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"The OGL is not enforced by anyone" - man calling himself game designer in 2018
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Mar 13, 2018 20:31
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Warthur posted:I don't know what the breakdown of hobbyist designers who churn stuff out for fun vs. pro designers who do it to partially or entirely support themselves is; I suspect the hobbyists outnumber the pros in terms of the number of folk writing, but might not outweigh them in terms of materials published (especially since there's probably an invisible chunk of hobbyist writers who only distribute their poo poo among their friends). Um, this is what people did in 2014. Harper had no idea what he was doing, which is why it took him as long as he did to get the game out in a state he liked. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it understandable. The amount of difference between RPG kickstarters in 2014 and 2018 could fit in a small book, and while it was out of the true wild (far) west of kickstarter that was 2010-2012, the best practices weren't quite where they're at today.
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May 30, 2018 21:23
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Lemon-Lime posted:Yeah, definitely no one ever got paid for writing RPGs back in 2014. Sorry guys, money was only invented in 2017, so it's normal. Harper and the other writers agreed to do things for no pay. Something must have changed between then and now if the writers aren't mad about it but you are. Or they live in a weird spaceland where money was only invented in 2017. We can be dumb and just try and score points. That's always fun. Like, if you want, you could correct my post (the kickstarter was 2015), or you can be really mad about what other people dumbly agreed to.
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May 30, 2018 21:59
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Lemon-Lime posted:"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. Anyone worth listening to will agree, in general, that paying for people to make things for you is good. However, as every post since yours has shown, there's some degrees of bad decisions here that have no morality attached to them, just a bunch of people not being transparent about their views and doing things that apparently were the norm and/or are still the norm when it comes to stretch goals. Everyone acted in, if not good faith, in a manner without the intent to deceive. Did John Harper do wrong? Yes. Did John Harper create some plan to not pay his friends out of any bad faith? No. Should people not do what John Harper did? Yes. Should we hold John Harper to these standards? Also yes. Should we treat this issue like it's exactly the same as intentionally trying to tell someone that you'll pay them in exposure? No.
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May 31, 2018 01:14
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Comrade Gorbash posted:No one's advocating this, and to read that as what people here are saying is frankly disingenuous. Lemon-Lime posted:"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. If someone tosses pro bono around a lot, I'm going to assume they mean pro bono. This is a complicated quid pro quo issue, a transparency issue, a stretch goal issue and probably a few other significant issues going on. I don't want to downplay any of those. But the response I gave was specifically in response to that line which makes John Harper out to be some sort of unethical thief when he's just an idiot who didn't think how people would respond to something that, if Sage is to be believed, happens more often than not RE stretch goals.
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May 31, 2018 01:38
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Hostile V posted:Yeahhhh if nobody else is in the know Avery is more or less supposed to be Avery Alder of Buried Without Ceremony/Monsterhearts, a woman who Zak hates and hates enough to not even be like "legally this is some other woman" in his poo poo writing except for when he's like "what no that's totally not a person I hate, where's your proof?" when someone calls him on it. gently caress zak s and his lovely everything.
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Jul 13, 2018 19:41
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hyphz posted:Also did anyone notice that they said they would “recast” the RPGsports team? No offense, but this would be the first thing I've heard that would make me more likely to watch it. Now we just need like 19 more pieces of news like this, and I'll think about catching it.
