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It's only online that there is any discussion of this happening. Yes, I see that Legal Eagle's comments are getting flooded with requests to cover this, and that the CoD Discord's #general chat is posting about it, that Foundry VTT released a very special announcement on their Discord, and that my Youtube recommends are currently showing me lots of videos covering this, etc etc.. However, I play both D&D and Pathfinder in-person and the topic has not come up at all at either table, and these are groups that will talk about just about everything going on in the world while rolling dice for a few hours in the evening. I was at my local gaming store this last weekend, during the store's weekly "D&D night" and there were four tables of games going on, and the OGL was not a topic at any of them. Don't get stuck inside the Twitter/online echo bubble, there isn't nearly as much discussion of this amongst gamers as you might think (I'm sure there's plenty of discussion happening inside the companies that use the OGL though).
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Jan 9, 2023 18:54
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CottonWolf posted:Take it with all the required grains of salt, but: Yup, that was circulating around late last night. That's the first time I saw the whole thing laid out since the people commenting on it last night didn't want to show the full text in case there was some way to ID the leaker in there.
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Jan 9, 2023 20:00
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The discussion of content being available for DMs is something that absolutely can not be ignored, and it has been the bedrock for why many people like myself stayed in the OGL for all these decades. D&D 3.0/3.5 had lots of content a DM could pull from to make things especially because Paizo was producing modules, adventure paths, encounters, maps, etc. in their magazines long before Pathfinder was ever even dreamed of. It was also nice sometimes to take a break from DMing and let someone else run some other OGL game for a few sessions without everyone needing to learn a new system just to play astronauts fighting moon demons, or spies trying to smuggle nuclear codes. The OGL meant that 3rd party books had already been written that allowed us to massage 3.5 into something different when we wanted a break but didn't really want an entirely new way to play. In contrast to what some posters on this forum believe, the vast majority of us that went with Pathfinder, did so because Paizo spent years building up a customer base of DMs who trusted and liked their content, and to this day, they still produce ready-made material for DMs and players to slot into their games. The OGL in general gives 3rd party publishers the ability to create these toolkits for DMs and it is immensely useful for those of us that just want to run games for our friends (especially now that we can slot these into VTTs). Smaller indie game systems have always lacked this content on the DM side, which is fine but does create a barrier if you just want to quickly make something the night before you play. In fact, this very issue is cropping up now that I'm trying to run a game of Hunter: The Vigil. I've tried finding content from other GMs, even asking on the CoD discord server, only to discover that the community for that system will happily talk about lore, or themes, but walls off the crunch pretty hard. Considering the fact that the GM needs to stat out everything by hand, this definitely slows me down and makes it harder to break the inertia of starting to run the game. What really needs to be seen is how this affects DMs. The OGL and VTTs have been an immense boon for the community for two editions of this game. If WotC makes it as hard to find DM content as other indie games do, then we might see some shifts. However, if WotC keeps the spigot open in regards to DM content (like how Paizo does), then don't get your hopes up because it means there won't be much reason to leave D&D. What CitizenKeen said below. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 19:38
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Tsilkani posted:If you're gonna ignore four players' enthusiasm just to get the fifth guy going 'okay, I guess' you are doing a grave disservice to all 5 players. LOL, you weirdos, this is an entirely non-existent dynamic anyway. No players are saying "meh" to DnD5e, or to a less extent Pathfinder. Completely the opposite, those games are getting the enthusiastic "Yeahs!", to the point where there are too many drat players for the number of DMs. My local gaming store has a "Learn D&D night!" once a month and the owner has DMs come in and run games for newbies and every time he needs to post on the Discord that the room's full, please come by to shop, but there's no more room at the tables for DnD.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:12
