TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I know there's some maxim to the effect of "Listen to what your customers are complaining about, but do not listen to their proposed solutions," but dear God, I sure hope Holden gets that "not in the business of writing bad rules people think they want" tagline in his permanent Akashic record.

That is just so uniquely stupid and lovely above and beyond all his other poo poo. It's like the Metallica cover of "Astronomy," why would you even do this?

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 10:50

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 23:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

That Old Tree posted:

When I found out we would be doing a third edition "from the ground up" I immediately started working on relatively radical proposals like players defining their own skills and Charms reinforcing and being restricted by that, or paring the Ability list down drastically and doing away with Attributes, or more closely tying skills to Attributes like Trinity did.

Then our very first big development email thread was everyone arguing John out of reverting War to Brawl again.

Exalted 3 should've looked a lot more like Scion 2. Hell I'd say you could just slightly adapt Scion 2 to play Exalted. Obviously you kind of need the Exalted fluff because otherwise just play Scion.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2018 10:34

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Terrible Opinions posted:

There is an oft repeated anecdote that when asked by a fan if the the orcs were based on anyone in particular in WW1, he said that life in the trenches turned everyone into orcs. I haven't been able to find any citation on it though.

It does not seem to be a quote, but I imagine if you raised him up from his Essential Saltes Tolkien would say "Yes, that's correct."

This RPG.net stuff is wild. I was wondering why that guy slandering the name of Nadreck got banned from the Lensman Let's Read thread - now I know!

# ¿ Nov 1, 2018 05:16

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

There is a lot you can critique about Lowtax but I think he is correct about the 'Special sauce' which is why this particular comedy forum, however necrotic or homosexual, has kept on rolling. Those three ingredients being, first, putting some skin in the game (through registration fee), second, having active, human moderators (however horrible they turn out to be) and third, having clear rules which are not interpreted in a doctrinaire way.

I don't think this formula would be impossible to replicate, although as the taxman himself has discovered you probably can't do it as a primary business. (You probably could break even.) People have not, to my knowledge, ever really attempted it, and as with any social environment the network effect has a large intrinsic value, so you might not be able to have a lot of those kinds of places around.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2018 00:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Loomer posted:

Let's not forget that they also decided to make the screaming blood thirsty rage a normal, natural Orcish trait and not a Demon induced thing. It turns out that Warcraft orcs really are just biologically more inclined to go into berserk killing sprees and enact horrific brutality on others.

As the Orcs have doubled as an African/Jewish metaphor for some time, this is Unfortunate.

The idea of having some kind of grendel-esque beast mode that your species can trigger in order to flip cars and own fools is pretty awesome, but it seems like this would tend to make your culture exhaustively formal and polite instead of what anyone would call 'orky'.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2018 05:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Nuns with Guns posted:

Martin Ericsson/Swedracula says he still has a job, so my expectations are still low for any long-term change.

Sweden has like, workers' rights and poo poo, so it may just be that the firing process isn't instant the way it is in America

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 05:06

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Lost_Heretic posted:

V20 didn't have a crowdfunding campaign.............

I thought it did? It was just, essentially, a pre-order for a deluxe edition (and probably also a way for them to break even on day 1)

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 07:19

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Print run's better for cons anyway, I know several times I've bought a book for American fiat dollars that I would have probably not bought if I wouldn't have had it right in my hands due to POD etc. Of course the established practice is probably to get some copies for them anyway...

Joe Slowboat posted:

Can you imagine how jealous the SIGMATA guy must be of Mark Rein*Hagen right now?

Also, it's really painful that the tagline for SIGMATA is 'this signal kills fascists' when from everything that's been discussed on this 'chemical toilet' he goes out of his way to minimize the contexts in which one is allowed to kill fascists, down to 'actively fascing right the hell now and as soon as they start losing you have to stop shooting.'

Yeah I don't get why it seems like people forgot at some point that there is space between "literally kill every single person who was ever involved in the armed forces of an oppressive national government" and "only non-lethal takedowns and martyrdom acceptable." Then again maybe it's because of the fascination with being insurgents.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2018 00:51

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I have to imagine that DTRPG has at least a small physical stock for things they know are going to move some units, like a newly-released OPP book or something. They're not literally printing every single book on a bespoke basis, are they?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 11:26

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Hmm, sounds like this Lovecraft fella might have been pretty racist. Not sure though. Need some more convincing.

I don't know if it has come up much but I imagine that part of why Lovecraft in particular has been milked so hard is that Lovecraft died intestate before the Disney-induced eternal recurrence of copyright law, and he produced a body of work with some real depth to it. Indeed it is a shame he did not write more Dreamlands stuff because that was bordering on an entire mythical world like Middle-earth and so forth.

