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Ranged on one side: those Pathfinder fans who can find it within themselves to acknowledge that kt can do with a tune-up. On the other, those who refuse to contemplate any step further away from rote mimicry of D&D 3.5. Begun, the Clone Wars have.
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Mar 7, 2018 23:15
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Bedlamdan posted:I’ve never seen open development result in any serious changes or ground-up reworks of blatantly bad ideas. Either fans like what is put out in the initial release and maybe want some tweaks to this or that pet issue, or they just hate it from the word go. It happened with the Dark Heresy 2E playtest - the original version was a much more radical revision but they toned it down when people yelled about it losing cross-compatibility with old editions and other FFG 40K RPGs.
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Mar 8, 2018 10:21
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ultimately I think given infinite time most games will progress towards positive change, even with the regression we see. I don't buy the idea that everyone who rejected 4E in part because of the way it rejected LFQW did so because they were brainwashed idiots; I know plenty of people who did so but who also had a broad enough experience of other systems that you can't say that LFQW was the only idiom they knew. In general, I'm suspicious about any argument which relies on assuming that people are mistaken about their own tastes; if it turns out that some people find LFQW to be fun or a positive aspect of a game, actively disbelieving them is a good way to lose their patronage - and dogmatically assuming that LFQW is a bad thing which needs to go extinct needlessly tosses a game design tool into the bin which could be used for games which actually engage with it and make a virtue out of it (For instance, what about troupe style play? LFQW is absolutely not a problem if everyone has a F and a W of their own to use as the plot demands.)
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Mar 10, 2018 22:48
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counterspin posted:Oh my god, we really are going to cover the entire 4e edition wars. You can LIKE things even though those things are objectively bad. spectralent posted:also LFQW is just "I have fun when other people have less fun". Yeah, sure, people who like playing wizards probably love it but I imagine the pool of people who really want to have to sit on their hands for four hours and get told all their fun ideas are impossible while Dave conjours his eleventh platinum half-demon orca to trivially save everyone is probably much smaller. Perhaps if your experience of LFQW games are like that but mine differ then it really and genuinely is a matter of personal preference - in which case the question to settle is whether it's the preference of a majority of a game's audience and potential audience (and thus should be retained in a new edition) or the preference of a minority, which can be discarded for the benefit of the majority of a game's adherents.
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Mar 10, 2018 23:18
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Darwinism posted:Okay so you're not so tight on the words 'objective' and 'subjective' so let me clear this up - people can subjectively like a game, that's within their rights, but because they do like the game does not mean that the game cannot be also objectively a bad game because it presents itself deceptively to the people playing the game.
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Mar 10, 2018 23:32
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spectralent posted:Fighters appear in the book, acting like they're a proper class, when they're at best training wheels for the concept of dungeon crawler RPGs. Because one of the genuine strengths of a class system is that you can design classes that are adapted to different levels of engagement with the game and the system, which is extremely handy if you have players whose levels of system investment range from "Wants to know every single rules nook and cranny" or "Will show up week-in, week-out, with a better recall of what went down earlier in the campaign than the GM has" on the one hand to "is new to this and doesn't want to be given too much game mechanical stuff" or "actively wants to be able to coast in terms of the system stuff because they're mostly here for the roleplay" on the other. That's not a reason for fighters to be quite as terrible as they currently are, of course, but it is a reason why you would include a "training wheels" class. You could even label it as such and say "Listen, game mechanically you will end up overshadowed by others in the long run, but you might consider it a worthwhile tradeoff if you'd