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Terrible Opinions posted:Why would you be playing with randos from a game store instead of any existing friend group? What a bizarre question. Gaming stores run these kinds of things to introduce people to the game. I've never played in them because I learned D&D3e my freshmen year and have been the designated DM for something like 22 years, but plenty of people want to get into DnD without having someone to show them how the mechanics of the game works. Newbie sessions in the table room of gaming stores are great because you aren't wandering into some randos house, there are vending machines, and lots of other people having fun, and usually the DM is there to handhold and help the person learn the rules in a low-stress game. I've been DMing some version of DnD3e/3.5/Pathfinder1e/2e for 22 years with lots of different friend groups with campaigns lasting years in some cases. Sometimes we take breaks and do random other systems for like Halloween or something, but most of these guys and gals just want to play D&D and aren't interested in learning a new system.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:21
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Terrible Opinions posted:I am familiar with learning to play sessions at game stores. It's bizarre that you keep bringing them up when people are discussing regularly playing a ttrpg. You are presumably not going to treat players as interchangeable, and thus the preferences of your players are relevant. Also you're literally not playing D&D, you're playing a different TTRPG and calling it D&D as shorthand. First, I love that you edited your original post to imply I didn't have any friends after I quoted you :chefs kiss:. Second, I reference my gaming store because that's where I play games. There are tables there and my friends and I game there because we all have families and kids and it's easier to just meet there and play into the night without us waking anyone up if we get loud. We are by far not the only long-term group of players who use their local gaming store as their meeting place rather than their homes. While playing in the table room I also encounter other people that play games and thus I'm sharing my experience with 1) the level of relative interest new people have for learning D&D, 2) the fact that most players outside the internet don't seem to even know this is going on and will likely not be making any major changes to their habits unless their DM mentions it. And, yes, I do play DnD5e ya dingus. I just am not the DM in those games, but I've been a player in the same group here for years.
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Jan 11, 2023 22:22
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LatwPIAT posted:I don't think this will amount to anything and I don't think this should amount to anything. I don't think game designers, already underpaid, will benefit much from their work being on "open" licenses, and I don't think the games will get much better simply because any random idiot can integrate their ideas. Knockoff D&D will not get all that much better because it's possible to publish Knockoff D&D Now With Beekeeping instead of the Beekeeping Expansion for Knockoff D&D. TTRPGs are in many ways already "open" by design, so you don't need a license to let people implement whatever tweaks they want. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vz9ogq7JTg) Ryan Dancey discusses why he made the OGL in the first place when he did. He compares TTRPGs to telephones, where the device itself is worthless if no one else has a telephone but it becomes more useful the greater the network of telephones that are out there. Before the OGL, gaming was divided up in bubbles based on the game system being played and these bubbles didn't interconnect or network with each other, so when a game company went tits up, those bubbles would slowly shrink and die. The purpose behind the OGL was to bring lots of gamers under a single bubble, and would allow developers at many different companies the chance to sell their ideas inside that bubble. Maybe the internet has changed things since then? We'll have to see. The OGL 1.1 shatters that bubble, so it's a question of whether sufficient networks exist for all the separate companies to still be able to pull in new gamers to keep all the new bubbles intact.