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Oct 20, 2018 22:10
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Capfalcon posted:That's kinda my point. It gives you fun things to do in the game, and it's very good at clearly telling you how they work. But it's just such a dry read, because it's efficient with it's language. Yeah, this is a big thing: If you enjoy looking at rule interactions and how to make neat mechanical combos, the books are great. But I'll agree that the writing is dry, and worse, it's all written in such a way to specifically tell you that you're not allowed to have too much fun with each of these abilities. The Crafty designers were trying to build a toolkit for a living campaign for both of their major lines at that time (Spycraft, Fantasycraft), so they went through and wrote everything assuming that they'd want to cap abilities off in very specific ways so as to reign in the worst of the charops nonsense. They didn't take into account that people would eventually figure out how to mess with the math, but it typically was based on bad assumptions rather than playing up to charop people. Spycraft 2.0's Scientist class says hello.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:26
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Biomute posted:Paying for PDFs is pretty dumb anyway. Pen and Paper RPGs is pretty much a nostalgia-based industry at this point and any business model should revolve around producing collectible, tangible books and goods. how do you post from 2008 and please take me back with you
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Nov 5, 2018 23:08
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WereGoat posted:Fixed for you Seriously, the only issue I had with Wizard Voice was when he was actively cancelling people's pledges because they had real questions and Wizard Voice wasn't answering them in any sort of reasonable way. Had he just had a Wizard Intern Voice or whatever, I don't think anyone would've cared.
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Nov 8, 2018 01:49
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hyphz posted:Just existing doesn't satisfy that issue, though. Roll20, for example, has great support for Blades In The Dark, but it wasn't made by Harper or the publisher. And even that doesn't matter because there are no games of it there. Cost/benefit, most likely. Remember that most RPGs are not money-makers, especially in a cash-in-hand sense. Hiring GMs is taking very slim margins and at the very least making them slimmer, possibly even flipping them to being net losses for every book sold. It'd have to be baked into the price if you want to do it. That being said, having it be a kickstarter stretch goal could be possible, but again, it'd have to be baked into the prices.
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Dec 26, 2018 22:30
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hyphz posted:It's not a conspiracy because it's not deliberate, any more than the gym owner who didn't try to get people in the door and made more money might have just been lazy. But I would say it's a potential market failure. You need a new hobby because every solution you find to this "problem" is somehow worse than the last. You're suggesting that the RPG industry does more work for less money just so you can find it slightly easier to get games that the entire TG forum have offered to run for you. Please stop trying to make market solutions to non-market problems. This isn't a market problem. This is a people problem.
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Dec 27, 2018 21:15
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remusclaw posted:I feel like much like with pro wrestling the only way to end up with a million dollars in the RPG industry is start with ten million. how do we sell rpgs to the saudi royals?
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Dec 28, 2018 19:42
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Halloween Jack posted:Numenera don't care how it is pronounced, sing the drat song
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Feb 1, 2019 00:25
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moths posted:I kind of wish there was something to tell players the opposite. Fun silliness is still fun, but I've only played in a handful of serious sessions that didn't breakdown into jokes, puns, or humorous situations. I was in one of these, and a few sessions will devolve because keeping up that level of grimdarkness is just hard to do, especially in a campaign. Just hope it gets turned more into genuine dark comedy and/or slapstick rather than bad memes.
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Feb 6, 2019 03:53
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Unoriginal Name posted:You would think the content would make you question the decision of publishing it the first time. The KS was not specific about the abusers metaphor and just seemed like it was some very weird, dark game that felt more metaphysical than it actually was. I don't know if I can read the KS and not see some of the hints now, but there was definitely not specific wording about this game being what it turned out to be. A whole bunch of people got rightfully upset at the early drafts. I don't know how much Onyx Path knew about the exact metaphors that were going to be used, but I imagine they greenlit it on the strength of Demon more than anything else.
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Feb 11, 2019 22:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:Pretending that rpgnet doesn't have a huge problem with refusing to ban abusive shitheads isn't a good look. They have problems with being indecisive enough when it comes to some very obvious problem people and way too decisive with lesser issues, but if you're around and being an abusive shithead, you're gonna get banned from RPGnet, even if it took too much time to get there. Was there a specific incident you're talking about?
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Feb 12, 2019 00:46
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Of course, that's what makes this particular incident so clear-cut. Zak has been an rear end in a top hat and a bully for years, I wasn't surprised by Mandy's horrible recount of their relationship one bit. It turns out, the S was not for Sucks... it was for poo poo.
