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whydirt posted:Am I reading that correctly that there was a Pathfinder/Rifts crossover? Savage Worlds/Rifts.
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Nov 27, 2020 00:54
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Halloween Jack posted:There are games that are entirely modeled after a specific model for a campaign, like how The Gaean Reach assumes that the PCs are all questing for vengeance against an interstellar supervillain (who defaults to "Quandos Vorn" but can be anybody). There's also games like Band of Blades that run exactly one predefined campaign with a little wiggle room for different characters taking part. Anything but the one campaign is homebrew rules territory.
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Nov 27, 2020 01:10
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The most successful LGS around me is a cafe first, board games second, RPGs and wargames distant third (and they only get a slot because the owner really, really loves Malifaux), so around here we're right with you. I guess the margins on coffee and sandwiches make up for some of the costs. Then again they're also terrible at their wargame scheduling, so maybe we just don't exist enough there for the limited stock they keep to matter. The couple times I've visited it's just been the cafe part occupied, barring one pair playing Horus Heresy of all things. The other two are a scam artist and a "I really just want to sell records and comics but I have to stock MtG to make money" dude. The good shop with active wargame support closed a long time ago. Model of business is changing, I guess.
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Nov 27, 2020 23:35
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IME CritRole and the like have given new players the wrong impression of how RPGs go, but those same people have been pretty willing to adjust to the reality of them and do pretty well. The Matt Mercer effect is real but overblown I suppose.
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Dec 2, 2020 06:17
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Froghammer posted:I'm cribbing off of another poster (maybe TheIronJef?), but as a person who's ran a whole bunch of public RPG events, you can teach a person how to run a character in a given system ("I make an attack roll! Which one's the d20 again?"), but you can't teach them how to roleplay a character with a Russian accent in public without feeling awkward. People who get into RPGs via Critical Role have the second part down cold. But I'm a bad example to use here, experience has proven I'm a black hole of creativity & performance skills.
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Dec 2, 2020 06:24
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Appreciated, but voices are the least of my concerns for RPGs currently, trying to push through poorly-treated/untreated ADHD is a lot higher on the menu and focusing on weird voices undermines that. But I feel like I'm derailing now and can pick this up somewhere more appropriate.
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Dec 2, 2020 06:35
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With how many games I've seen hit other sites immediately on request using scanned pages if a PDF doesn't exist for sale, I'd be surprised if it worked at all.
SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 18:18
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RudeCat posted:Wait, people don't *always* do recaps before a game starts? My group doesn't always, usually just if we miss a week, but because a) we play online, b) hearing impairment and ADHD combine poorly for memory, I have running session notes in a Google doc that everyone has access to read.
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Dec 4, 2020 17:00
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Dexo posted:wait what lol Calling Shadowrun 6E a trash fire would be an insult to waste-to-energy plants worldwide. They actually do something useful and mostly properly. SR6 is not well made. If you want to surpass SR6, the bar to pass is "functioning core mechanics".
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Dec 12, 2020 16:44
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90s Cringe Rock posted:There doesn't seem to have been an F&F, but I would love to know more, even if it's just incoherent yelling. Seconding this, I remember the release but conversation died off fast and I never did buy it. Side note, going to try and get one or two more Red Markets posts out this week, but IRL circumstances are gonna put a block in for a bit. Don't worry, not abandoning it.
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Dec 14, 2020 20:38
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CitizenKeen posted:Just realized the design studio behind Degenesis is the same studio that makes all the art for Legends of Runeterra (the LoL cards game). Yes, SixMoreVodka is an art studio first and an RPG studio second. They're very good at one of these things.
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Dec 15, 2020 01:33
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Gobbeldygook posted:, e.g. I don't know if there was ever an edition where cyberlimbs were generally good and not a noob trap. 5e. Hand of God is a common decker build for a reason.
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Dec 15, 2020 17:15
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Gobbeldygook posted:If you're referring to the old "one cyberarm but with attribute enhancements on it and you try to convince the GM you're doing everything one-handed", that is exactly the problem I'm talking about. Cyberlimbs are not "generally good", it is a single way of using exactly one type of cyberlimb that also provokes table arguments. In a cyberpunk game replacing your arms or legs with cybernetics should make you a badass, but in Shadowrun they're noob traps. This is fair. There are more solid use cases than just the hand of god, but they do require understanding the system farther than a new player is likely to. I don't necessarily agree with your last point, but I think that's going to come down to a difference in the type of cyberpunk fiction we're interested (and hence possibly beyond the scope of this thread) and the focus of cyberpunk TTRPGs on styles that emphasize that "badass cybered-up protagonist" style even if they don't mechanically reinforce it.