genuinely prefer not to have to learn any magic rules, and if your campaign isn't going to go much beyond level X it won't get that bad". Alien Rope Burn posted:As for Vancian spellcasting and LFQW, they get blasted because the main intent they most often seem to fulfill is "make a game like D&D". And that's not to say they can't serve a design purpose - anything can if done within proper intent - but whether or not they properly serve the needs of conventional fantasy games has been in question for a long time now. I like to think we can do better than 1974's state of the art, ultimately. Nostalgia appeal is as valid a design purpose as any, and criticising Pathfinder for not cutting out major nostalgia factors in a new edition is like saying that the next time someone remasters the Yes back catalogue they should swap out all the Moogs and Mellotrons for modern synthesisers. Even if objectively speaking the modern synthesisers have vastly superior capabilities to the old ones, the limitations of the old ones gave them a distinct sound and feel all of their own and the difference when they are taken away is noticeable. spectralent posted:Yeah, but that's why they're lovely designers and pathfinder is bad. lovely designers if game design is a commercial exercise where the aim is to squeeze money out of an audience which has made its preferences extremely clear? No. Keeping the nostalgia factor going is a perfectly decision given the commercial position Paizo are in. Blue skies game design is what indie games and small presses are for. At the scale of Paizo you need to craft your product to fit the audience you intend to sell it to. You should not be shocked that the McDonald's and Burger Kings of game production are putting out fast food-grade games rather than refined repast.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:35
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counterspin posted:No one complains about the power differential in Ars Magica because it's up front and taken into account in the broader design of the game. As much as people didn't like the late 4e stuff, I had seen in my groups that there were people who were never going to enjoy 4e at it's default fiddliness level, and I was glad to see it. People hate LFQW in D&D because it's a party game and there's a presumption of fairness. There's even this way to compare power across classes, called LEVELS. But it's a crock. And that's why people hate if. If you sold the fighter honestly no one would play it. Maybe part of the solution is to do class tiers and give an XP chart to each tier - so it takes that much longer for the wizard to pull far ahead of the fighter. (Of course, that only delays the problem... but if the problem is delayed long enough that 99% of campaigns wrap up before it actually occurs then it's ceased to be a central problem and ends up an edge case.)
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Mar 11, 2018 01:06
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Kai Tave posted:I don't think it actually benefits a game to try and cater to both, to go for the stereotypical example, someone who's really invested in the game and consequently knows how to exploit the hell out of all the tools at their disposal and the guy who shows up just to drink beer and occasionally hit stuff with an axe when he remembers it's his turn. The Forge days of hyper-targeted games aimed at an extremely specific game experience to meet a very defined play agenda gave us lots of lovingly-designed indie games which it ended up being absolute hell to sell a group on playing. If you want to see your game get widespread actual play then you need to design it for a range of tastes and levels of engagement because the odds of everyone in a gaming group liking exactly the same thing are pretty long.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That's also, IMO, why light storygames struggle to gain dominance. They require so much less buy-in and so much less time that they're discardable.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:11
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Bedlamdan posted:Okay so after a lot of thinking: Pathfinder is better than D&D 5E, because I can play Pugmire on Pathfinder and not D&D 5E
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Mar 11, 2018 23:17
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spectralent posted:I think the fallacy here is assuming that a game needs to be a market leader to be good; the one upside of RPG-as-hobby is that there's now enough games out there that people shouldn't have to settle for acceptably-lovely games.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:11
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spectralent posted:Yeah, but as stated earlier, even if mcdonalds acting like mcdonalds is entirely rational, I'm still going to dunk on it for being mcdonalds.