Anyway, that meant that his poo poo was public domain and could be freely pillaged for parts in a way that (for instance) Doc Smith's work, which was broadly contemporary, could not. I think even Howard had some kind of literary estate, didn't he? But if Lovecraft had one it was brief and was held by Derleth for a while and then lapsed into the public domain.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2018 23:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Terrible Opinions posted:

So blame Disney, because now nothing else will ever enter the public domain.

Until the Old Ones return and teach us new ways to ~~shout and kill and enjoy ourselves~~ produce novel IPs using superannuated source materials. :gritin:

# ¿ Dec 9, 2018 23:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Maxwell Lord posted:

Well I mean, that's true, but they still sell a poo poo ton of stuff with him and all the related characters. He's a mascot. So all they really need to control is the branding.

Like if Steamboat Willie went into the public domain, I would be able to write a story with Mickey Mouse in it (ONLY using material from Steamboat Willie as a basis, mind you- couldn't include anything from work that was still under copyright), but since the trademark is still Disney's, I would be very limited in how I could package or promote that story. I would have to make it very clear that this was not a Disney product, or at least do nothing to suggest that it was.

I imagine Disney's concern was more with their older animated features which were still major moneymakers, and probably still are. It would be a dog's age before anything from The Little Mermaid on was public domain, but if they lose Steamboat Willy and the shorts, then a few years later they lose Snow White, Fantasia, etc.

This would be less of a hit NOW, but back then they would trot that poo poo back into theaters every few years for another rake on the children of America.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2018 09:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Loomer posted:

I might be on the wrong side of this but hermaphroditic gods and goddesses are an established tradition that I'm not going to break with. Doesn't make them good NB, trans, or intersex representation of course.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the esoteric concept of "transcends/includes the entire space of masculine and feminine energies," which is what I think you are speaking of - even if the term "hermaphroditic" would be deprecated nowadays.

The problem in this particular case is the lovely illustration, not "elves have less sexual dimorphism than humans" (which seems to be an established trope) or "this elf god has this particular trait."

# ¿ Dec 29, 2018 12:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Joe Slowboat posted:

I just thought of something - surely charging players per game played would reduce the number of games actually played? Since there would be no cost to just acquiring and reading RPG books, but a distinct cost to running the games?

Doubling down on Hyphz' original problem with the industry?

Pretty much. One of the advantages of this hobby is that you can amortize maybe fifty bucks equivalent up front cost for books, some funny dice, and scratch paper/pencils into a massive amount of entertainment... and that fifty bucks equivalent is in 2018 dollars and rapidly becomes "peanuts" if you can get the dice and books for free or cheap.

remusclaw posted:

I feel like fantasy creatures often end up standing in for other groups and cultures as well and it never feels right. Where those people would show up in a story otherwise, in fantasy, there appears the fantastic creature to take their place and deflect from having to take responsibility for how that character was portrayed. "Oh, I'm not being racist, that's just how Orcs are, they are born evil and dumb and uncivilized and no matter how they are treated or raised they will never be able to rise above their lot in life."

For me the division is kind of, are they meant to be aliens or are they a different window on humanity?

Most of the classic D&D fantasy races are essentially humans with a couple of modifiers. The modifiers can be important but they are so obviously similar to humans, often to the point of creating interfertile offspring, that it breaks my own mouth-taste if they have some fundamentally different detail. It feels like the distinctions in that case should be primarily cultural. It is way easier to accept great divergence from humans when they are explicitly aliens - like thri-kreen or Kzinti or whatever.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 04:07

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think the first people to have that particular idea were White Wolf with the Changeling the Dreaming cards.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 05:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Lemon-Lime posted:

This leads to the absolute worst part of Eberron, which is that the gnomes are a secret conspiracy that controls the media and disappears anyone who disagrees with them, while the dwarves retain the already-lovely "money-grubbing misers who would sell their mothers for profit" characterisation from default D&D.

And y'all were always talking up this setting. Is the allure of playing a robutt that great?

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 13:12

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ProfessorCirno posted:

He had a lot to say about alignment, all of it profoundly hosed up. At one point he was explaining "Lawful Good" on dragonsfoot, which involved claiming "eye for an eye" was a proper understanding of lawful good, quoting a real world genocidal maniac (two of them, actually, but only referenced one by name), pointing out that if a paladin were to ever convert someone of evil alignment they should immediately be murdered to ensure they don't "backslide," and stating that pacifists deserve to be made into slaves.

I dunno, what'd he have to say about collectivization of agriculture? This could still go either way.

I do wonder about a lot of these guys' written material and how much of it was the equivalent of an effort post in a thread here, which most of us would probably not consider to be included in our personal portfolio and Selected Quotations from Username Nessus. On the other hand, alignment was pretty hosed up, and unfortunately that propagated instead of weapon speed modifiers...

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 23:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

AlphaDog posted:

You sure can do all kinds of roleplay poo poo with planescape such as factional politics or idealist travelogues or or or all kinds of other things that don't work at all with the D&D system.