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Dec 15, 2020 18:00
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Halloween Jack posted:It's not in the initial post, but someone said something about being obnoxious in a Discord. Yep. Please name names if someone is a problem, but also name the actual problem, not just skating around it, especially if you're going to disable most people's replies so no one can actually clarify what you're even talking about. Holding off on making a judgment on this one but it ain't a promising opening. e: also, can I get one thing clarified real quick on their chain? I get content warnings and appreciate them when they're present, but is there really much of a point to "CW: Ben Flowers" when the entirety of the relevant content is just saying the name again? You put the entirety of the content you're warning about in the content warning... SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 17:27
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potatocubed posted:Content warnings on Twitter are almost wholly useless in general, to be honest -- tweets are so short that by the time my brain has processed the warning my eyes have already taken in the rest of the tweet. They're even less useful on image posts. Sure, I mostly only find them useful on long threads or whatnot (but I also follow people who do those, which isn't the majority). Just trying to figure out why a CW as long as the content is an idea at all, let alone a good one.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:32
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DigitalRaven posted:Forgive my ignorance, but who is this Ben Flower? From context, it doesn't appear to be the Welsh rugby league player who's the only person with that name who comes up in my google searches... Ben Chong, did Swords and Flowers. This is all I've found but I admittedly didn't look hard.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:18
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:I do noooooot like how quickly this thread decided this is all over nothing and just another twitter outrage. Plus the demands that the abuse survivor give us exacting detail about their abuse. Plus the utter dismissal of the abuse survivor because they didn't lay it all out. Plus the... Personally, like I indicated in my first comment (and the only one directly about this and not about surrounding factors), I'm holding off on a judgment. I don't know who any of these people are or have any investment in any of their choices. If it comes out that the dude is a sex pest or something, great, out the door please. Nobody has the information to figure that out, so I'm just waiting for something substantial to come out from these several places that immediately severed ties and, like the original post, disabled replies on their statements so nobody can ask them about it. Judge other goons how you want, that's your initiative. I don't see any of your entire first paragraph as a realistic description of the past page of posts. e: edited to delete the whole original comment in the time it took me to write this
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Jan 11, 2021 08:01
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Pretty much. From the outside with no information, all we can really do is go "uh... sucks, drat, wish I had a clue what this even means". Nothing really constructive and a lot of room for negativity. Certainly not going to try and police others' posts but I guess there's a line of... Familiarity isn't quite the word, but I can't think of what a better one is, to keep in mind for these kinds of things. If nobody's gonna know what the hell's going on, and the information isn't out there to figure it out without already being a part of these closed circles, then yeah I guess it's good to know "hey this dude got cut from a bunch of deals over accusations". I don't see what else we can really do with that as a thread without leading into this sticky territory? e: further followup, I maintain my lack of a position but yes, "Pammu is clearly an abuser here" is a pretty bad take, even if I don't quite understand the nature of her accusation just making it doesn't automatically make her an abuser, if she's making false ones that's a whole different story but we don't know that SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 18:01
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moths posted:Every interaction with Twitter makes me confident that my leaving Twitter was the correct decision. The best way to engage with twitter is to never, ever have a public conversation on it. My feed is basically various international museums & historians, a lot of animal bots & zoos, and a bunch of RPG figures & official accounts, and while I only look at it once a week or so I find it fairly pleasant when I do. Extremely Online Twitter, on the other hand, is a terrifying place.
