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Surprised nobody brought up Paizo when it comes to profitable RPG companies.
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Feb 15, 2018 15:04
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Kai Tave posted:Paizo is a successful RPG company and they're also something of an outlier these days, they aren't a model that anyone else can really hope to replicate since a fair chunk of their success is largely due to unique circumstances. Every successful RPG company has unique circumstances. Only one company got to sign Eastman & Laird before they were millionaires. Only one company figured out how to get punks with literal mohawks to color in multiple-choice character tests. Only one company had just gotten enough money from colored cardboard to buy out TSR when they were failing. I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement. Every exceptional success is an exception by definition. Mors Rattus posted:No one has hard data on Paizo sales of anything, ever, because Paizo doesn't publish that data. They sold several thousand copies of Starfinger at GenCon, at least based on statements they made. senrath posted:Pretty sure it was just that ARB typoed it once and it stuck. I just kept doing it as a typo behind the scenes and was like "You know, there's no way that's any stupider than Starfinder, so to heck with it." I understand why they named it that, but, wow, that's an cringeworthy compound designed for brand recognition and literally nothing else. It really is pretty appalling. Starfinger is better. Never say I didn't do Paizo any favors.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:08
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Kai Tave posted:The post which kicked off this tangent about what constitutes a successful RPG business was one that held Onyx Path up as an example of a company "on life support" which is pretty foolish and short-sighted imo, defining success in RPG publishing terms as "has an actual headquarters and full time employees and a CEO" means that nobody except Paizo and WotC qualify as "successful," which is obviously not a very accurate way of looking at how the hobby had transitioned into a different sort of model over the years. No, I doubt that Kevin Crawford brings in as much money as Paizo or WotC do, but claiming that he isn't successful because he does his thing thanks to crowdfunding is wrongheaded, and the same goes for Onyx Path, Arc Dream/Greg Stolze, Evil Hat, etc. Well, if one were to define a company's success by having a headquarters and a warehouse and full-time employees, Palladium Books would also qualify. Of course, that's more likely an echo of past success than present, so you're right that isn't necessarily an indicator by itself. There are also just RPG companies that make their primary biz outside of RPGs that have traditional business setups, like Fantasy Flight Games and Steve Jackson Games. It is definitely a solid indicator of a certain level of success, but it also requires creating a product that's short on risk, and it's rare to see that in the RPG industry. Also, Wizards of the Coast also employs about as many full-time people on D&D as Evil Hat or Onyx Path does in general. So while D&D has much more in the way of monetary backing, it isn't a huge business as a individual brand.
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Feb 16, 2018 15:03
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Xelkelvos posted:3d movement with zero g inertia would be extremely weird when put onto a grid without a computer running the calculations. Even just 2D-based vector movement in a TT game gets really ugly, much less 3D- I've seen several games do it but I can't think of one that did it gracefully. It's a gimmick that's best abstracted unless your name completely centers around it.
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Feb 18, 2018 08:36
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Mors Rattus posted:Fragged Empire? Fragged Empire just delays maneuvering to loosely simulate the difficulties in vector-based movement, but it's not a "true" vector-based movement system where you're tracking both thrust and vector at all times. It's a good compromise, tho.
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Feb 18, 2018 16:55
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Yeah, it's tricky. I was working on some fan material for a game recently and realized my color-coding could be an issue (though, IMO, not a huge one) for the color-blind, but it's a question of whether or not I sit down and do two hours of work to fix that or... I do two hours of added actual content everybody will still be able to enjoy either way. I leaned towards the latter and will probably be fixing the former down the road, but it's a question of how far I go with something that's just an unpaid fanboy project. 
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Feb 24, 2018 12:25
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Not everything has to be the biggest thing ever. It's like being upset that your videogame isn't making Overwatch or Zelda money. It's not reasonable. Some people are happy eating McDonalds every day, but that doesn't mean your favorite local hamburger joint should close up shop, or that you shouldn't recommend it. It's a bad argument.
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Feb 27, 2018 23:29
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CroatianAlzheimers had some interesting stories about writing for the 2008 edition of the Robotech RPG over in the Palladium thread.
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Feb 28, 2018 17:08
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Well, it turns out even when you have only one god people still really, really can't agree on what that's all about, and you'd think that'd be a lot simpler.