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Jan 12, 2023 04:06
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EDIT: Beaten to MoistCr1TiKaL! I was actually posting earlier this week that the casual players at the gaming shop last weekend weren't talking about it, but over the last 6 days the story has popped into some more visible areas including motherfucking MoistCr1TiKaL posting a video on his YouTube channel with 12million subscribers (over 2 million views on the video so far), and several rather well known D&D AND Pathfinder channels suddenly tweeting and posting about it over the last few days. So yes, I think it finally did break over into the greater part of the player base.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:34
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There's another layer that I think many lawyers looking-in kind of miss. If you listen to the history of WotC before they bought TSR you also kind of get an idea of what the OGL was supposed to represent. WotC in it's early days got sued because one of their rule books edged too closely to another company's IP (I believe it was Palladium) and it would have been a loving chore to work it out in court, so they settled out of court and had to attach stickers to their book saying it was an unauthorized rip-off or something like that. The OGL was meant to solve many problems, but one of them was a certain "gentlemen's agreement" between the gaming companies that WotC wasn't going to throw around lawsuits if companies used the material in the OGL and those companies would then agree to stick to the OGL when utilizing 3e's content. Lawyers keep approaching this and saying "The OGL was never necessary! You can't copyright game rules!" and they are absolutely right. The idea wasn't that the OGL was needed for companies to copy 3e, but that WotC was agreeing that companies were totally allowed to copy certain content freely without WotC suing when things got too close for their comfort. Without the OGL, yes, companies can freely copy everything that's totally legal for them to sell, but there also isn't any protection from things sliding back to the pre-OGL times, when bigger companies sue even though the content is legal to produced just because the smaller companies can't afford to fight it out in court. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jan 16, 2023 |
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Jan 16, 2023 00:21
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I was discussing VTTs with my wife this morning because she wondered what I was up to when she saw me searching for DungeonDraft custom asset packs. I was explaining to her that I can run games on Foundry, and that I can subscribe to people's Patreons who then allow me to download their custom maps as tiles and modules in Foundry since you can link your Patreon account into Foundry. That led to me explaining that you can link your Patreon to Discord and Discord to Foundry, and that you can pay people directly through cartographyassets.com, or indirectly through their Patreons to get assets for DungeonDraft, which itself is a program you can buy for $19.99. At some point in discussing this, I pointed out that absolute none of this money changing hands actually makes it into WotC's pockets, and kind of laughed. They really missed the boat on making money off online-play TTRPGs, and an entire fan-made ecosystem has not only formed, but fully integrated into itself completely outside of WotC's own systems. It's actually kind of amazing.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:35
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I already know a number of graphic artists who have begun using AI as part of their workflow, and honestly that's going to have to become part of the norm going forward, because those lawsuits are actually not likely to succeed, and even if they do we're in the "Napster" phase of the technology, and God help anyone that's still clinging to the rocks when we reach the equivalent of iTunes, or Spotify in the technology's acceptance by the general public. As someone that teaches at a university, we had this brief moment of panic with ChatGPT, but we're already finding ways to incorporate it into our coursework and shifting our assessment techniques because the tech is not going anywhere.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:18
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Eh, I think these are all stances people can take right now, but they have an expiration date after which people are going to have to figure out how to swim in the new waters. I didn't compare AI (whether it's art or ChatGPT) to Napster casually. Pirating music existed long before Napster, but it was when Napster came out that suddenly the average Joe realized that he or she liked being able to easily download their music straight to their computers, and even after Napster got smashed into the ground it didn't put that genie back in the bottle. From there we moved from almost everything being physical media into almost nothing. The one big difference between something like Midjourney and Napster however, is that it's highly unlikely that Midjourney is going to lose in court. At this point the average Joe now can make art by typing words into a text box and seeing what comes out. I'm using it to make stuff for my D&D games (including massive backdrops for games on Foundry which I never could have done on my own), my wife is using it to make silly birthday cards (something she could have done on her own but it now takes her minutes instead of hours), my daughters use it to make custom filters over selfies they take. And that's not even touching on how ChatGPT has completely shifted how we create written content. Professors in the Slack's that I'm part of are using it to draft letters to administrators, political orgs are using it to create draft letters to members of congress, my students are using it to write their reports (with varying results). The genie is out of the bottle and it's never going back in. You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether it's RIGHT or WRONG, but that's essentially like getting pissed that Kindle has replaced physical books, or how streaming services killed physical media. Artists, whether they want to or not, need to find ways to make AI part of their workflow. Some are already doing it, but eventually everyone will have to, because AI art is only going to get more sophisticated and the entire system is now accessible to most of the population of the modern world. It's not going away.
