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If it was just “you need other people to play” then board games would have the same problem. It’s more about pre-investment (CCGs and minis) and long term commitment (RPGs). I know a fair number of game club organisers who hate RPGs because they create isolated closed groups of players for every meeting for months on end.
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Feb 28, 2018 12:02
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Xelkelvos posted:The funny thing about RPGs is that they could totally be organized like board games where it's 2-6 hours of people at a table with their character sheets, their resolution system of choice and whatever visual or textual aids that they need with single sessions being more or less one and done things. This is the sort of culture Japan has with their RPGs where, rather than having a series of shorter sessions over the course of months or years, it's one or two extended sessions that go from start to finish. You can see this in the Double Cross and Tenra Bnasho books that got translated as they explain the general flow of a game where, in the former, players are totally expected to burn themselves out and go out with a bang by the end of the session as part of the climax. This is built into the system and written as the intended mode of play. The tradeoff for that, though, is the relatively light nature of these systems (that I've seen, anyway) which might lower their appeal to the kind of people at organized gaming clubs who are there for "board games or whatever's going". I mean, there's times when I'd totally just want to relax at games club by being in a GSS session and being a cute fox kid who's helpful to people, but not everyone's going to want that (or feel comfortable admitting it, for that matter!)
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Mar 2, 2018 18:50
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Ferrinus posted:It's very easy to take 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder, 5e, or whatever other D&D chassis you want and fix the LFQW problem: give fighters and rogues increasing amounts of per-day abilities that are comparable in power to spells of the same level. You don't have to touch existing casters at all - just make everyone quadratic. The problem with that is that it addresses the problem of “i hit one dude and the wizard fireballs 20”. It doesn’t address “I help gather crops and the wizard casts Control Weather”, or “the enemy wizard casts flight and protection from missiles and I go suck my thumb”. Those, especially the first one, likely require removing “wizard” as a single class.
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Mar 10, 2018 15:19
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remusclaw posted:Yeah, but as someone else put a bit differently, you gotta put the time in with folks playing the popular games before they like you enough to listen when you tell them that there is a better way. Last gaming group I played with put me off of them before the game did. But well, no gaming before bad gaming, I suppose. Yea, that's the issue. There's massive inertia in most groups, and by the time you actually get anything that's not popular to the table, it's expected to light up the sky and dance with the angels.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:54
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The above about Alas Vegas is completely agreed - I can’t imagine it running coherently with rotating GMs as proposed in the book. Wallis occasionally shows up at my FLGS. He’s never been anything but encouraging to people playing Baron or any of his stuff, so I guess just emphasising that it is a book as opposed to just a random game to be learned by hearsay is what he wanted? Spyfall has a similar problem.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:31
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I think that can be the reverse. What GMing works in a podcast may not work outside one, and what works for people with the talent to be successful podcasters might not work for anyone else.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:14
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Nuns with Guns posted:There are some games that straight up wouldn't work in a podcast but I don't see how being able to keep a compelling conversation going on a podcast wouldn't translate well to GMing. Player (and GM) motivation, for one thing. If a player’s favourite PC dies in a private game, it’s annoying and upsetting for them. If it’s a podcasted game, they can spin it as a “plot twist” for podcast listeners. A few free copies and advertising bucks make up for a lot, including - possibly - not really liking the game that much.
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Mar 13, 2018 19:57
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Flavivirus posted:I'd say the opposite is true: characters on streams have fandoms, and an unexpected death is going to have huge consequences for the game's following - far more so than in a private game. I meant disliking the game rather than the system (although there certainly are podcasts that just ignore the system). But if someone’s constantly racking up bad rolls, for example, then in a podcast they can play that to the audience. In a private game it just sucks to be them.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:53
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Another thing that's different with actual plays that I've heard talked about : the GM has to be more cognizant of ending at a place that makes for a good episode. Not only does that influence pacing a lot, but it sometimes means the group will push through another half hour to get to an end point when in a home game you'd just call it a night. And that, from some casts, means more deus ex Machina episode endings - and players who are more tolerant of them, because they have an interest in the podcast succeeding too. Honestly, it’s just a question of asking “would these people still play, and play like this, if the mic was gone?” And the answer is often, at best, “Umm.”
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Mar 13, 2018 21:07
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White box Paranoia.