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Mar 1, 2018 19:26
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Kevin Hannah posted:Founded (Denver) June 2015, by partners in crime Kevin and Ginette Hannah, Alchimie Inc. strives to author compelling 1940s/50s Dieselpunk themed stories and the products to truly bring them to roleplaying life.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:13
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Brahman is complicated, yo. Point.
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Mar 2, 2018 08:19
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Paizo got out from under Pathfinder Online, which is ironic after the fury we've see over other failed kickstarters. And they're still trying to get new subscribers! For some reason, there are plenty of people that think that's okay. They'll be fine.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:37
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Daeren posted:It means the eternal splatbook treadmill stops, which they consider the death of the game, and they have a murderer to point to that isn't called "the free market." I remember people complaining about the loss of AD&D 2e support. Which, I mean. If you've read and run everything AD&D 2e has to offer, bravo. Granted, you'd probably have to be an independently wealthy robot to manage it, which may be more amazing.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:43
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You know, when Palladium started selling "Raw Preview" editions of their books - basically the final draft without the art or layout, I was like "Ha ha, that's so funny, that you would think I would buy an unfinished book, ha ha, what a ridiculous company. Ha ha."
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Mar 7, 2018 22:18
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Serf posted:so like a printed book or a pdf? A physical printed book. Yes, but not their whole catalog. Kai Tave posted:Steam does it all the time. I'm not talking about "Buy an unfinished thing and get the finished version later too if and when it's finished." I'm talking about "Buy an unfinished thing, and then spend money on it all over again if I want the finished thing."
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Mar 7, 2018 23:10
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Yeah, I wouldn't foresee major changes with these paytests. Fine-tuning numbers or maybe fixing a blatant breakpoint, but this isn't a legit playtest in the sense that the test can have a failing grade assigned.
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Mar 8, 2018 02:43
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Lord_Hambrose posted:The recent L5R gives me hope. They seemed responsive to a lot more of the complaints than I expected. That's a different story. I'm referring to playtests where people are being encouraged to pay in and invest before the game is finished.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:51
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Arivia posted:No one has to pay to join the Pathfinder 2e playtest. The materials will be available online for free as well as the physical copies being sold. That's why I said "encouraged" and not "forced". Yes, they'll be free, but you don't push flip-mats unless you want people to buy them.
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Mar 8, 2018 16:57
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The problem is for me that I thought they understood their system too, I mean, they'd have to, right? But then Starfinder had really amateurish math mistakes in important parts of the system, and a lot of the side systems are fiddly and clunky even for an F20 game, IMO. Presumably that'll be an less of an issue with them being able to do the open playtest and then cycle around for a final product. But I honestly thought Paizo had enough experience not to make those kinds of mistakes, and yet they did. Maybe it was the rush to develop the game in roughly a year, maybe it was only having a closed playtest, but I have a lot less faith in them after Starfinder than I did before. Which feels weird to say, but there you have it.
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Mar 9, 2018 23:43
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Thinking there's a possibility that Erik Mona would turn away from Vancian spellcasting or spellcaster dominance is precious. They'll very likely get toned down in some respects if Starfinder is any indication, but there isn't going to be a sea change. I mean, this is the company that has to reassure its fans in 2018 that don't worry, we won't take away your gnomes like the other bad people did.
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Mar 9, 2018 23:59
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Ultimately I think given infinite time most games will progress towards positive change, even with the regression we see. I spent a lot of my childhood under the shadow of AD&D, which seemed like it would never die, but it did. And for all of their bleating nostalgia, 5e and Pathfinder are not that game. Overall, the amount of growth in terms of "system technology" in the past 20 years dwarfs the previous 20 before that. Given infinite time, I think Pathfinder might come to resemble more progressive takes on the classic fantasy game just through erosion, but nobody here who wants that has that kind of time. But no system lasts forever unchanged. Even the OSR isn't AD&D for the most part. No matter how hard you try and go back, you keep on slipping forward. That's not to say you can't play old games RAW. But overall the industry has momentum, it's just frustratingly slow.
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Mar 10, 2018 02:10
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Man, if you think Forgotten Realms had issues with being upended, Greyhawk kept getting whole reinventions, usually by people who wanted to make it the Dark Ages counterpart to the Forgotten Realms high fantasy kitchen sink and scrub all the goofy stuff out. Last I saw everything was at warrrr because of the minis game and it basically came across as Warhammer Fantasy Lite starring that D&D Thing You Remember From Way Back.