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Mar 15, 2023 07:16
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Lemon-Lime posted:No, it's not even remotely close. One is a change from physical media to its digital equivalent, the other is an entire business model built on stealing and reselling for profit the labour of human beings. The workflow argument is completely irrelevant until generative art models stop being trained on stolen work. Which is why I'm comparing it to Napster. Napster was also blatantly stealing intellectual property and just handing it to people for free, but it was also the canary in the coal mine for how the internet was going to shift the way people consume media. I think pointing to the current AI companies and picturing them as the endgame of this technology instead of the starting point is a mistake. The idea of just creating images and written material using prompts is now becoming normalized in the heads of most of the population, and in the coming (I'd wager) 5 years we will see a radical shift in how these technologies are used in the day to day lives of most people as well as by much smarter companies than the current crop. I don't expect to see these "No AI material" pledges lasting more than 2 years in reality.
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Mar 15, 2023 08:46
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The point of their new VTT is not to limit what you can do INSIDE it, but to make playing in it so easy that you stop using the other 3rd party VTTs to play D&D. The D&D (and Pathfinder) support on Foundry, for example, is incredibly expansive, but there is still the hurdle of loading all the modules, assets, and learning how to do basic coding to make it all work. Currently that's one of the only options for really free-form "do what you want" online D&D play. They want to create a VTT that already has all the D&D rules hard-coded into the VTT, so DMs and players can just log on and press easy to use buttons to do things that Foundry can also do but takes a bit of getting used to. Once you're in that VTT though they are banking that you will be less likely to decide to suddenly change course and play CoC, since their VTT doesn't run it and you are not going to want to go through the trouble of remembering how to use Foundry (and moving all your players over there). On a side-note, this is why other gaming companies like Paizo or Chaosium are making deals with already existing 3rd party VTTs to become the "one-stop" product for that game. They realize what WotC is trying to do and are trying to put their flags down in certain regions so that there is a reason for players to stay there.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:07
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PharmerBoy posted:Is the old guy anyone of importance? I generally don't watch rear end in a top hat's videos on the principal of "Don't give them the views," so I don't particularly want to click on it if it's just some rando. It's some no-name dude with a total of 55 views on his video. I'm not even sure how the OP came upon the video in the first place and now I'm mad that the Youtube algo is going to think I wanted to see it.
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Apr 7, 2023 16:58
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It's also hilarious that goons of all people are trying to work up a storm because someone is funny looking. I've seen the goon selfie threads, no one here should be throwing stones on that front. I'm actually really confused what point those series of pictures were even supposed to be making. It's not an official WotC product, so it's not the usual anti-WotC gimmick, it appears to be an indie kickstarter, and I didn't see anything in those pictures indicating it was some kind of Nazi product. So, I guess it's just "this guy is funny looking and also was in the military at some point in his life hurhur!"?
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Jul 5, 2023 18:50
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Yup, I was going to hop in and try and convince people that it likely wasn't AI art (people have been witch-hunting for AI art for awhile now and tend to flag lovely art as AI generated) up until I clicked the image link and saw what was being referenced. It's absolutely a first pass generation that you immediately recognize if you've seen enough Stable Diffusion generations. The real crime is that he didn't do any work on it afterwards to tidy it up. Lots of artists are incorporating these tools into their workflow now, but no one is noticing because they are doing more work on it to make things look better. The guy appears to be a real artist who has made things for other books, so this looks more like laziness on his part rather than WotC hiring some dumb untested tech-bro. As for how this slipped past the art director, or how the newest Werewolf book ended up with potentially 100 unsolicited photos of real people that can't be changed before Gencon release, it's because art is usually the last thing to be received and there's rarely time to review it closely. James Jacobs at Paizo, back in the early 2010's once talked about this, and how their buttes were always puckering when they tried out a new artist, because even when stuff was turned in by deadline, it was still way too close to production day for there to be any room for error. If a new freelancer just flaked out, they basically had no back-up and if some artist turned in something really rancid they might have days to get it fixed before they needed to get everything turned over for publication. Apparently artists were also the most common thing to flake out on them vs. people turning in copy, so it was a constant issue at least back then.