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Mar 12, 2018 09:35
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Kai Tave posted:James Wallace pops in to gripe about a Yogscast video where they play the Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen claiming that they never even name the game or mention it's a thing you can buy, except for the fact that they name the game in the beginning of the video, in the description of the video, in the title of the video, and at the end of the video. Maybe he's got a point in that they don't name Wallace or throw a link to where you can buy the game, but on the other hand we live in an age where Google exists and none of them were trying to claim they created the game themselves so. I've noticed that Wallis in general tends to take a very strong view on how much a game designer contributes to your home game experience. I finally managed to have a look at Alas Vegas recently (didn't get my own copy since I got a refund during the long silence on the Kickstarter) and the central adventure in there is extremely railroady, and he more or less directly talks about how he and the person currently running the game (it's a revolving-GM setup) are collaborating somehow. ("That doesn’t give you a licence to make poo poo up. This isn’t one of those indie games. Improvise by all means, but this is guided storytelling not a freeform bullshit session, and in each session there are two guides, you and me, and we’re in this together." - Infuriating not least because the nature of the adventure is such that in the early sessions the person GMing a) doesn't know what is going on and b) as per the rules as written isn't allowed to know what is going on, and so can't answer player questions or handle unexpected actions at all well because they don't have the underpinnings of information necessary to work out what happens as a result of actions which ping the underlying metaphysic.) The fact is that the Death of the Author applies doubly to game designers - once a game's out in the wild and in someone's hands you don't have the designer right there to interpret them for you, all you have are dead words on a page that the participants have to interpret. I think Skarka and Wallis are radically underestimating the talent required on the part of performers to actually make a game session interesting for a non-participant to watch to begin with, and radically overestimating the capacity of a game designer to shape people's experience at the table. At the end of the day, especially with RPGs, all you are doing is handing the play group a packet of suggestions, and you aren't there to complain when they ignore them.
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Mar 13, 2018 14:38
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Plutonis posted:Maybe that dude's point is that tabletop devs and people who work on TRPGs as a whole don't have a strong union like the SAG and are paid in peanuts because of that??? Though given that both Skarka and Wallis self-publish a substantial chunk of their work they wouldn't necessarily benefit so much from one anyway. (Especially since Skarka isn't getting that much freelance work due to the Far West stink, and Matt Sprange has all but openly accused Wallis of being unprofessional concerning his Paranoia obligations.)
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Mar 13, 2018 14:41
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dwarf74 posted:"Please! Won't someone stop these talented and entertaining people from advertising my games for free!"
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Mar 13, 2018 15:11
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hyphz posted:The above about Alas Vegas is completely agreed - I can’t imagine it running coherently with rotating GMs as proposed in the book. On the other hand, if the central game mechanics of your game are that simple, you've made a bigger problem for yourself anyway - namely that it's difficult or impossible to discuss or critique Munchausen without giving much of the game away. Wallis makes the book worth buying by writing it in the Baron's voice, which is amusing enough that I figured it was worth the money I spent on it, but if people don't value that it can be hard to convince them it's worth the money anyway - I can see how it'd be harder still if someone did a let's play involved enough that others could just start playing the game by watching the video once and them copying the game mechanics from that. Alas Vegas, of course, has the problem where if you watch a Let's Play of it, you've already spoilered the core scenario for yourself. This is true for all prewritten scenarios, but is especially true for Alas Vegas, where every single session is meant to be a huge surprise to the participants and drip-feeding out the information is so central to the concept.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:04
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Bieeanshee posted:The version a friend had had pages and pages of hilarious bullshitting prompts. That would have been worth the price of admission for me. But, yeah, mechanically it's about as complex as basic Mafia. On the other hand, there are how many varieties of Werewolf, Secret Hitler, etc. out there? You're right about Mafia and its variants, though I guess most of the ones people try to sell to folk as commercial products incorporate some form of tactile element or game piece which is where the money is really justified.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:32
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That said, it's pretty undeniable that fantasy-based TV series are huge - see the phenomenon Game of Thrones was, see how many of its imitators got at least some traction. The problem comes back to the fact that more distinctive fare has already eaten D&D's lunch in the TV market.
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Mar 13, 2018 22:39
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GimpInBlack posted:Pfft, they're just gonna put out Fungeons and Fragons in a couple of years and then all your E&E material will be useless. I'm going full accelerationist and putting out Zungeons & Zragons. The industry can now gently go to sleep knowing its final destiny has been accomplished.