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Mar 10, 2018 14:37
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Liquid Communism posted:Remember when they rebooted Dragonlance into grimdark low fantasy because Weis and Hickman pissed off WoTC? Was that Fifth Age? I didn't pay attention too much to that. I mean, SAGA wasn't bad, but Dragonlance was so deeply rooted in its own little corner of AD&D that it seemed surreal to try and market it without it. I mean, it makes some sense, trying to turn on novel readers with a lighter storygame, but at that point Dragonlance just wasn't as hot (trash) it was in the eighties.
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Mar 10, 2018 18:25
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Warthur posted:Whilst I think iterative improvements and new innovations are all to the good, I don't think you can necessarily say that that inevitably means that Vancian spellcasting and LFQW will go extinct. Removing them only qualifies as "positive change" if they are flat-out negatives, and there's no circumstances under which it's ever sensible to use them as a design decision. I didn't exactly say they would. (I'm not a big fan, mind, but I didn't say that.) But games at the very least need to have mechanics that fulfill the intent of the designers. If a monk is supposed to be an acrobatic, hard-hitting class in a fight, maybe it'll finally be that in Pathfinder 2e, because it sure as hell wasn't that in 3e, 3.5, or Pathfinder. There's a problem with Pathfinder (and many games akin to it) is where sufficient system mastery causes players to start discarding well over 50% of the options printed on the page. Feats like Toughness, Dodge, or Rapid Reload quickly become prerequisite fodder and little else. And this isn't just an issue of the D&D legacy they saddled themselves with - recent classes like the Envoy or the Shifter can show how this is still an issue. Even within the rigid goalposts set for the d20 microcosm, there's always room to improve the player experience and mechanics. 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.
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Mar 10, 2018 23:36
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Warthur posted:The mere existence of both Pathfinder and the OSR in general suggests that there's a "vintage mechanics" market just like there's a vintage car or vintage book market. With Pathfinder, Paizo have been pretty evidently selling to a particular quarter of the vintage market - "cutting edge" isn't what they're after. I don't think that's the best analogy, because vintage cars and vintage books don't dominate their particular market. I think a closer comparison could be made to video game design, particularly those that require a heavy level of system mastery to participate in beyond the surface level, like fighting games or real-time strategy games. I think a lot of what keeps the modern D&D model in business is the heavy amount of buy-in and dedication required. Whether it's sunk cost fallacy or the like, if you play a game that takes a month to learn and play it for a year, you're more likely to scoff at a game that takes a day to learn and only gets run for two months. D&D and its heirs are akin to "lifestyle" games that they demand that they be the only game you play more or less indefinitely, as completing a game can easily take two or three years on average. Which is why people probably get upset when you suggest upturning that apple cart. Just like the fighting game fans who lost their poo poo when I suggest that, say, a sequel to a popular fighting franchise might want to try discarding demanding mechanics like stances or 360 degree inputs. The community becomes so invested in things like buffering 360 degree inputs that they don't care that the 360 degree input was only put in because it mirrored the original move appearance-wise, and not because it was a particularly deliberate attempt to devise a functional mechanic for the ages. 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. I mean, sure, Apocalypse World encourages some degree of extended play with its advancement and resource mechanics, but then eventually encourages you toss out your investment and starting anew (with a new game or character) in mere months. Or you can just pick up another light game and try that out instead. As such, it might not be fair to compare the marketing of a game like Pathfinder to something like FATE. Something like Pathfinder requires your singular (or at least a large degree of) your money and time, whereas a lot of storygames just encourage you to invest smaller chunks of time in the hobby as a whole, so they kind of work as part of a larger aggregate. I'm not sure the nostalgia is just there for aesthetic appreciation, but more because so many are invested in that particular type of game that it continues on by perpetuating a cycle of initiation and investment that's hard to break, as evidenced by all the people that struggle to get their local group to try a new game. Granted, large, time-swallowing games aren't necessarily a bad thing, but they tend to choke out diversity. Thankfully, due to the internet, there's no longer the limited bandwidth of store shelves for designers to sell their games to fans. But at the same time, if I walk into a bookstore or gamestore, it's pretty unlikely I'll buy anything because most of the shelf will be put over to two or three games I have no interest in, but that will have fans that just buy the next book sight unseen. And that's a real problem for me and others like me in more than just ease of purchase, but what games get run at those stores, and what kind of local communities get built for RPGs, ones that are oft-exclusionary to anything outside of their singular focus.