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Aug 5, 2023 05:02
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Roadie posted:I see basically this same explanation every time poo poo like this happens and I still find it bizarre that apparently nobody in the industry, including Wizards, which has a gigantic pipeline for art for Magic cards, has bothered to do anything to fix the processes that lead to it. The entire thing might be different depending on the company, for example, apparently THIS art has been sitting somewhere for a year and WotC never noticed it was dogshit, which is actually fairly impressive. I honestly am kind of surprised at how WotC can consistently demonstrate practices that completely work opposite of what a functional company of it's size should be doing. However, for the specific example I gave from Paizo, what you need to remember is that these are for products that were being produced on a monthly subscription schedule with set dates for getting things to the printer so that products could be shipped on time. Just from a purely functional standpoint, copy will tend to be written faster than art. But also, copy can be turned in as rough drafts and then edited and sent back for revision during a development period, where art will tend to be maybe a rough sketch but not much other warnings that things are going wrong. One of the issues they would run into would be an artist that was radio silent for the whole period and then would send them beautiful art on the day it was due, so basically they'd get all the anxiety of someone who might be flaking only for everything turning out okay. The solution was basically to only work with artists they found dependable and to rarely risk trying new artists because they didn't want to get burned. For the example from the Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5e book, it was just pure utter betrayal by the artist. None of the art "looked" bad, but it was unsolicited and unattributed photographs of real people, and it took the artist copying a really distinctive set of people for fans to realize that ALL of the art might be more of the same, and by the time that happened Gen Con was 1.5 months away and there was no chance to fix the problem. You basically had all the eyes of the fanbase looking at those pictures and not immediately seeing the problem, so even a really on the ball art editor probably was going to miss it. EDIT: TL;DR Most companies have to meet publication schedules, so they can't sit around looking at every picture and since pictures come in last they will just miss poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2023 10:53
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dwarf74 posted:The guys behind a kickstarted board game called Castle Assault may be the guys who lifted $300k in magic cards from Gen Con. LOL, how the gently caress can someone, much less two people, be this stupid?
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Aug 12, 2023 08:18
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You're leaving out the part where apparently the cards were found alongside stolen D&D books, indicating that these stable geniuses were trying this at many different booths. EDIT: That detail was in the Polygon article on the arrests: https://www-polygon-com.cdn.ampproj...y-theft-charges Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Sep 7, 2023 |
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Sep 7, 2023 01:04
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Every aspect of this crime has honestly confused me from the moment it was first mentioned in the GenCon thread. There's no loving way to unload 300k of MtG cards without anyone noticing because no gaming store is going to buy that inventory and risk their entire business if the cards get tracked to them, which means you need to sell it to individuals each of whom is someone that will potentially just turn you in when you make contact with them. And all of that is before you realize that this wasn't just two random dudes, but a pair who were known members of a community that is very small and insular, and they committed their crime wearing the goddamn t-shirts for their own game! I originally thought it was just two guys making a snap decision, but the new story is that they were trying to steal from multiple booths, so apparently they just showed up to GenCon to steal literally the hardest poo poo to fence in the world?!
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Sep 7, 2023 01:54
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I agree with most of the criticisms being leveled here, but at this point it's almost not even worth it to make fun of the art direction of the nWoD/CofD gamelines since the art has been consistently LOL for so long that it's almost a staple of the lines at this point. I love Hunter: The Vigil (1e), but it has an absolutely terrible cover, and the art inside ranges from hilarious traces of real people/video game characters, to mid-tier hand drawings with the perspective issues I see when I'm viewing the stuff made by my daughter's elementary school gifted art classes. As someone that has had friends that take art commissions for RPGs it always surprises me that White Wolf so consistently found BAD artists when there are plenty of good artists that will still work for dirt cheap. Fake edit: Okay, I'm being over-mean here. There's plenty of good art in HtV, it's just that the bad stuff is so bad it knocks you right out of the book for a few minutes.