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Jan 11, 2021 18:16
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Tarnop posted:Everyone seems to be ignoring this post, for some reason I took note, just didn't comment on it. "She has a reason for making an accusation" doesn't really clarify the situation, and I think the first bit about enough detail to retraumatize the speaker falls in with other misinterpretation that's been addressed; I don't think anyone is asking for a graphic play-by-play of every second of the events that happened, or even really asking for much detail at all beyond "what did he do to make saying someone's name to someone else, and then apologize publicly for doing so, trip into abusive territory?" I'm not an expert but I don't think you have to go into full gruesome detail for that. I maintain that my only cause for suspicion with Pammu is the immediate muting of all replies across both her thread and all (but one) of the other people or groups that cut ties. Not allowing clarifications or other questions/discussion rubs a little wrong. Could totally be nothing though, and really isn't my place to be concerned or pry as long as all parties involved have enough info to go on.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:44
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Rand Brittain posted:The prices for games need to go way up even if the costs of printing don't. While it may not be the most popular take, I have a lot harder of a time with that suggestion than with physical copies. With the logistics of physical copies, there's a hefty production cost per unit that's been discussed to death. Outside of "keeping your website running" (which isn't free by any means, and while it's surprisingly hard to find hosting plans oriented towards distribution to pull an estimate from, it's a bit more expensive from what I'm finding - but "a bit" not even leaving 2 digit figures for a small or independent publisher who doesn't need DTRPG scale infrastructure, and web hosting without that is still a cost to account for) or itch/DTRPG's cut if you choose to have it hosted by them, the production cost for each PDF sold is... less than a cent of electricity. Depending on the range a given game is hitting in terms of scale and the size of the team working on it, any development/writing costs can come back fast from that. I'm pretty sure Baker and Harper are doing just fine, and "solo project that's artless or public-domain art" has a much lower cost to make back. This does also come off of the handful of physical RPGs that I do have as a context point - it's hard to say "yeah, charge more than $20 for the PDF" when the physical copy is already around $20. Caveat, my interest in physical books does skew towards the zine side where production costs and standards are lower. I have physical copies of LANCER and Electric Bastionland and both were absolutely worth the $50+ paid for them, and I would have paid more if it came down to it; but for better or worse most RPGs are not 400+ pages of quality half/full page art every second or third page in a hardcover format. Please pay people appropriately for their games. "Appropriately" for physical games is definitely much higher than the current paradigm. "Appropriately" for PDFs, and picking PDFs as the sticking point to say "no, this is where we don't buy anything" especially as the format where the authors/artists/etc get more of the money you spend on it... I dunno. To draw a bad parallel, it's like looking at the music industry, seeing how absolutely shafted musicians get financially, and drawing the conclusion "so don't buy merch at their shows until they raise the prices on it". The merch at shows is where most of them survive and the one place the record label doesn't get to be a vulture. Forgoing that and only putting money through the label has you spending the same or more and getting even more siphoned off by middlemen and less getting to the creator. It's a bad parallel because it reintroduces physical production and distribution costs, but the sentiment behind it stands.
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Jan 24, 2021 17:49
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GreenMetalSun posted:I don't feel like I have the authority to comment on anyone's fursona, and even less authority to comment on someone's puppetsona. Especially considering that this is pure actor creative control. https://twitter.com/TheJovenshire/status/1356660616090411008?s=19
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Feb 3, 2021 05:57
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CitizenKeen posted:Four big names have left Fandom in the last month, three announcing yesterday. Good. Sounds like it wasn't any awful happenings in the company, just better opportunities for people, and entirely separate from Beyond I've been hoping for them to fall apart for a while now for what they've done to wikis. Win-win.
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Feb 5, 2021 15:45
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Countblanc posted:it's almost certainly like a Brand Identity thing. artists have talked in the past that WotC gives a lot of notes about what artists need to do or change for their submissions, so at some point it's probably easier to just say "make it look realistic" because people generally agree on what that means. it'd be much cooler if you got stuff like with the Pokemon TCG where there's a huge mix of styles and even formats including photography Hey, look on the bright side, there's at least one step worse it could be. My favorite example for "too weirdly uniform art" - Degenesis (which, don't get me wrong on either count here; Degenesis does have great art, and it's also still written by loving creeps so I sadly can't recommend it anyway even as an art reference). Something like 800 pages of core book and several 250+ pg expansions. Every bloody piece of art looks like the same guy drew it. Originally just found it idly amusing, eventually went to the various Artstation pages for credited artists and got a big ol' "huh". Looks that way because SMV lead figure Marko Djurdjevic has equal or higher credit on their own portfolios for every piece of art, and I'd put money down he's actively involved in them considering his background with Marvel and the impression I got of him from personal interaction. Plus, yknow, the sole credit given to him on every "iconic" art in the core book. At least MtG has different spins on "realistic"!
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Feb 21, 2021 00:25
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Pyrolocutus posted:WOTC "looking at moving beyond game stores" rip LGSes. I mean, the good one near me is already dead and the rest suck, but that's a pretty solid stake in the heart if it goes through.
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Feb 25, 2021 17:52
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Lumbermouth posted:Is this just them going all in on Spelltable in the wake of the pandemic? loving up where your games are actually played seems like a bad move. Maybe. I don't know. In a slightly less reflexive response, my LGSes probably won't die because they've clawed for absolutely everything they can do (EXCEPT RPGs and, to a lesser extent, wargames - all of them push the former away and all but one pushes the latter, but the latter's owner is a bit scummy so I wouldn't play there anyway). As long as MtG is still played with paper cards they'll survive, along with comics and record sales. But I wouldn't be surprised if they finally give up pretending and just let RPG sales die entirely if WotC ever gets their digital distribution poo poo together.
