ground, it was carve out a good chunk of market share or almost immediately go out of business. It�s why it�s hard to talk about, disreputable acts spurred disreputable acts.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2023 13:44

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

For what its worth, PF2Es sense and condition rules work well in play when dealing with things like invisible opponents. I've run several combat scenes with them on Foundry and they handle it well.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2023 19:45

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

YggdrasilTM posted:

And how do you hide from lifesense?

Put on something charged with negative energy to help obscure your positive energy?

The rules can't cover every bit of edge case cleverness a PC might come up with, but they suggest a framework to handle it. Its similar to the rules for Assisted Recovery when removing a source of persistent damage. Two of us had been hit by Enervation, we poured Ghost Charge on ourselves to make the recovery check easier after the fight.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2023 23:12

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Never been impressed with any of his coverage, no analysis or explanation of the game, just a stream of consciousness ramble and insincere hype.

It�s fairly clearly clumsy extortion, Isaac Childres basically commented �Good to see this is finally out there� so he has form, a huge number of his videos are sponsored streams backing that up. He�ll have unhealthily parasocialised fans defending him, but thats the market today.

I�m a cynic so I�m predicting a shame shave, and a solemn fireside apology, talking about the stress he was under with the upcoming marriage with his Rabbi sitting beside him nodding along and his fianc�/wife weeping in the background.

# ¿ May 22, 2023 14:05

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Magnetic North posted:

If we want weird support for something that sucks, we could just got to BGG where people are diligently picking over their words of the publisher to find any tiny amount of daylight to make this more acceptable on the part of Quack guy. I can honestly understand the desire to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but the issue is that you can fall right into a pre-set trap of plausible deniability. I'm really extremely uninterested in what he has to say at this point unless it is a real apology. FWIW, it doesn't seem to have hurt them since they have cleared 2 mil, so it was a great choice of project to try and squeeze a measly 7K out of.

Even if we are excessively charitable and assume complete innocence on his part, I try to imagine how I would react in situations like this. If I made an innocent business correspondence with another party who misunderstood it as extortion to the point that they were indignant enough to air it out in public, I would be falling all over myself to unreservedly apologize to anyone that would listen. You don't want to be "the blackmail guy."

Unrelated but wtf: Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is ranked 4.75 weight on BGG?? That's as complicated as The Campaign for North Africa aka the "Italians Need Extra Water For Pasta" meme game.

I've got a review in the Kickstarter thread but its one of the heaviest boardgames I've ever played. Not as much from tracking minutiae, as much as you need to carefully follow the steps for action resolution and keep in mind anything you need to trigger.
For example a boss might move to your character and attack, after resolving the attack, there is a reaction window you can do stuff in, so you need to remember "Ok, after his attack, but before his Knockdown, I'm going to use this reaction to move one square to prevent him knocking me down"
All the fights however escalate in complexity and lethality and you continually need to improve your gear and play to keep up. Get lazy or careless in a later fight and your titan will often just get straight up killed in one attack. The first boss is all about knockbacks, initially they are small irritations, then as he levels he starts knocking you back so far you can't get back to him with your movement the next turn, then he is knocking you across the board, then if he knocks you to a board edge, your titan dies. He's the entry level boss, every one after that is more complex in some way.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=3777631&pagenumber=552&perpage=40#post530082107

# ¿ May 22, 2023 23:17

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Ultiville posted:

I have to say, expansive your-choices-matter CRPGs have had some truly, clearly, utterly reprehensible moral choices available for as long as they've existed. I just can't see any issue with having a deeply optional path to have consensual fantasy sex with what's clearly a person, even if that person has transformed into a bear. Some people will find it hot, some people will find it funny, everyone else can avoid it, and it's nowhere near as bad as the genocides, murders, and other just straight up wretched behavior you've been able to get up to in these games for ages. (Which, to be clear, I also think is totally fine, even if I'm never going to pick those options myself.)

I like Larians stuff a lot mechanically and ultimately you are deeply unlikely to get to that content unless you go looking for it, but there is a fierce bang of "But she's a 7,000 year old dragon even if she looks 15" off it.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2023 20:12

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

To quote someone on this topic.