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Sep 17, 2023 20:56
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I'll be honest, a big part of why I'm harsh on Tome of the Pentacle is because of Onyx Path's general downward spiral and mismanagement. Their art quality's always been spotty at best, that's why I focused on the cover clearly being bad interior art instead of their normal bad cover art. It's just a highly visible sign of how mismanaged these lines are in general. Can you tell me more about this? I only started paying attention to OP when H:tV 2e came out, after years of not owning my old nWoD books, and I could immediately tell something was up with that book when I bought it. Everything seems like a clusterfuck, but I've only gotten scattered stories about what happened with that company.
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Sep 18, 2023 07:58
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That Old Tree posted:I think this thread is catastrophizing a pretty mundane situation with Onyx Path/CoD where they just don't have the resources or recognition to carry on the success typically associated with the properties they handle. Most people don't know or give a poo poo about how terrible Beast is or that the art isn't great in some supplements to a game that didn't even get a regular retail release for its core book. As successful as many of the Kickstarters have been, they have likely been the bulk of whatever audience there is for these games, owed in part to the tiny advertising budget and reach for them and nearly complete lack of retail release. Any decline going on is just sort of some boring withering away of IPs, mostly noticed in online spaces which remain the principal place they're even noticed, as the best known of their projects fade into the past because Paradox doesn't remember or actively chooses to let them fall into disuse. They seem perfectly capable of being a mid-level outfit pushing out a somewhat steady stream of books for other stuff that still pulls in very respectable crowdfunding dollars. At this point I think it's pretty bizarre to act like anything more should be or should have been expected of them if you've been paying any attention. I somewhat agree with you that most of the explanations just posted don't really line up with the reality that nobody who is not terminally online actually knows about any of the controversies that people have been mentioning. Not a single real live human that I've gamed with has heard of Beast, much less all the poo poo surrounding it. I've posted about this in the WoD thread, but I'm lucky if my gaming friends are aware that there is a Vampire game besides VtM, much less that there is an entire system out there called Chronicles of Darkness. My curiosity about Onyx Path is more centered around me being genuinely confused about what their deal is since it seems like they are allergic to actually advertising their games. I posted about this in the WoD thread right before Hunter 2e was released, but as someone who has not followed nWoD since like 2010, I could not figure out where I was supposed to buy new content when I searched Google. When goons finally pointed me to OPP I was really surprised at how badly organized their website was. Like, go check out that website. Show me where a list of products they sell is. If you click on "World of Darkness" or "Chronicles of Darkness" you get linked to blog posts on that topic. Those posts might link to DTRPG for a single product, but there is no easy list of everything they sell in that product line. Looking at their media production. They apparently release all of their media on Twitch, which is not really that bad, but their Twitch channel is locked to subscriber only to view their videos. So again, you have to be actively looking for this poo poo to actually stumble upon it. I guess they have a Youtube channel, but it appears it's just stuff posted on their Twitch channel several weeks earlier and with anywhere from 8-200 views total. The videos usually aren't really high production value, and it seems like almost all their Youtube presence is a random dude named Corbin, who doesn't even work for the company, and whose videos consist of a guy copying and pasting stuff from the pdfs into a PowerPoint and talking for 8 minutes before begging for tips or Patreon subs and then signing off. What I've been trying to figure out, is what the actual management strategy of the company is. It's mostly just a morbid curiosity, since it seems like every single person that talks about the company is a "freelancer" and nobody actually ever talks about the permanent members of the actual management. Does it have real employees? It's just so weird. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 16:14
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Randalor posted:I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but what's Beast? All I know about the newer World of Darkness stuff was that there were some blatant white supremacist dogwhistles in one of the (prerelease?) documents, and that there are board games that use the Vampire name and setting that don't seem to be associated with Paradox or Onyx? Haha. I'm not directly laughing at you, but your question kind of proves my point when it comes to the publicity of CofD. I once made a post in the WoD thread about trying to describe the difference between WoD, nWoD, CodD, and WoD5e. To answer your question, you are thinking about the WoD 5e release of Vampire: The Masquerade
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Sep 20, 2023 17:04
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The new VtM is perfectly fine if you want to play that game. The books seem to have production values, appear in stores, and are still actively being produced. Hunter 5e, the production quality is there, but the actual game seems shallow and uninteresting. I think the big issue people are dancing around here is that being a successful table-top RPG publishing company is kind of hard and requires a deep bench of experienced people to run things and teach new people how to run things. When White Wolf died, a lot of those people scattered to the wind and never came back. This seems to be a problem in a lot of indie companies as I've noticed a lot more typographical, formatting, a grammatical mistakes over the last 5 years than I've ever seen in books I bought in the early 2000's. It really feels like the big companies are now holding all the talent, and lots of these indie companies are just amateurs who feel like they have a good system but don't know how to actually professionally run a company.