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Apr 12, 2018 20:02
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Also did anyone notice that they said they would “recast” the RPGsports team? Not deselect, bench, or bar, like you do in sports. “Recast”, like you do in performances. It appears the “AP meta effect” has already been planned in; it’s actually “RPG pro wrestling”...
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Oct 20, 2018 13:37
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The thing is that UA doesn’t necessarily cop to its view of violence; the first page of the combat rules does, but little of the supporting material supports it. To actually solve most problems you end up having to either use violence or do magic, both of which UA says are ultimately terrible ideas. And as for “don’t say that orcs are brutes” that’s a bad case of a reinforcing metaphor. If there was a second sentient species that was just better at violence than humans then it would be more violent because it works. (Edit) The whole idea that such a species can be a metaphor for certain subsections of people is itself embracing a decent chunk of the racist viewpoint. Lydia Bugg posted:Yet it's the kind of parable that turns up over and over again in science fiction and fantasy stories that are reportedly trying to convey a message of tolerance. "Look, we get that you're having trouble seeing minorities as humans, so perhaps it would help if you imagined them as something that is A) objectively not human and B) inherently dangerous." hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 23:00
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Comrade Koba posted:I don't think actual posts would count as personal data as long as nothing in them could be used to identify the person who made them. Deleting the account and removing the IP logs would probably be enough. I’m not sure. The UK and later the EU supported the Right To Be Forgotten, which basically means that if you make a dumb forum post when you’re 16 you have the right to not have employers Googling it when you’re 35 - or more seriously that when a legal conviction is spent and no longer needs to be declared, people shouldn’t be able to find out about it anyway with a search.
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Oct 30, 2018 11:40
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Liquid Cannibalism posted:Now I'm curious. Does that extend to needing to censor archival news sources that mention it? If I recall correctly, it doesn’t have to be deleted but it has to not be searchable? It’s complicated basically.. they’re saying that somehow the internet has to be like the old microfiche archives where everything is there, but nobody would spend hours combing it to find that Fred Muggins shoplifted some Pokemon cards 10 years ago. hyphz fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Oct 30, 2018 |
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Oct 30, 2018 11:58
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Angrymog posted:Membership, and the parent company, Skotos, runs paid muds iirc I really doubt they make any money from those any more. They were a comically bad idea.
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Oct 30, 2018 13:59
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dwarf74 posted:Part of the whole point of the legislation was to reverse that trend. Yea, I see the practical issue but I also see the counter argument, that technological innovation should not be the be-all-end-all determiner of how society works.
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Oct 30, 2018 15:01
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Books do work better for getting a game played in real life. PDFs work better for getting a game played online, provided they either give permission for group sharing or get pirated. That’s usually the killer - if a game allows its PDF to be shared with group members, that’s an easy way to get a free copy which unlike an RL shared copy you can keep forever. If it doesn’t, it will never be played. And yea, it’s fine to pay for PDFs. Although if an RPG could just be reduced to a geek code it might be a bad deal.
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Nov 5, 2018 23:37
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It can be easier, but I find a) searching through a book is faster on PDF but going to a known place is faster physically. Muscle memory is still a thing b) getting away from screens is a highlight of physical RPG play for many folks I’ve met so bringing them back is undesirable.
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Nov 5, 2018 23:49
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Also it’s easier to bring a bunch of books for people to look through and say “hey do you fancy playing these” than to pass around a tablet or hand out a shared link that everyone will get lost navigating (and/or just scrape the whole share, cha-ching)
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Nov 6, 2018 00:00
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Poundstone’s book Priceless argues that price and value aren’t determined economically at all, but psychologically. Understandable since pure economic pricing tends to fail to account for sales strategies, decoy pricing, prestiging etc. Ref invisible sun and most RPG Kickstarters.
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Nov 6, 2018 22:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:It might be worth going through Caleb Stokes's (of Red Markets) work, as I recall he wrote (or talked) a bunch about doing a print run for Red Markets and how the economics of that worked out. If I recall that turned out to be a bit of a disaster though. The print run was in China and so all the KS backers were hit with large shipping bills as unexpected price increases.