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Feb 15, 2019 19:28
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Toshimo posted:If someone interrupted my product demo to ask me about something another part of my company was responsible for, I'd tell them to go contact our PR team or the contact for that portion of the company. There's zero chance I'd engage them in any way because that's not how the world works. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot or a liar. You can sincerely engage it without making a definite statement and say that you don't have any control over it. You can come up with a better plan than "delete and move on". Even if the deletion isn't intended to protect Zak, it's a very bad look. Leave the protest in so people know what's going on. This is the risk you take when you do things as a corporate entity.
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Feb 15, 2019 22:37
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Lost_Heretic posted:This reminds me of when Ronnie at Mantic Miniatures admitted to using new kickstarters to fund previous ones. Fortunately (?) their company hasn't collapsed yet. This isn't a terrible plan -if- you stay ahead of the curve on them. It just happens to fall apart really badly when they do. I mean, this is basically the process the industry used before, only they used to get their money from the banks than the customers when they couldn't sell other products enough to pay for the next. This is pretty much what caused the initial fall of White Wolf and why they cut back harsh and suddenly.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:31
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So, either the entire pre-POD/PDF tabletop industry is a pyramid scheme or you have no idea what words mean. Money has to come from somewhere. Most industries that make things have some level of this "buying thing A pays for making upcoming thing B which will pay for future extensions of thing A". It used to be much less direct than kickstarter, but this is how budgets and finance work. If you're good at it, you can cost things so you don't drive yourself bankrupt with the process, instead costing in some level of support for future projects directly into what you're doing with the profit you make. They clearly did not do this. Lost_Heretic posted:It's notable because using one kickstarter to pay for another is against the Kickstarter TOS for creators. But Ronnie said they did it anyway and Kickstarter didn't act on it because they don't give a poo poo as long as they get their 10%. This, however, is a big problem if you make the market where this isn't allowed. I don't see how they'd ever enforce this, because I doubt they'd tell people what to do with their profits that they budget into their projects. That being said, given the absolutely backwards-rear end margins they've got, it'd be very easy to show that's what they did in this case but it could only really be definitively shown in cases where the budgets failed like this.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:09
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Joe Slowboat posted:You (Lore Bear) outlined the precise opposite of their behavior. It isn't, because it wasn't the plan. Look at their budgets vs their costs. Part of a ponzi scheme is intent, and no one this ignorant of actual costs could make a ponzi scheme intentionally. Also, if they were running an actual ponzi scheme, you don't go explain the ponzi scheme with data like this unless they want to get extra jail time. If it's a ponzi scheme, you run and hide. Every time some idiot fucks up a kickstarter, people scream "Crime!" like this isn't just complete ignorance of proper costing and financing. These are solvable problems that should be the core of an industry discussion on kickstarter. Every time we assume it's criminal rather than human error, we lose out on the ability to come up with a better way of handling something. Building costs into B to pay for A that is ongoing isn't a crime nor should it be treated like a crime if it gets both products released. It shouldn't be a best practice and this is exhibit 1-A for that, because failure causes problems to get worse. Calling it a crime is absolving them of their actual fuckups.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:49
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Darwinism posted:You can commit a crime even if you do not intend to commit that crime Joe Slowboat posted:I'm pretty sure some classic Ponzi schemes happened because the investment portfolio wasn't actually producing the promised returns, so the portfolio managers started paying off the returns they promised with the later investment. Yeah, this is a weird tangent I shouldn't have dug in on. Pyramid schemes are assumed illegal unless they have actual products being sold, and the SEC has been digging into MLM practices to make sure that's still the case so that they can still exist. You also need an intent to defraud if you want to get charges, and if their budgets show any money that's listed as either expected profit, windfall or anything where they pay themselves for their time, it'll be hard to show even with these numbers that they weren't just massively incompetent vs intending to deceive. Pyramid schemes and ponzi schemes are also, generally, focused on the wrong