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Mar 14, 2018 16:16
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Flavivirus posted:It's not the timeline of events they promised, but at least it's something. As far as I can tell Black Hat Matt hasn't said anything about the allegations made against him. - You have a scene-setting paragraph. - You have a mealy-mouthed discussion of whisper networks which both seems to snidely insinuate that they are Part of the Problem, partly by not ensuring that every single woman gets in on them and partly by being quasi-vigilante affairs. - You have criticism of existing harassment policies framed in such a way that more focus is put on "unethical manipulation" and "defamation" of alleged abusers than failures to protect victims. - You have her discussing her own experience in the most general terms and apologising for nothing beyond being somewhat intemperate in her tone. She does not address Suleiman's situation at all and, if this were the only thing you'd read, you'd have no clue that anything with Suleiman had even happened. - She culminates by declaring that she and Green Ronin are going to propose this new STOP Harassment industry-wide policy that they'll encourage people to adopt at GAMA. Because, of course, the best people to propose a new code of conduct for the industry is the company which still cannot find any way to coherently explain and account for its behaviour concerning Suleiman. Gimme a sec and I'll look over the STOP Harassment document itself (here it is).
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Mar 14, 2018 16:25
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OK, so STOP Harassment is itself trash. The introduction kicks off by attempting to give equal weight to the problems of harassment and false or misleading accusations. ("However, a consequence of this power is the risk of destroying the careers and families of innocent persons, either because the accusations are false or because the conduct at issue does not fit the definition of “harassment,” and such risks can lead to severe consequences of irreversible public shaming.") That's typically a red flag in my experience - not that a policy should necessarily discount the possibility of false accusations, but at the same time the one is clearly far more prevalent than the other. (In particular, in the light of the Suleiman stuff, it kind of leaves me wondering whether Green Ronin actually believe what's been reported about Suleiman at all, or whether - despite their apparent later backpedalling - they still think it's all false.) Their actual definition of sexual harassment is not unreasonable, though I can see people trying to weasel their way towards arguing that their behaviour isn't covered by it (and the policy seems very concerned with coming up with a really tight definition of harassment which is objectively testable, which may be the wrong approach to begin with). It says "Discrimination or harassment that is based on race, age, sex, gender, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, disability, medical condition, religion, or sexual orientation would also be addressed under this policy", but only gives a detailed description of what sexual harassment is, so how you're supposed to assess the rest of that stuff is immediately unclear. The definition ends with "Harassment is behavior which focuses unwelcome attention on a person, inappropriately crosses objectively reasonable expectations of social boundaries, and continues after a request to desist", and to be honest they could have quite happily stopped at that (save for that pesky "objectively" there), but as it is the definitions paragraph is confusing: it starts with one definition of a specific type of harassment, continues to say that you can apply it to all different types, and then closes with a different but overlapping definition of harassment in general. If they wanted this policy to generate objectivity and clarity that's the wrong way to go about it. They seem particularly keen on making this an industry standard, which would seem to rule out people choosing to be more stringent or giving more weight to the victim's account than the policy mandates here. That's concerning. There's a free speech clause: "Tabletop gaming is an inherently creative industry and this policy shall be implemented in a manner that recognizes the importance of the freedom of speech and expression: no provision of this policy shall be interpreted to prohibit conduct that is legitimately related to fiction, teaching methods, or public commentary of an individual member or the educational, political, artistic, or literary expression of members in games, fiction, and public venues." By my reading this means that if Zakula decides to throw in a degrading parody of a trans designer he's clashed rhetorical swords with into a product, that's absolutely fine because it's part of the fiction. Non-retaliation section is fair enough. What puts it beyond the pale is the requirement for accusers to, directly or via an intermediary, privately raise their concerns with their harasser before they make a report. "If such behavior does not immediately cease, or if direct communication is insufficient, the behavior may be reported. Such a report should include the substance of the complaint, date(s), a list of witnesses, and/or reference URLs, where appropriate." What happens after reporting is that an investigative board is put together, which shouldn't include any friends or family members of the accuser or accused. (So they're treating this like a quasi-judicial procedure, which is not the point of a harassment policy. Companies, conventions, LARP events, tabletop meetups and gaming clubs do not have to hold themselves to a judicial standard!) Incidentally, given how interconnected the industry is, good luck making a viable board at all. The investigative board then is supposed to spend 60 days investigating and come up with a report within 90 days. Note that "Hearsay should not be considered. Hearsay is evidence of a statement that was made other than by a witness while attesting during a hearing, and that is offered to prove the truth of the matter stated. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible by law in both civil and criminal trials." Green Ronin got fleeced by the legal experts they supposedly paid to review this because depending on the venue hearsay evidence can absolutely be admissible; here's the UK's Crown Prosecution Service guidelines on it, which I found with literally five seconds of Googling. Finally, look at this laughable statement on standards of proof: "A finding of harassment or false reporting can have consequences for the accuser and/or accused, and so a finding of harassment or false reporting should be based on a clear and convincing standard of evidence. In a typical civil dispute, the burden of proof is a preponderance of evidence (50.1% or more). In a criminal case, the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt. Clear and convincing evidence is more than a preponderance of evidence and less than beyond a reasonable doubt." So, rather than choosing one or the other standard of proof - each of which, whilst poorly understood by the general public, is at least something people can research and gain an understanding of - they vaguely wave at the hazy borderland between the two without making any positive statement about where the standard of proof lies within that zone. That is loving terrible and will lead to loving terrible decisions if implemented. And what happens if they find someone is guilty of harassment? Well, then the company, convention, or organisation who received the complaint just sort of decides by themselves what happens. "Remedial measures should be designed to stop the harassment, correct its effects, and ensure that the harassment does not recur. These remedial measures need not be those that the complainant requests or prefers, as long as they are effective." So the classic "we'll move them to a different department, which may constitute a promotion, and take you off their projects which may constitute a de facto demotion for you" move is absolutely in play here. As far as the listed examples of sanctions go, "getting your rear end fired from the company" isn't on the list. On confidentiality, they say "Every reasonable effort should be made to conduct all investigations into allegations of harassment, intimidation, or discrimination in a manner that will protect the confidentiality of all parties. Notwithstanding the above, confidentiality is not absolute, and those with a legitimate business reason to know and to be informed of the allegations will be so informed. Parties to the complaint should treat the matter under investigation with discretion and respect for the reputation of all parties involved." In other words, the accuser and accused alike are expected to remain quiet, but if someone with a legitimate business interest asks they might be told about what's going on. Ick. Lastly, on "false accusations": "It is a violation of this policy for a member to knowingly, recklessly, and/or negligently disregard the truth when making a claim of harassment, intimidation, or discrimination. Failure to prove a claim of unlawful harassment is not, by itself, equivalent to a false claim. Neither should a thorough investigation to be sure a claim is not being made for other reasons (e.g. political disagreement, competitors, racial bias, gender bias) be taken as assumption of the claim being false." The bolded bit a) makes me convinced that they wrote this entire policy whilst thinking about the accusations of antisemitism that Holden levelled at Suleiman and b) sounds like a near-guarantee that accusers should expect a "thorough investigation" (which may well resemble intrusive pestering) to see if they're really legit. Nice. I hope that the other people at GAMA recognise this for the dangerously shoddy policy that it is, and I hope Green Ronin sober up fast and stop pissing what's left of their goodwill down their leg.
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Mar 14, 2018 17:00
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Kurieg posted:This is before a third party is even involved. They're basically saying "if you're offended by someone's behavior you need to go through a jury of your peers to decide if it's actually offensive first." The Green Ronin bubble have absolutely lost their minds.
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Mar 14, 2018 17:30
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Meanwhile on RPG.net armchair pedants are nitpicking and deflecting and talking like this is a good faith attempt that's worth seriously discussing and debating to see if it can be refined into something useful. gently caress that noise. You do not watch what's been going down in this community as long as Green Ronin have, and make the progressive noises that Green Ronin have for as long as they've been making them, and then turn around and turf out a squalid poo poo of a policy like that and then get to claim ignorance.