Or you can use all that as a backdrop for your interdimensional heist team who spend a third of their game time searching for portals/keys/information and casing a place; a third infiltrating the place, stealing the loot, and inevitably betraying or being betrayed by employers etc; and the final third escaping from the various people they've pissed off after it all goes to the place two spaces to the right of hell and one up.

"Oh no, Moroseville is sliding into the Grey Emo because the Lord Of The One To The Left Of Hell -2 To Fireball and the Greater Society Of Not Picking Your Nose At Dinner (New Schism) are fighting! Whatever shall we do?"

"Moroseville? That the place with the expensive clocks? Could we nick some of those while everyone's panicking about it?"

I mean, I fuckin' love Planescape, but you gotta lean into stuff you can do with D&D if you wanna play D&D in it.

So you can use Planescape to play Shadowrun, but D&D and without guns? That's what I'm getting out of this.

I nominate Dark Sun as best original D&D setting.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2018 03:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Slimnoid posted:

Warframe's an entirely different beast and wouldn't really be suitable for anything other than Warframe.

On the other hand, Warframe would be a pretty bomb-rear end setting for a sci-fantasy RPG, even if the players weren't tennos

# ¿ Dec 31, 2018 07:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Pieces of Peace posted:

Almost certainly the latter. FE could in theory support it, and it wouldn't be too hard of a mechanical shift - the gearing certainly works for taking base weapons and adding mods, and the gear/talents separation could reflect Warframe/Tenno powers pretty nicely; but it would basically require a full treatment of inventing balanced Warframes, probably as superpowerful unique armors with their own 3-5 special effects (depending how you want to translate their powers and passives), changing up the psionics from FE's fairly restricted themes of space warping/time warping/brain warping to the five disciplines of Tenno powers, and then figuring out the new enemy balance.

In short, very doable in Fragged * engine, but closer to making a new Fragged * game. Whereas a simple reskin of Fragged Empire by itself would be fine and dandy for a "you're a Red Veil Operative, Steel Meridian Soldier, Ostron hunter, and Solaris United mechanic, fighting the overwhelming forces of Corpus, Grineer, and Infested while the Tenno do their crazy space ninja poo poo elsewhere."

E: also in power levels, FE characters are definitely closer to the mooks. You can get maimed (although not killed) very easily in one bad round, and you're encouraged to move tactically and make careful use of cover at all times. Enemy squads with automatic weapons are murderous against anyone in the open with less than the best armor money can buy (stuff vastly out of the purchasing power of a starting PC).

Can you think of a system that CAN approximate Tenno bullshit or elite boss powers?

# ¿ Jan 1, 2019 02:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

It's also much more built for boss fights rather than 'crushing eight million Corpus grunts'.

I mean one advantage of Warframe is that you do, generally, kill most of the enemy in one shot. Sometimes more than one enemy per shot. Basically you are the only thing keeping the Grineer from ramping up their populations, because they ~~attack~~ attaf straight into your shotguns and death waves.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2019 06:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I thought the issue with defiling wasn't so much the player level, although of course you could still gently caress up a village by slinging spells around: it was that the career path for defiler went something like defiler -> sorceror-king -> the Dragon

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 07:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Kwyndig posted:

I think there are Paragon Paths and Epic destinies that take you down the road of the Sorcerer Kings, but the Dragon is like a level ridiculous enemy intended to really challenge a whole max level party.

If I remember in 2e they had a book all about the various physical transformations and how to achieve them and hitting Dragon was crazy hard since you needed to essentially destroy an entire nation to get enough sacrifices to start the transformation.

See that was great because then you look at why all the sorceror-kings have these nations that snipe at each other when they don't really need that and you go: Oh. oh

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 12:42

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

unseenlibrarian posted:

Didn't some of the sorcerer kings have this explained by the fact that they'd genocided some of the regular D&D humanoid types that didn't exist in the setting? Like I think one of them had killed off the Athas gnome population or something, and another one had done for ogres.

They got a lot of them. The big twist is that Rajaat, the guy who had the idea, was basically tricking all these champions, because his plan was to restore Athas to its original inhabitants... and he'd never mentioned to them that that wasn't humans, it was halflings. The guy who became the Dragon nearly finished off the dwarves.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2019 07:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mors Rattus posted:

Yeah, every year GAMA manages to find new and interesting ways to gently caress up managing Origins, despite the fact that the volunteers that actually do the gruntwork are all doing their best..

They ought to hire the Smithees guys, that always goes off smooth as buttered glass. Alan Smithee presents: Origins!

# ¿ Jan 8, 2019 14:55

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

homullus posted:

Huh. "Sales were dropping, gamers (aside from a few vocal ones) apparently didn't want it, distributors didn't want it" is better than "I won't stoop to making a product based on a license that's actually popular."