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Feb 25, 2021 17:59
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"No books, just brands and vibes" for next thread subtitle maybe.Ultiville posted:LGSes are the lowest rung of the ladder for trad games, we're on borrowed time if quarterly earnings corporate capitalism continues to exist, as always. I'm not surprised to hear that but still sorry to. People have strange priorities.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:23
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Baron Snow posted:Re: Ravenloft, I feel like I should post this here. It’s a thread and I’m sure people will have opinions. ... Huh. I never post on Twitter and apparently this user has me blocked anyway. No idea what caused that. Opened in a browser so it was still legible, so whatever. This seems like it says nothing whatsoever. Not sure it'll be controversial here. Maybe in the more reactionary communities.
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Feb 26, 2021 15:05
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Calico Heart posted:Hey there fellow goons. I recently finished my first Tabletop RPG, DEAD IN THE WEST, after it was funded on Kickstarter. I have about 85 physical copies to ship off, but I'm ordering 120 in total. I've ordered extras to give to several local gaming shops, who have seemed interested in the product. This looks potentially quite interesting, but I'm gonna ask the big one that comes up with every Western RPG: "Mythic Old West, like cowboy movies and pulp novels" is setting off industrial-size alarm bells without any further detail. Those cowboy movies and pulp novels are based deeply upon settler-colonial narratives that the common mythology of the Old West in media has built on top of as a foundation. What did you do to pull away from that? It looks interesting, and when I've got some money freed up I'll likely pick up the PDF, but that not being handled is gonna be an instant dealbreaker and neither your gumroad page nor what I was able to find on the KS page answered that much at all.
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Feb 26, 2021 17:39
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Is this our opportunity to somehow get Zak to admit in a court of law that he poo poo his pants at Chick Fil A on the last day of Gencon? All seriousness, gonna be interesting how it pans out.
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Feb 27, 2021 20:39
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, that really stood out given, you know Dogs in the Vineyard and AW. I can see Baker asking not to be identified with DitV since he's disavowed it. But not identifying him with Apocalypse World, progenitor of one of the most widespread design genres in the industry, and instead tying him to a joke game? That's weird.
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Feb 28, 2021 21:49
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Falstaff posted:When/why did this happen? 2018. Vincent Baker posted:Basically, Westerns can go to hell, Utah history can go to hell, and unless i extricate Dogs in the Vineyard, it can go to hell too. My thoughts on this have been historically ill received when offered. There is a generic version available that has Baker's approval.
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Feb 28, 2021 23:50
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Hel posted:Is DITV the game where RAW gay people cause demons or am I mixing it up with something else? "The presence of sin opens a community to attacks from Demons." DITV's Sins are "violence, sex, deceit, disunity, blasphemy, apostasy, worldliness [catch-all of "breaking the Faith's rules], and faithlessness". Sex includes any sex outside marriage, unless "your marriage is ordained in Heaven, you're prevented from wedding by inescapable circumstances, and you wed as soon as you are able." That does include homosexuality, but also includes married members, and notably doesn't explicitly include a married couple without one party fully consenting. (One implicit spot, depending on interpretation.) Polygamy is also perfectly fine in the King of Life's eyes, but wanting it is a sin. Sexuality is a mess of hangups that all invite "demonic attacks" outside of the Faith's tenets. That said, important to note - demons aren't necessarily real in DitV either. They're representations of the conflict that "sin" in a deeply religious community drives between its members. A Steward exploiting his position to squeeze a bit more personal gain out of his community through spiritual authority doesn't need demons to cause a conflict that'll tear a branch apart eventually. The book acknowledged that it doesn't really matter if the demons are real, because the effects that result are what matter. (The guidelines are written based on determining real demons' actions, though.) The book's examples of "demonic attacks" are "the church meeting house burned down, making the victim blame a convert out of bigotry", "the farmers' tools are breaking while they're being fleeced by a shopkeeper", and "a woman in the town is barren, driving internal conflict blamed on infidelity". None of those require a supernatural cause. tldr: yes, "gay sex causes demonic attacks" is a correct interpretation of the Faith's beliefs, but it's oversimplifying what Baker portrayed. I can go look for my DitV binders and see if I can find that one "branch story" I really wanted to see play out at some point. (Preview pseudo-edit: other people have covered this as well and Heliotrope has pointed out the important part that "the Dogs are right when interpreting the Faith" and part of that is that they can decide the King of Life ordained these two to be married, sex be damned.) e: here we go, from the Forge archives. No demons, no supernatural whatsoever - just the Dogs riding in on horseback to help a town split down the middle by an arranged marriage falling apart. One of those "this is the kind of scenario the game was written for" sorts of things. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 02:31
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Heliotrope posted:There was a thread on the Forge where Baker talked about what this stuff meant without the supernatural aspects and it was basically: Sin is going against the rules of the conservative religion, demonic attacks are bad luck that combined with someone breaking the rules makes the situation a lot worse, and a sorcerer is someone who uses this terrible situation to gain power and possessed people are their henchmen or toadies. Pretty much how I had intended to run it back when I was still planning on doing so. Haven't thought about it in a while, my usual group isn't very amenable to these sorts of stories and I'm bad at writing towns (and at GMing, but that's not a game issue).