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Mar 14, 2018 17:54
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some loving LIAR posted:"Clear and convincing evidence", a/k/a the "middle burden," is a real thing. quote:All of the various standards of proof, from "reasonable suspicion based on specific articulable facts" (the standard used in the US to decide whether police officers are entitled to pull over someone for drunk driving who hasn't actually violated a traffic law) to "beyond a reasonable doubt" are all hazy borderlands with lovely vague definitions. For example, whoever told them that "preponderance of the evidence" actually means "50.1%" is an idiot. "Preponderance…" means "the greater weight of the credible evidence," which is to say, someone has proven something to the preponderance of the evidence to you if, after you hear all of the evidence that was presented to you, you can say, "well, reasonable people can disagree about this, but based on what I heard, personally I think it's most likely that X, even if it's not by a particularly wide margin." The percentage standards that lawyers bandy about among themselves are not for public consumption as they're shorthand or jargon at best, and conceal the actual work of judging credibility and sorting out inferences that a jury or other factfinder is asked to do. That said, if you pick a specific, known standard of proof people can at least look at the literature on it. These things are studied, discussed, explained in far greater detail than the space in the policy provides. You can educate yourself to understand them. The problem with the way this section was phrased is that it doesn't look like "Clear and convincing evidence" is a real thing - it scans like it's a new thing they've made up which exists between the other two standards. And if it reads that way to someone with an admittedly quite specialised and niche understanding of law, it sure as poo poo is going to read that way to laypeople - which means they don't even know it's a subject they can go research. quote:Where they hosed up is that they should have been able to articulate a more principled reason why they selected the middle burden. One reason for imposing the middle burden on a party is that the party seeks quasi-penal consequences from the other party. For example, when someone is trying to have a person civilly committed for mental illness, the middle burden is often imposed. Everything has "consequences," and the policy should have been able to articulate why the particular consequences (here, getting frowned at by gamers for a while maybe?) are bad enough to justify imposing the middle burden.
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Mar 14, 2018 18:08
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Eh, I was genuinely asking for it. Amusing how far Tango Samurai had to go before the moderators even looked sideways at them, mind.
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Mar 14, 2018 18:18
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They did say they'd ceased working with him. On the other hand, who fancies taking them at their word these days?
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Mar 15, 2018 09:30
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Bedlamdan posted:What basically owns about this post is that even though Green Ronin may have gotten rid of the rape-man, they can still be treated as if the rape-man is still present and/or actively being endorsed because we can’t trust anything they may say after loving up the first time. Unfucking themselves is unattainable, any attempt is always going to be in bad faith. The rich thing is, based on my reading of the STOP policy had they applied it to CAS they might not have had to get rid of him.
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Mar 16, 2018 20:14
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Meanwhile RPG.net shuts down discussion on the topic, because the most prominent RPG-specific forum on the internet isn't actually fit for purpose for discussing significant news stories in the field.
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Mar 17, 2018 12:36
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Rand Brittain posted:And I don’t think that’s unintentional. If they thought CAS was behaving unacceptably, they'd have crafted a policy which would have caught that behaviour. They haven't. If they think CAS was behaving acceptably, then why don't they just continue working with him? The obvious answer is "massive public disapproval", but they're incredibly naive if they think that this policy would be welcomed with open arms, and since they're giving every impression of not really believing that what CAS did was harassment they just look like they lack the courage of their convictions.
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Mar 17, 2018 12:46
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Rand Brittain posted:If I had to guess I'd say they talked to a lawyer, who told them CAS was radioactive and they needed to drop him like a rock, but they don't like it a bit.
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Mar 17, 2018 17:26
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PST posted:While, absolutely, GR hosed ho how they handled CAS and their new suggested policy, let's not forget that Holden is an enabling fuckwit who deliberately covered and covers for his abusive friend and tries to attack anyone who's called him out for it to the best of his not very good ability. Also, was a poo poo developer for Ex3. There was a narrow window when GR's actions made sense, and that was the brief span of time when it seemed like they'd mistaken the new round of accusations for a continuation of the unfounded antisemitism/pro-terrorism slurs. (They've since gone on to behave in such a way to lose that thin slice of goodwill - if the timeline made that much sense and exonerated them to that extent, they'd have published it already.)