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Nov 19, 2018 16:48
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Atlas Hugged posted:Have there been any solid 4e clones that use tile based combat? I loved just slapping down dungeon tiles on a table and being able to play. Sadly, they all belonged to my friend and I've moved countries. Not exactly. Unity, Valor and 13th Age use the 4e moves system, but not grid based combat. Fragged Empire/Kingdom uses precise grid based combat, but not unique character moves. Panic At The Dojo uses moves and grid based combat, but for some bizarre reason has no character advancement rules. Strike also uses moves and grid based combat, but has no stats, weapons or armor. Pathfinder 2e Playtest is actually very 4e-like, but is broken in many innovative ways. hyphz fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Nov 21, 2018 |
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Nov 21, 2018 12:04
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More odd drama: apparently a warehouse destroyed copies of She Bleeds, a LotFP supplement that's basically "periods are magic". https://www.geeknative.com/63810/warehouse-destroys-disgusting-lamentations-of-the-flame-princess-rpg-supplement/ (for some reason it is being repeated on other Internet sources that they burned them, but I don't think there's any evidence of that nor any reason why they'd do so) It was a distributor who did the destruction and the books were already bought from the publisher, so it's not active destruction of property, but there's a lot of complaint about whether buying the books and then destroying them is active censorship of the author's work or not, or if it's just correction for a product that wouldn't sell and isn't worth storing.
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Dec 3, 2018 17:03
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Part of the thing I noticed about Strike! is that the initial rules are quite wordy, in part because they're teaching you how to apply the relatively simple to multiple situations, but also they read rather defensively. The "don't demand nonsense" principle can easily come across to the reader as "don't demand that the game system prevents nonsense". More of the issue with Strike is the layout - the rules pages are very densely packed and wide text, so it's difficult to believe at first it's a light system, and while the lack of numbers simplifies things, it also eliminates the psychological satisfaction that comes with numbers going up. Fellowship had a similar thing on defensive writing: in its GM section it specifically called out "just because you can show signs of an approaching threat any time you make a move, doesn't mean that any time a player fails a roll a bear shows up." Which seems a bit weird even if you aren't familiar with the quantum bear meme, and if you are familiar with it, you know that's an incorrect statement of it (because there's no advice on the two issues that quantum bears was about, which were a) confused causal links and b) the fact that the GM isn't a bottomless fount of creativity and so the twists he/she/they introduce will have patterns to them) 5e of course doesn't bother defending itself even when it's obviously wrong, so it's not necessarily a bad thing..
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Dec 23, 2018 23:43
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theironjef posted:I think people are seeing the names and the art and creating a little theme in their heads, yeah. Like this game is about angry child necromancers and robot duelists. It'd maybe help if the classes were just titled like episodes of friends, so everyone saw the mechanical wheels, all like "The One that Interacts with Downed Enemies" and "The Ranged One." I hate to say it but the Archer is one of the worst examples. You’ve got this picture of a dude with a mini gun and then a bunch of abilities that refer specifically to arrows. And moreover, to running out of trick arrows and needing to make more which is kind of difficult to reskin (it’s easy to say power packs or something but then why can you still fire unlimited regular shots? And making a power pack seems to be much riskier and need more specialised equipment or even a factory than making an arrow etc..)
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Dec 24, 2018 16:42
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Impermanent posted:If you're wondering how moves recharge and other science facts/ la la la / say to yourself it's just a game I should really just relax. Well sure except, in this case it’s critical to how strong the trick arrow moves are. There’s no listed recharge duration except “when you can get more arrows, and the GM should make it difficult”. The necromancer has a similar thing, their strength varies based on how often you meet undead-or-equivalent.
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Dec 24, 2018 18:22
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Impermanent posted:You, hyperventilating: HOW would a DRAGON even RUN OUT of BREATH?!?! and WHY doesn't your character FLY AROUND?! the OTHER DRAGON IS A MARTIAL ARTIST Arhegehege It's not that a dragon couldn't run out of breath; it's that the difficulty and process for making arrows is pulled into the game's mechanics by the fact it's the only guide to recharging that ability, and that difficulty and process is going to change significantly with reskinning. Ok, maybe a dragon can run out of types of breath and have to recharge by eating the right minerals Flight of Dragons style, but then that changes how that recharging is going to happen in different environments and natural contexts - you can make an arrow from stuff you might find in a castle, you aren't likely to just suddenly find a spire of rock to eat. Speciality ammunition for a fancy railgun? Ok, but tying a breakable flask of oil to the end of a regular arrow is something an individual could do much more easily than dismantling an industrially-made sealed ammo cartridge and loading future-napalm into it, and even if you adlib that because it's the kind of thing gun nut characters do in plenty of sci-fi, then how many places are going to sell small sachets of future-napalm and are you going to find them lying around in the enemy base?