problem. If every mistake is some sort of fraud or scheme rather than incompetence, then why try to fix it? Why come up with better solutions? That's why it matters if you call what killed White Wolf a crime vs a scheme vs bad business. So you can improve the industry, hold people actually accountable in a way that matters because the proof of fraud is digging into the weeds for no benefit. Cat Face Joe posted:This is exactly not how they did this nor how ks works. There are no "profits" in a ks. That's not what it's for. It's a loan for developing a project. All of the financing is frontloaded for the budgeted costs. If they sell it afterwards then what you've described takes place. When you budget an item for creation, you budget in your expected profit margin. In the case of being the creator, this is basically considered paying yourself for the work you yourself are doing. Without this, no one would kickstart anything ever from the creator side if you expect to profit $0 from the sheer mass of work you will put into a kickstarter.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:07
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As individuals, the only thing we gain from analysis of a crime is trying to stop crimes from happening again. It basically condemning it as "this is ethically wrong". When you start digging into schemes, you're assuming this wasn't a solvable business problem at some point because you're focusing entirely on the negative results and assigning them some sort of moral value. If it is just rank incompetence, just let it be that. Businesses fail all the time, usually for these exact reasons, sometimes for even dumber ones. No bad actors, just costs scaling out of control and trying to fix problems with what they have on hand. I agree about transparency, even to the point of possibly scaring away potential customers from how much you think the actual writers, artists, etc's time is worth. And I agree that they should have been forced to acknowledge this, but that this isn't a moral failing, and it was not ethically wrong to believe in your project enough to think "we'll dig out way out of this". People have bankrupted themselves and others for much dumber reasons than believing in their product and themselves. I think they had no idea the right way to do any of this, but that their intent was fine. Otherwise, they wouldn't have posted any numbers, because those numbers will follow anything they touch going forward and will likely be used if it did turn out that they defrauded anyone with intent.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:44
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Angrymog posted:I'm shocked that you would say that ZakS poo poo his pants at Chick-fil-A. zak s shits his shorts but shat his pants at chick-fil-a on the last day of gencon 2017
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Jun 13, 2019 17:46
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dwarf74 posted:Friends don't let friends eat at Chick-Fil-A. I heard it was Sak Z, but I may have heard wrong.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:31
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neaden posted:I don't think we should rule out the possibility that Zak S has poo poo in a Popeyes though, either before or after he poo poo in a Chick-fil-A on the last day of Gencon. Good biscuits though. Right, of course, it was Zak S who allegedly shat in his alleged pants while standing in front of an alleged Chik-fil-A on the alleged last day of Gencon. Allegedly, he is a stinky pants-shitter among his other, more serious crimes.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:28
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moths posted:Siege base game shipped to the people who paid for two shipments. There is a tremendous amount of stuff in the Doomtrooper pledge, which exponentially delayed everybody else's. I'm waiting for mine too. Was this diarrhea in front of a Chik-fil-A? If so, I know who did it.
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Jun 18, 2019 21:55
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Admittedly a crafty defense. Maybe even a Crafty defense. Spycraft 3rd edition when?!
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Jun 19, 2019 18:26
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potatocubed posted:DC was talking about RPG theory -- I can't remember exactly what because I didn't care -- and Harper rolled in with eyeroll.gif to say it had all been done before. DC said 'uh, no?' and Harper went off with a very 'sit down and shut up, your elders are talking' line which went down about as well as you'd expect. It was about the light vs heavy RPG concept, talking about how to describe games. Harper went heavy into "we did this before, nothing good comes of it" in an rear end in a top hat way to shut it down, and yeah.
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Jul 11, 2019 18:27
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DalaranJ posted:I feel like WOTC is being misleading with it’s numbers here. This is just the numbers for the starter set, what’s their actual attach rate? Eh, it isn't, really. They likely wouldn't give numbers that are wrong, but they likely wouldn't have much say in how the numbers are shown. This would be, at worst, as bad as any other company with a proper PR department.