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Mar 1, 2021 02:42
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Falstaff posted:This was shared in CSPAM, and I read the entire Twitter thread, so now I'm sharing it here so everyone else can feel my pain. We could finally stop having to hear about Chad Walker if people would just not post his takes. Imagine how much nicer things could be. Mors Rattus posted:Oh, I guess he has a new Twitter now.
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Mar 1, 2021 23:26
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Warthur posted:One could argue that if you can afford to get the LOTR licence in the first place and have a number of other successful games bringing you in income, you don't need Kickstarter to fund the production of a book you 100% were going to make anyway. One could make that argument about most major Kickstarters in the RPG sphere. Part of the trouble of Kickstarters. Fund projects that don't have a working example already done and ready to show potential funders, and you're gonna get shown how much of a fool you are on 9 out of 10. Fund projects that are already close enough to done (and sufficiently funded through the creation process, whether self funded or externally) that they can show a product and just need the extra funds for production/print runs, additional content, etc and you're defeating the point of using Kickstarter and not just preorders. There is no window of "safe KS bets that also couldn't exist at equal quality without the KS succeeding". I've got 3 backed RPG kickstarters. I don't regret backing any of them, not writing from spite. None of them needed the platform though, and while I get the argument of drawing attention to the platform with the big names and letting attention filter over to others, I don't think the people making those arguments remember how much money most people make and how little of that is left over for things like "taking bets on creative projects not failing mid writing process". e: Keen wrote it more concisely than me
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Mar 4, 2021 20:39
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homullus posted:An anecdote about zine creators noting that some people backed out for The One Ring: solid data I hope you're not genuinely trying to present "I have (anecdotal) data and refuse to show any of it" and "I have (anecdotal) data and can and will present it" as the same thing.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:34
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thetoughestbean posted:I don’t particularly think it’s some sort of bad action from the lotr game person if some people wanted to pay money for their product more than the for the zinequest thing. In the most overly reductive sense, yes.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:50
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nacon posted:One can pay writers, editors and artists to make a product that is more appealing to consumers, market that product heavily, sell more of that product, and repeat when you have access to capital? The issue being that that isn't what you said: nacon posted:I think your opinion that the DnD/OPP/White Wolf/Evil Hat TTRPG consumers of the world don't care about quality of writing or gameplay is a bit spurious. Well-organized, easy to understand, entertaining, and interesting writing must drive those products. That's valuable. If you add in accessible, fun, and easy to learn mechanics, you've got a great product. That also adds value to a TTRPG. If you wrap those things into an aesthetically pleasing product with excellent art, layout, and production values, you've got a commercial success. If that's the benchmark for "driving products" that you want to use, then D&D has failed ("well-organized" - three separate books, two with godawful organization, to play the game; "easy to understand" - where were you when 3.5 was the biggest game on Earth?; "entertaining, and interesting writing" - ymmv but "forgotten realms is interesting" is a take I have not seen in a long time). Vampire et al have failed across every edition ("well-organized, easy to understand" - fifteen metaplot books later...; "entertaining, and interesting writing" - without even digging deep, if writing off IRL human rights crises as a vampire plot is entertaining and interesting writing then I've got bad news for you). Had to actually go check the Evil Hat publishing catalog because it's been a while, and most of what's in there are things people are supporting getting the attention. Not to say they're free of it, FATE as one of the most misunderstood systems in the hobby is demonstration enough, but EH is publishing the bigger of the "indie games", as meaningless a term as that is nowadays. "Accessible, fun, and easy to learn mechanics" is huge YMMV territory but in my personal experience with the mentioned studios' games White Wolf never managed it, and the only time WotC did they got enough community backlash that we got 5e. (And, again, FATE is a mystery box of a system for a lot of folks.) Yet they're still the top and "appealing". It's solely marketing.
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Mar 7, 2021 18:42
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Arivia posted:Having really bad faith takes about RPG consumers isn't helping your argument here. It's just making you come off as even more petty and spiteful. What's the bad faith take? Quality and sales volume have no correlation. Why should the conclusion drawn from that be "quality really matters for selling rpgs"?
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Mar 7, 2021 18:54
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