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Mar 17, 2018 17:29
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Speaking of abusers, guess who is being held up as Marcon's guest of honour in a couple of months: http://marcon.org/guests/mathew-mcfarland-michelle-lyons-mcfarland-special-guests/
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Mar 17, 2018 18:42
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Warthur posted:Speaking of abusers, guess who is being held up as Marcon's guest of honour in a couple of months: Wait,false alarm, that's from when they were guests in 2016.
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Mar 17, 2018 18:47
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Worth clicking through there to read the entire thread. Jessica Price had some useful input too: https://twitter.com/delafina777/status/978124284848517120
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Mar 26, 2018 17:27
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They got as big as they got feasting on those tough, stodgy grognard cookies, but they also love the rainbow sprinkles and sense of virtue they get out of the progressiveness cookies.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:55
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Atari had a similar culture and that's mostly what most the dialogue about Nolan Bushnell has been about. Yeah, they were partying all the time but it was super exploitative for him to seduce employees or make them do things like get into hot tubs with the male executives while they're having a "meeting." It'd work better if it went the other way - just bang cool people who are down with being part of a bang network, and then offer them jobs if they happen to have the right skills. Then people know what they are getting into and are in a better position to say no if they decide that they want to keep working and banging separate, and you don't have the awkward moment at the end of the job interview where after the candidate accepts the job the interviewers stand up from behind the big desk and it turns out none of them were wearing pants and for some reason the interviewee runs away at that point. EDIT TO ADD: Come to think of it, it probably *does* start out that way - just a group of pals who bang and also make a company together. The mistake they make is that they then assume that people they employ will be down for the same arrangement they're currently down with, and they don't adapt to a more professional basis of working once they expand beyond the friendship group. Alien Rope Burn posted:She jumped ship to Wizards shortly after Vampire: the Masquerade shipped, so make of that what you will. Warthur fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 18:27
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Leperflesh posted:This would only work if 100% of your employees got into the company that way, and they never changed their minds. And it'd still be a legal quagmire, because eventually every company finds itself needing to fire someone, and that someone now has all the ammunition they could want for a big expensive lawsuit. It honestly depends on the structure. Like, if everyone who comes in buys in as an equal partner and so on, as Jeffrey points out. At that stage though it starts to resemble not going corporate at all, and simply being a polyamorous commune that happens to produce books to make ends meet. That puts a huge crimp on your potential expansion. On the other hand, maybe indefinite expansion is a poison chalice and aiming to simply make enough to keep you and yours healthy and happy and supplied with necessities and luxuries is actually enough. TG probably isn't an industry where you can do that, though.
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Mar 28, 2018 18:37
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Kurieg posted:1e World of Darkness books are really... not great. I really like 1e Chicago By Night, but I suspect part of that comes from it being the playtest campaign and so having a dose of extra richness and road testing arising from actual play.
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Mar 28, 2018 20:59
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Kurieg posted:The werewolf books were not anywhere near as polished. The tribes backstabbed each other at every opportunity and their clan stereotypes were flanderized up to 11. Alien Rope Burn posted:The original Vampire was one of those projects that was saved by a second edition. Not to say it wasn't a hit - it was - but it was the second edition that everybody remembers.
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Mar 28, 2018 22:50
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Kurieg posted:I don't think ARB is talking about the core book on it's own, as much as the Metaplot and supplementary books. The WOD Cores are rather densely packed with crunch and don't leave much room for the writers to wax poetic about how the Get of Fenris are actually for real double plus nazis. EDIT: Also, I believe 1E had the original and best version of the Mummy supplement, where it was fresh and distinctive and mummies were genuinely rare and the concept wasn't horribly diluted by trying to crowbar all sorts of other stuff into it. Warthur fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Mar 28, 2018 |
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Mar 28, 2018 23:25
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