Yeah, that's remarkably reasonable and even has a pretty neutral and probably-accurate explanation for the market collapse. Did... did the Internet really gently caress everything up?

# ¿ Jan 30, 2019 12:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

So this clown tattooed "LOW BLOOD PRESSURE" on the inside of his forearm? But (from his perspective - such as it is) upside down?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2019 08:36

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Loomer posted:

Yes, because that's how much he cares~

Nevermind that an infinitely more practical option is to, I don't know, get your partner a medicalert bracelet with a QR code or even just some handy little laminated cards listing it for your wallets, his-and-hers style.

Notice also that it's on his arm, which creates reliance.

EDIT:
QR code, not bracelet.

So where did The Human Eyeliner here get the money to make people financially dependent on him? He come from money? Selling crank to schoolchildren?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2019 09:05

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ha ha what a clown. Watch him try to start RPGGate once this high wears off.

Like at this point he�s clearly doing it with deliberate purpose.

E. Jesus that financial thing. Probably was making his victims pay for the �privilege� of being abused huh.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2019 10:00

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Loomer posted:

I don't know if it's been expressed yet but Frankie's defence of him includes the concept that if you're a victim of abuse, you must be reaching out for help or looking for a way out while the abuse is ongoing. That's just about the most hosed up, dangerous myth to be passing around because people in the middle of those situations often can't reach out at all, not just because of isolation but because of internalized attitudes stemming from the abuse that they deserve it, no one will be understand, etc. 'It can't be serious abuse if they aren't trying to run' is genuinely dangerous to put out there as an 'informed opinion'.

I mean, unless you're trying to facilitate abuse. Perhaps because you plan to engage in more of it? (The you here refers to Zak)

# ¿ Feb 16, 2019 07:06

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

90s Cringe Rock posted:

Singular they is too familiar, for more formal language you use the singular yey.

Literally nothing wrong with this.

Yey art, or "yeet" for short

# ¿ Feb 22, 2019 09:37

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The o-WoD patch was that botches take away successes but you just normal-fail if you had any successes at all, right?

# ¿ Feb 27, 2019 11:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

moths posted:

There were also long periods of time where Mandy couldn’t have sex because of her illness. Zak sat and worked next to her and tried to keep her healthy.

I ask merely out of morbid curiosity but what the hell did she have? Was it something that actually required or benefited from intensive care, or was it entirely the rear end in a top hat using her as a prop?

# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 10:26

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

gourdcaptain posted:

The Serenity RPG is mostly remembered in my RPG group for the rule stating unprotected exposure to vacuum dealt damage equal to rolling every die on the table. Hence referring to how games like Shadowrun have absurd dice pools as "Serenity dice."

Dave? What are you doing, Dave? Why are you putting Frank's dice in that cup? I'm confused, Dave. Why don't you just spend a Fate point and think about this ra

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 22:36

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Bieeanshee posted:

I hope to never meet anyone who thinks this sort of thing is in any way a good idea.

What are you gonna do, try to have FUN with your hobbies?

Of course I have only been in PARANOIA LARPs at cons, notable mostly for the refs having to call for everyone to freeze in place as they take sight lines to determine who got hit by stray lasers.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 00:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

So like, what's the appeal there? Is it in fact that some guy gets to be Great Value Lord Humungus and sex a bunch of people in costumes? Is it supposed to be like historical re-enactment?

# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 08:16

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I'm old enough to remember when the cool edgelord anime had Dracula and Wolverine Priest murdering buckets of vampire Nazis.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 23:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Xelkelvos posted:

Yeah, China is weird about doing things with history that aren't culturally or plausibly true. Time Travel series and movies and stuff is forbidden China iirc.

What's really weird is why. You'd think, okay, they don't want you going back in time in your story and saying you made everything better by dropping Chairman Bao and preventing the Binese Bommunist Barty from taking over Bhina.

Apparently the actual issue is a huge trend in a lot of literature in which key characters are told by various historical figures that they are brilliant and awesome.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 02:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Maxwell Lord posted:

Oh poo poo maybe this is why the Emperor is kept alive, because letting him die would violate quorum

If he dies there's a general election. Chaos might win - and that would be acceptable - but it is also possible that Labour would win, and THAT is unthinkable.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2019 22:42

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 23:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

It seems strongly implied that the only reason Swedracula didn't get staked and left for the Sun, professionally speaking, is that Sweden actually has labor laws and it seems that he probably did not actually violate criminal laws.

e: To be clear this is more of a "We have no law prohibiting you from what you did because we had not expected anyone would start an international incident with a vampire roleplaying game" situation, not "he did nothing wrong"

Nessus fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Apr 3, 2019

# ¿ Apr 3, 2019 21:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG as an Industry: A pendulum swing against the excesses of Rule 0 culture

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