�If you're going to examine Werewolf, you really have to start from understanding that at the time of its writing, if you put Bill Bridges in an elevator with the CEO of Exxon, it's very likely that only one of them would have still been alive when it reached whatever floor it was going to. It was not put together from a position of "haha, man, it's so dumb that we're ruining our own planet." It was put together from a perspective of "A small group of absolutely clear-eyed people are rendering this planet literally uninhabitable for my great-grandkids in order to line their pockets. Hundreds of millions of people will eventually die in misery because of them. They know this, and just don't care, because by the time it becomes everyone's problem, they'll be long gone having enjoyed a life of luxury along the way. Those people absolutely deserve to be beaten to death with a pipe wrench while they beg for their lives through a mouthful of broken teeth."

It's a game about the world giving you big claws and muscles and magic gifts to help you get within arm's reach of those people. It is a game about righteous, murderous anger. It's a game about running down the worst people in the entire world and ripping out their guts with your teeth while they're still alive and screaming.

(This is crystal clear in the 1e corebook, and massively diluted in every book that followed because it's incredibly difficult to keep that kind of intensity going or communicate it to freelancers who aren't emotionally invested to the same degree as the game's original authors.)�

Its the frustrated eco-warrior RPG, we don�t have a lot of those. One could argue its time is coming again.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2023 11:19

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Ascension is the reality war version where technology is just the dominant magick of the setting.

In the more "innocent" times of the 90s playing the guy saying "Vaccines are full of mind control nanites, I can heal you with these crystals" was ok. Its when that opinion went mainstream it starts to look dodgy.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2023 15:18

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

joylessdivision posted:

History is he got poo poo canned from What Culture (when that was a thing) for being really creepy towards underage fans, I think he was soliciting pictures or something, it's been many years so I'm hazy on the exact details there.

I assume this is the same poo poo

I don�t recall the fans being underaged, he asked/manipulated/pressured for nudes while being dishonest about his relationship status. I don�t recall anything being made public other than that. It was deeply lovely stuff, but nothing criminal charges could be brought up on.

He then did a shame shave of his head and made a video apology.

I don�t think he got shitcanned from What Culture because he had just left it in fact, this all happens the week that the content producers from What Culture Wrestling had broken away to start their own channel Cultaholic with Adam Blampied as the headliner.
They had their launch stream, answering a barrage of questions about how Adam B now wasn�t going to be involved, several with gritted teeth or fuming in the background, clearly furious he�d cocked up their launch after they had burnt their previous bridges to the ground.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 01:22

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

My issue with the new Werewolf the Apocalypse is I want WtA to be the ecowarrior RPG about fixing problems by pulling out Malevolanto executives intestines' out of their torsos.

Whereas the game takes a hectoring line that corporations aren't necessarily bad and what you should be doing is driving a Prius and circulating Change.org petitions.

It's meant to be the direct action RPG, I don't care that its "not realistic" let me have my fun.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2023 21:18

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

In the old continuity some droids had a heuristic processor and some didn�t. Having a heuristic processor enabled the droid to learn and grow, so my interpretation was that a droid with one could become a person and a droid without one was basically a sophisticated simulation of a person.

In universe it talks several times about the importance of mind wiping your droids regularly to prevent them developing personalities, which is arguably an ethical approach. If you have a droid doing a lovely job, you don�t want it to become a person and have to wrestle with doing that job, you just want it to do the job.

It�s the same argument we�ll eventually have about AIs when we get there.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 16:51

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

George also cut the merchandising deal with Kenner that changed the game.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 19:20

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

FishFood posted:

The old Star Wars LCG had funky deck building where instead of selecting individual cards to put in your deck, you selected groups of 5. This meant that your deck could have 2 Yodas in it, but those Yodas had to come with a couple of possibly janky cards.

It ruled.

The set based deck construction was a late addition to the game. Friend of mine playtested it without that and he said it was the best game he ever played.

But I imagine it was done to try and forestall power creep.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2023 16:21

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

On a partly related topic, I did a little freelancing work for WFRP 4th edition for Cubicle 7. I did the Group Advantage rules in Up in Arms which have been pretty warmly received which made me feel great.

The other day on the Ratcatchers Guild (the WFRP 4th Ed Discord Channel) there is a home brew channel and one guy wanted to expand the Group Advantage rules, so he fed them into ChatGPT and posted the results.