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Dec 24, 2018 20:03
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PoptartsNinja posted:The VPS-30 "Varia" Railgun has standardized variable ammo. Every individual shell is built to be easily dismantled and filled with any appropriate contents. Because this specialty ammo is relatively expensive and requires different muzzle velocity to be effective, most people stick to the solid core rounds with the highest overall projectile speeds. But a few enterprising soldiers like to keep the more specialized payloads on their persons so they can quickly swap to incendiary or acid bee payloads as needed. That's fine, but it's changing the recharge rule. The recharge rule for Trick Arrow says explicitly that you run out of the specialised ammo. So sure, you can keep those ammo on you, but when you run out, how do you get more while still behind enemy lines? I mean, ok, maybe the enemy use them too - although that's going to be difficult because I don't know how balanced Strike is if you use the PC class abilities on enemies, and if they don't, you get the thing where the enemy is storing a bunch of loot that's useful to you and not to them which is a fairly classic gaming cringe - but otherwise it's tricky to fit. Same with "recharge with nanomachines every 2-4 combats", you can rule that way if you like, but it doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the text (which explicitly says "this is a powerful ability so the GM is encouraged to be harsh with letting you recover your trick arrows")
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Dec 24, 2018 20:25
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All of these are quite reasonable adjustments for other situations but here's the actual rules text of Trick Arrow:quote:When you roll a 2 on your Trick Arrow power, you must treat it as though you rolled a 5, but you have run out of that kind of ammo. Cross the effect off the list. (If you are making this attack in an area, you do not run out of this ammunition until all targets are resolved.) Finding the materials and crafting these Trick Arrows is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. You’ll have to find the downtime to make the Skill Rolls required if you want that particular ability back. Use all the usual rules in the Non-Combat section. This is a powerful ability, so the GM should not let you off easy. So let's look at what we have to satisfy to not create a clash with the mechanics here: a) the material used has to be difficult to get and take time. It's not therefore likely it will just be in enemy stores. b) the time is stated as being difficult to find, so something that is guaranteed to recharge after a given amount of time doesn't really match it. c) when you get the ability to do so, you have to be able to take an action that gives you arbitrary and abstractable number of these attacks (because you might roll a 2 on your first roll or 20 rolls later). d) there are no explicit rules for downtime except in the Dangerous Delves extra rules. They suggest that downtime is usually spent in town, which means those materials can presumably be found in the vicinity or networks of towns. Most of these don't match things like recharging nanomachines or malfunctions.
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Dec 24, 2018 20:50
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Foglet posted:Something something ludonarrative dissonance That can be forgiven, but this also hits class balance, which is a much bigger deal. It’s like if spell components were the major balancer for mages in D&D. Given jimbo’s mathematical background it would be much nicer if there was an added note on that ability saying “playtesting found this ability to be best balanced if / the combat numbers were calculated on that basis that the player can get their arrows back after X time” or something similar. hyphz fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Dec 24, 2018 |
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Dec 24, 2018 21:04
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Impermanent posted:It would be good if there was some Dev text about optimal class balance for the archer power but there's no meaningful distinction between "be stingy for this arrow guys powers and "be stingy for this gun guy's powers' and your insistence on beating this particular drum makes you come across as a pedant with no experience actually running, or playing, the game you're discussing. This is partly true - I'm a BNG stuck on Xmas Eve after all - but at the same time, it takes a lot of time and effort and not a little luck to actually find a game of an indie system like Strike, and so saying someone has to do all that for a game they don't like just in order to have their opinion trusted is a bit much. (Although actually, I do like Strike very much, but it's not perfect!) I do know of a group playing Unity, but they haven't played very far yet so I haven't seen how it's gone.