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Mar 11, 2018 02:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This isn't wrong, but I would like to add that what it was meant to do is far less important than the effect it actually had -- inputs may have been "arbitrary" in a design sense, but things like a 360 degree motion are in fact important to the balance of the game for a variety of reasons. (For example, the more individual inputs there are in a motion, the higher the minimum number of frames it takes to complete that motion, which has implications for what other moves can be input faster and thus come out earlier.) I think that's a retroactive justification when you're talking about the origins of the mechanic. It has become a thing designers take into account as the genre developed, but I'm pretty positive they weren't thinking about things like frame advantage when they were originally creating Street Fighter II. It's like last hits in MoBA games, a mechanic born of the limitation of the Warcraft III scripting engine that people cargo culted into some of the world's biggest games not because it's a great mechanic, but that's just because they were recreating Defense of the Ancients and wanted to attract its burgeoning community.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Well yes, but what I'm saying is it doesn't matter that it's retroactive. It is completely secondary to the effect it has on play. You should keep 360s, much like last-hitting, because they are in fact good for the game. I don't know, I just find them discouraging and unenjoyable. I can do them, sure. I can also put Dodge on my character sheet to take the Prestige Class I want. That might even be a deliberate part of the balance of that Prestige Class. But it's unpleasant and it'd be pretty hard to convince me there isn't a better way.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:33
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Countblanc posted:This is like saying rocket jumping in FPS games should just be a button you press. Rocket jump? That sounds dangerous.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:47
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Pretty much, the big issue any D&D movie it's going to face is that the IP offers practically nothing outside of winks for turbonerds. You could do something with D&D fiction, but most of it is, at best, delightfully bad. Granted, Marvel has done wonders with some surprisingly bad comics, so it's not unthinkable, but they have resources and talent most filmmakers just don't have on tap. Maybe a movie based on an adventure? Strangely enough, I think if you really wanted to encapsulate D&D in movie form, that feels like the most genuine way. It'd be tricky picking a particular module, but I think if you wanted to do a D&D movie - not a Forgotten Realms movie (I hate to say, but let's not pretend they'd use another setting), not a generic fantasy movie that just has a beholder or a rust monster at some point - that'd be your best angle to start a screenplay on.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:46
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You're right, he should be happy to be paid in exposure! ... in any case, it is part of a legitimate conundrum that creators face overall online whether it's RPG Streams, Let's Plays, fanart, etc., and other derivative works making a lot more money than the original product, or a lot of money in general. There isn't an easy answer, but it'd probably be more productive for him to reach out to the streamers in question and see if, say, they'd be interested in having him guest star or otherwise feature him in an interview or chat. I'd think most would be glad to have that sort of thing.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:18
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dwarf74 posted:...no? gradenko_2000 posted:pretty sure ARB is taking the piss Kinda-sorta, yeah. I think it's more of a complicated issue once it stops being a fandom work and people start making a real living off of this kind of thing, but I wouldn't pretend to have the answers. Ideally you'd use the opportunity to reach out to the people and see if there's a way you can help them and vice versa. As for "they bought their copies!", who knows how much Wallis gets off of that? I mean, I think he has the rights to the game and presumably makes something off of the sales, but it's hard to say. Presumably getting his name highlighted is probably worth more than the sandwich money he gets off the sales.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:21
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A more accurate acronym for their policy would have been PAUSE.
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Mar 16, 2018 20:26
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Plutonis posted:They are making Uno 2: Dos Disappointed it didn't pick up where the first game left off, with only one card in hand, now you have to make it to two cards, what's gonna happen in the Los Números saga?!
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Mar 20, 2018 17:37
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It also has two stacks of cards you can match instead of one, and if you manage to match the color of both stacks (presumably to balance the fact that it's a lot easier to lay down cards), you force everybody else to draw a card. Otherwise it's mostly the same except for the aforementioned changed cards. You could do a lot worse with children's games, really.