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Jul 12, 2019 18:38
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DalaranJ posted:I mean that I think the led the author into the presumption that the starter set is D&D itself. It looks like the numbers they quote 41% in 2017 and 52% in 2018 are a match to the chart which states “sales of the starter set”. It would be quite a coincidence if overall sales rate change happened to be 1 to 1 with those of a single optional product? The D&D starter set is the product that has been sold more of in the last few years. Reading too deeply into any financial magazine puff pieces beyond "let company show off new product" is a waste of time. They're going to show their best product and the author is probably going to give it a cursory look to make sure they are numbers related to a real thing, and then the article is done. There's no manipulation other than the type of manipulation there is in every single one of these pieces, where companies will only give numbers if they are good or if they legally have to.
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Jul 12, 2019 22:30
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EdithUpwards posted:Zak S poo poo his pants at Chick-fil-A on the last day of Gen Con '17 Zak S -heavily- poo poo his pants at Chik-fil-A on the last day of Gen Con '17, -flowing- out of his pants and onto the floor.
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Jul 17, 2019 01:30
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Froghammer posted:At least I can take some small comfort is knowing that we've found the worst possible reaction to all this mess in "Adam turning out to be a garbage person magically un-garbages Zak" This came up during a recent internet discussion when someone tried defending Louis CK, that I feel applies here between Zak's perjury comments and the magical transitive thought process of shitbags: You do not have to be found guilty in a court of law to be an irredeemable shitbag. Usually your actions after the accusation speak louder than whatever magic word spell you try to cast.
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Apr 7, 2020 19:39
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Joe Slowboat posted:I do think it’s fair to say that paying extra high rates for Zak S was both a moral and tactical error, in that you shouldn’t be giving Zak S money and it clearly backfired financially. I hope his writers who weren’t awful people who make the hobby worse got paid similar rates, though, and I hope they get what he owes them. Yeah, it's hard to tell if Zak got paid better than the other writers. People should get paid more in the industry as a whole, but Zak getting a premium for basically name recognition and that loving up your cash flow makes me lol.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:13
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Tsilkani posted:Part of it is that they've backburnered Spellbound to focus on the Mistborn stuff, since it pays the bills for them. It's also been delayed since the d20 boom ended and they've pared down the company to just two or three guys, I think. Yeah, the issue is that Mistborn pays the bills and it really is a small-time show. I talked to one of the guys from Crafty at a local con, and it's a combination of branching out and keeping the lights on. Also, I imagine a few months of work away is a lot if you count them as months worth of full time work rather than just a unit of time. Months of work can take years to do if you don't have the time.
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May 20, 2020 16:54
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dwarf74 posted:Would that actually fly though? I agree that everyone deserves a second chance, once they have paid their debt to society, but the community (rightly) shuns people who have been credibly accused of sexual assault, who write sex fantasies about teens, and who get into fights at bars while drunk. I'd imagine there would be some quality control and removal of obvious attempts at harm. Not if Raggi did it, but if it was done by people who don't support rapists and abusers out of hand.
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Jul 9, 2020 22:20
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Gareth Michael-Skarka has a 'Special Research by' credit on the new Netflix movie The Old Guard. Why? Broken promises and failed kickstarters do not pay the bills, but Netflix might.
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Jul 10, 2020 22:21
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this is why i won't vote for 5e for president
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Jul 14, 2020 18:19
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Leperflesh posted:While it's definitely poo poo to see the company saddling one subsidary with all the debt, the total sales numbers suggest it can actually support that level of debt. Many financially healthy companies with 2B in revenues support 900M in financed debt. A lot depends on the details that we don't have yet. I agree that it's a good idea to grab any games you want to own that might go temporarily out of print or change publishers and therefore art assets etc. but it is IMO premature to predict the death of that company or the majority of its properties. Yeah, without digging too far into the financials, the total debt according to that link was somewhere around paying off the debt completely from EBITDA (profits not including interest, taxes and General Accounting Bullshit) in 4-5 years. So unless Asmodee has to pay it off completely in 5 years, it'll just be a bad time for innovation and growth. It's still terrible and should probably be illegal, but I'd say it is more likely than not that Asmodee is going to survive this debt barring some major future clownery.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:54
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