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Dec 24, 2018 23:04
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Ok, it's no longer Christmas, so I can be grouchy about the industry and about a conversation I had over the holiday. Any indie computer game, which was primarily multiplayer only, and that launched without any support for finding servers or players, would be laughed off most platforms. Every FLGS that wants to stay in business has to provide some kind of group arrangement or connection at least for CCGs and board games. So why it pretty much standard that this is ignored for RPGs? It's not as if it's particularly unviable. I expect a large majority of indie RPG sales go through DTRPG, so why couldn't it offer matching based on the games a person has bought, or statistics on play results per game? It'd not only add a bunch of value to everything on the site, it'd also provide some much needed curation if the authors of stuff like Beast or Blood in the Chocolate had to think through how they were going to arrange groups of the kind of person who wants to play Beast or Blood in the Chocolate. Better yet, it might actually increase potential sales value for RPGs by reducing the effect of adverse selection.
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Dec 26, 2018 18:27
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Haystack posted:Well, organized play exists, as does roll20 and fantasy grounds and the like. I'm guessing that that doesn't do it for you? 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. On the other hand, imagine a publisher with a new game who hired a couple of GMs to run seeding games across a few timezones. That would be much closer to what's standard for many other social game types.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:40
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The Lore Bear posted: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. quote:Video game developers, have larger budgets, bigger teams, and more baseline tech know how than most rpg designers. But if you want to play a trad with built in group finders and event managers, might I suggest larping? For high end games yes, for indies no. But then again, indies in video games have a LOT more active support to work with platforms to get games played, which is why I referred to DTRPG before. I also never understood the stretch goal thing where it's like "$100, the author will run a game for your group online". if it involved meeting up in person then I can see a high premium, but for online I would think that running a couple of games ought to be a standard part of the marketing process. (I'd like to say "and surely you like running it because you wrote it" but I've had enough experience that isn't true..)
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Dec 26, 2018 23:18
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Heliotrope posted:I feel like your comparison to video games don't work - they're fairly different things and yeah a multiplayer video game has to have support for finding other people online to play with. A tabletop RPG doesn't, because that's not a requirement for it to be able to work. You just go to your friends and say "Hey, there's this really cool game I wanna try running. You guys interested?" There are a lot of places where you can do online or play-by-post gaming and find people interested in whatever system you want to run if you can't do that or your friends aren't interested. If you want creators of tabletop rpgs to have a system to ensure that happens, that's going to increase the cost of the game. Well that would probably be OK because the cost of RPGs, at least PDFs, is likely already being pushed down by the adverse selection caused by having a low chance of actually playing any bought game. I mean, heck, if Invisible Sun had invested that $200 in actually organizing play of directed campaigns (as opposed to just handing them out) it'd be much closer to worth it. (Although it would also have to not have a terrible system and an IC currency that involves exchanging a bag of glass spheres for a McDonalds)
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Dec 27, 2018 03:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:Adding “economics” to the whiteboard labeled “Things Hyphz Can’t Do”. Fair enough. But that doesn’t make it right or sensible for the non-play rate to just be left as a gigantic elephant in the room. To say it doesn’t have an effect on consumer behaviour - and on the badness of the math - would be silly.
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Dec 27, 2018 14:17
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As I understand it BitD’s Roll20 support is fan made. I understand the randos issue too. But RPGs as they are feel a bit like the gym membership structure - not a scam or malicious per se, but having the effect of creating misery and making money in spite of it.
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Dec 27, 2018 16:03
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Meinberg posted:This feels very hyperbolic to me. How does an unplayed game “create misery?” Just look at the resolutions threads.
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Dec 27, 2018 16:28
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Lemon-Lime posted:Is this the entire basis of this argument of yours? Partly. And the fact that a friend who saw my shame shelves commented that he wondered if they “saw me coming”. And the other gold panning sales that tend to pop up at this time, and some comments on Discord about Savage Worlds. Did ya know Chuubo is a platinum seller on DTRPG? How many successful games of it do you know? There tends to be a problem when what gets rewards in the industry does not match what customers mostly actually want, and that seems to be the case here. hyphz fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Dec 27, 2018 |
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Dec 27, 2018 17:40
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:You know it's ok to just, like, buy books to read Yep, it’s fine, if you’re choosing to buy them to read. Obviously I’m talking about empowering buyers here, not forcing play on them if they don’t want it. But most RPG blurbs and KS campaigns focus on selling the play experience, not the reading value. Here’s the Chuubo’s Kickstarter: quote:It's not only the best thing I've ever written but I suspect that you can get ~500 hours of tightly-themed gaming from it without prep or players feeling on rails.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:37
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