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Mar 20, 2018 19:09
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I took a fair amount of poo poo for questioning Paizo's progressive bonafides, and yet I wish I'd been wrong. But I always felt they seemed totally disinterested in addressing the regressive poo poo at the heart of Pathfinder, and to me that was always the damning evidence. Granted, individual authors, artists, editors, and directors have definitely done their part and tried to be more forward-thinking, and I don't want to diminish that. But the core of of the company is still built on people who celebrate not changing things.
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Mar 27, 2018 02:13
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The thing is, I don't doubt Lisa Stevens means what she says. She pretty clearly objected to to sexual harassment when she was at Wizards. But I feel like she's also demonstrated a certain blindness to the faults and failures to those she's close to. I'm not saying that to excuse Paizo or Stevens, mind. Being earnest and effective are two different things.
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Mar 27, 2018 18:22
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From John Tynes' Salon article "Death to the Minotaur":John Tynes posted:Grand as that goal was, I don't believe it was the heart of Peter [Adkison]'s vision. That honor lay with his dream of revolutionizing corporate culture itself, of making Wizards a new kind of company. We would build an alt-culture workplace of smart young people. We would destroy hierarchies by a resolute program of egalitarian consensus. We would earn fabulous paychecks and free dental treatments. We would encourage diversity in every form. John Tynes posted:Although Peter now acknowledges the strait-laced responsibility a CEO has to his or her shareholders, to some extent he mourns the "different sort of company" he says Wizards could have been. He looks back on the weekend of the Truth or Swill game wistfully. "I still don't think what we did was wrong. But society does, unfortunately."
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Mar 27, 2018 21:22
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Yeah, it reads weirdly - I wouldn't say apologetically, but sympathetically in retrospect. The article was written over 15 years ago at this point, though, so I wouldn't make deep presumptions about that sort of thing. I know I've learned a lot since then, and I'd hope Tynes has too. But he's mostly out of the gaming industry at this point. Adkison runs Gen Con LLC these days.MadScientistWorking posted:Wait she's that Lisa? Yes. Lisa Stevens was involved heavily in the creation of both Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. Though she's not as well known because she's generally been an editor or executive, I think it's fair to say roleplaying games would be very different without her.
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Mar 27, 2018 22:25
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Kurieg posted:Oh man, she had to deal with Rein*Hagen too? She jumped ship to Wizards shortly after Vampire: the Masquerade shipped, so make of that what you will.
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Mar 27, 2018 23:49
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Well, there's the difference between excusing and understanding, too. A number of gaming companies are built by people who want their business to be a circle of friends (or vice versa) and it's not unusual for RPG companies to basically be founded by gaming groups. So I don't think Adkison necessarily meant harm, but he didn't want to accept things had to shift from a circle of pals to a professional business, and that's irresponsible and damaging. And that's how you can also end up with stuff like the Paizo situation. Yeah, you may recognize that sexual harassment is a problem, and yeah, you may have been subjected to it, but somebody is your friend and you can just talk to them about it and clear things up and that's all you need to do because, you know, you're friends and colleagues. And I'm not saying that's necessarily what's going on, nor am I saying it's anything but irresponsible if something like that is. But it's how this stuff goes on even in front of people that by all rights should know better. There are reasons when I've asked folks who used to work for Palladium what a certain employee actually does and get a big ol' shrug, because hey, that's Siembieda's old buddy and he isn't going anywhere. That's also how you get a guy robbing Palladium for years upon years and nobody noticing anything being up. Because he's Kev's friend from the Detroit gaming club days and he's a known quantity who would never work to bleed the whole company dry! Of course, I remember talk from the Sisterhood of Gaming panel at last year's GenCon where one of the editors on V:tM (maybe Nicole Lindross, I don't recall) and Stevens talked about how the early days of White Wolf when they were creating Vampire). Most of the employees lived in the same house, so there was that notion of a communal company. Which is part is how they managed to stay afloat prior to having a big hit, especially when they'd inherited Lion Rampant's debt and were basically just trying to get out from under that, but it was also a boiling pot of problems.There were also eyerolls regarding Rein*Hagen where apparently he would keep having ideas he wanted to put in the book which dragged things out, especially since they'd be in the middle of layout and he'd want to like add 3 pages, and them nearly missed their print date because of it, at one point running after the deliveryman to get their manuscript out in time for GenCon after having pulled a late night getting it in order. Generally no matter how weird you think the TT industry is, it turns out to just get weirder the more stones you turn over.
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Mar 28, 2018 01:14
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