I had a complex emotional response to that, mostly that it was cyberpunk as gently caress. What weirded me out was that the rules were almost functional, but mostly redundant and bad. Still felt mad seeing a language model spit out RPG rules and a somewhat ominous feeling struck me.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 20:55

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

So John Wick has left Chaosium. They'll still be publishing the 7th Sea Line including Khitai, though.

I backed 7th Sea 2nd Edition on the strength of my affection for the setting. I�ve never seen such a core resolution mechanic I have bounced as hard off as the core books.

Got 6 players together, created characters, I jotted down a scenario and the first scene it all stopped making sense to me.

My core gaming thesis is that games should feature meaningful choice, if there are no choices, its not a game. If a game says

�You must choose between saving these three people and each person takes 1 action to save. How many actions do you have?�
�Um, 7 that a problem?�

That was my experience running 7th Sea, I spent half an hour thinking up consequences to deal with in a scene and writing them out, a total of 20 things to spend successes on and the characters rolled 30 successes and just did everything. A massive amount of effort from me for basically no tension after the dice are rolled.

I looked up the example of play, in it the GM basically sets all these obstacles in front of the PCs, has them spend all their successes getting the McGuffin, then has the bad guy spend 1 success at the end of the scene to steal the McGuffin and escape with no chance of being followed.

Just baffled how that got through any amount of play testing.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 00:35

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Functionally the core mechanic was a worker placement game, where everyone had their own private tableau that had to be designed by the GM in every scene. Also the players could roll and have more workers than available spaces on the tableau.

So basically, the point of tension in the scene was before you rolled once, because after there was nothing but spending successes.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 10:01

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Dawgstar posted:

Doesn't 7th Sea 2E's system, fragile it already is, break entirely when you have more than three PCs?

I can tell you, it definitely does with 6. The cognitive load to design the consequences to spend your successes on is extreme at the table and should likely be done as prep work and that load only increases with more players.

And while that�s a manifestation of the problem thats immediately apparent it�s not the root problem, you could get an LLM to automate the process for you and the end result would still be an rear end backwards mechanic because all the tension evaporates from the scene the second you have made your roll, you can either cover your bases or you can�t.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 14:15

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Warthur posted:

Terrible decision on the Adventure Time front. I could see needing to do a system rethink if their "Yes And" system ended up hitting massive snags in playtesting, but switching to 5E is the laziest possible call which just sends the signal that they're half-assing the project.

In fairness, half-assing your project is a core design feature in 5e.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2023 12:38

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Hasbro has made the calculation that RPG players have no discernable taste, there is not a single star creator amoung the people they have released, the brand is the draw and new products can be produced by freelancers working for 9 cents a word/150 dollars an art piece.

They might be right, might not be.

Not a nice time for gaming creatives. I could say something a little biting about the market advising you to retrain as a content creator, but gah, just a cruel business decision you hope they get punished for.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2023 19:56

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

My rant on 5e is basically that it is the laziest designed RPG I�ve ever experienced from the publisher with by far the most resources.

Every design decision was made on the basis of how popular it was with the player base and how easy it made life for the designers.
�Rulings not rules� was a bit of car salesman bushwah to cover the pure laziness of making the GM do all the work of balancing the game.
It sounds great, but in reality it�s cover for not doing the job of making the game workable.
From an Indy designer, that would be regrettable and a black mark against their game, but from the group with infinite resources compared to every other RPG maker it�s loving outrageous.

I believe effort in games design and trying to make rules that are both elegant and complex is the best thing a designer can do and the games that do that are the best games. It offends me on a visceral level that 5e is monstrously dominantly successful as it�s the most loathsomely lazy edition of D&D.

TLDR: If there was work in the bed, they�d sleep on the floor.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 12:25

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

YggdrasilTM posted:

Completely outside the whole 5e discourse, I don't think elegant and complex rules are inherently better than elegant and simple rules.

That one is personal preference as it�s the hardest to do, but I think ultimately the most rewarding for people who enjoy engaging with mechanics. It�s also vanishingly rare.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 12:31

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I still think there's something in how Shoggoths and G1 Cybertronians basically have the same backstory.

I�m so Transformers UK-pilled this initially looked like nonsense to me, until I remembered the actual G1 cartoon lore.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 13:40

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

I often see the rising tide lifts all boats fallacy applied to D&D and I just don't think its true. The larger RPG industry does best when D&D shits the bed and people in desperation go out searching for something else to try out, when D&D is popular, everyone else is starving or making D&D compatible content.

I came up in the mid to late 90s and the diversity of systems and settings available was awesome, that's partly nostalgia and a lot of them were bad games, but you had so many prominent choices back then. That was with D&D at a nadir. I just don't find the concept of "The RPG industry is at its safest only making D&D with freelancers earning 1c a word suckling at the teat of WotC forever" particularly appealing.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 14:33

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Mods on rpg.net have assured the users that their details will not be scraped for any other purpose, but the traditional next rpg.net move is to genuinely accidentally leak everyones password and details by some other unrelated means.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 10:43

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Watching them load up Asmodee with unserviceable debt like a Viking longship with a dead king in it is something else.

I�m relishing my last few Arkham Horror sets.
Also, Star Wars Unlimited is going to last even less time than I predicted.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 09:58

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Comstar posted:

What games and series can we expect to be killed as a result of this?

Wondering if there's any I need to pick up now before they are gone.

You can look it up here, but its a surprisingly large amount of subsidiaries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmodee

Days of Wonder, FFG, Atomic Mass Games, Catan, Z-Man Games, Edge Entertainment are all stand outs.

So Heat, Arkham Horror LCG, Star Wars Unlimited, X-Wing, Legion, Shatterpoint, Marvel Crisis Protocol, Settlers of Catan, L5R RPG, Pandemic, Love Letter, Carcassonne are all potentially in trouble.

They might slide through this, but if anything is on your must play list�have a think.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 14:30

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

Leperflesh posted:

Oh hey I went back to look at the article again and noticed something I hadn't noticed before and it's LOL

the $900M in debt is in euros.

The capitlization/profit of the Asmodee group is in SEK, swedish krona.

1 swedish krona = 0.086 Euro

Converting the debt to krona is easier: 900M Euros = ~10.4B SEK

Assuming an 8% interest rate (that's a huge assumption and it could easily be much lower) that's about 833M SEK interest annually
Adjusted EBIT of 1.9B means just the interest payments are ~44% of profits.

That's still... manageable, but it's big, a lot bigger than I had been thinking

also lol journalists can you use consistent units ever

https://embracer.com/releases/asmod...embracer-group/

Furthest thing from a finance guy but it seems to be that the �900M/10.4B SEK is being taken as a loan by Asmodee to repay the existing Embracer 8B SEK loan they have that is due in Feb 2025. The new loan is then due in 18 months, so October 2025?

I suppose it buys you an extra 8 months, but the loan is called out as being ring-fenced to Asmodee with no recourse to Embracer Group which certainly seems like its being set up to be its own problem. It doesn't seem repayable, so a series of short loans whose interest eat up most of your profits to keep servicing the debt?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 19:37

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

"There are three nearly insurmountable challenges every RPG group must face:

1. Scheduling and commitments.
2. Disagreements we refuse to solve with adult conversations.
3. Monk unarmed attacks not being removable from a captured monk."

I'm joking but I've watched a lot of apparently otherwise sensible people go cuckoo over the last one.

# ¿ May 2, 2024 16:11

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:34

HidaO-Win: Jun 5, 2013; "And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"

theironjef posted:

Oh, was there a WOTC announcement where they gave themselves some backpats and poo poo? I didn't see anything but the linked article.

Oh they absolutely did. I hate loving around with imgur but google up Gabs and Jayne, because they were female space marines with purchasable models released in 1987, literal decades ago. Stuff like that leaving their range was a result of them getting increasingly staid and married to their grimdark bullshit brand, they've 100% lost fun over the years.*

*Granted this is a two-edged sword because they also don't have a fantasy army of extremely stereotypical bone in nose bush pygmies anymore either.

The two female adventurer models in power armour were intended to be female marines, but customers and retailers complained about female models being included in blister packs so GW made the space marines all male and set the lore that it was only possible for men to become space marines.

# ¿ May 9, 2024 09:41

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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