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Sep 20, 2023 17:58
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Kai Tave posted:The thing is, Demon has both McFarland and Rose Baily listed as developers so I guess my question is how much of Demon was actually Matt and how much was Rose? Like idk, I actually find it hard to imagine even from just a level of quality that Matt made one of the best CoD games with really tight themes, setting, everything firing on all cylinders, and then proceeded to just plummet straight off a fuckin cliff. It's not impossible, but everything about Beast has always made me wonder just how actually involved he was with Demon's finished state, because the two couldn't be more dissimilar if you tried. Everything is collaborative and the bench of experienced nWoD developers still working on CofD stuff was always fading over time. Dave B. back in the WoD thread a long time ago said that as much as he was known for Mage 2e, his real heart and soul was Deviant and that for McFarland as much as he was known for Beast his real heart and soul was apparently Promethean. Anyone aware of the premise of Promethean should take a moment to let that sink in (spoiler: It's considered a really excellent game but if you think about who made it then all the themes take on a new meaning). The truth is, McFarland and the other old guard White Wolf employees made some really good poo poo. The dude is absolute scum but he basically worked on tons of poo poo from the oWoD, nWoD, and CofD with a lot of that stuff being things I really liked (https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Matthew_McFarland). He was part of a team the whole time, so it's hard to say how much was him, but Beast was honestly not the first time his ideas of "you are different and world hates you for that...so you need to pretend to be human because they don't understand you..." appeared. It's just the least subtle.
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Sep 21, 2023 06:26
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MachineIV, thank you for your posts. Like others have said, it's been kind of a mystery trying to figure out the behind the scenes situation at OPP, despite it being obvious that there was funky stuff going on. What you posted lines up with a lot of what I've already kind of heard about McFarland not really thinking of Beast as being his while at the same time it becoming the thing he is most associated with. Your descriptions of the back and forth and the complete lack of real oversight was really informative.
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Sep 21, 2023 21:23
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MachineIV posted:Oh no. I don't care. Wow, goddamn. I was going to guess it was Mortal Remains, and I'm kind of proud I sniffed out the weirdness in that one too. I actually kinda like that book overall, even though it feels like the first half (Prometheans and changelings) was written in a completely different style than the 2nd half. Was that the case? The first two chapters went into a lot of detail about how Prometheans and changelings work with stated out NPCs (antagonists or not depending on things), and then the Sin Eater, Mummy, and Demon chapters were all very vague and mostly just new orgs with almost no stat blocks. Were they written at different times? I like the book mostly because it doesn't upset HtV itself while still allowing me to slot in the new rules I like from the God--Machine Rules update, and at least gives me ideas on how to handle Sin Eaters and Demons in that context. Ugh 2e HtV.
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Sep 21, 2023 23:13
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The editing work done of the original Star Wars is an immensely interesting subject. Rocketjump awhile back put out a video (less than 20 minutes long) detailing how the edit significantly changed the movie from it's original cut (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMyMxMYDNk). However, the fact that the editing work was important in creating the final product doesn't change the fact that George Lucas is the man that decided to stick samurai movies, westerns, and Flash Gordon into a blender and actually found a way to make it work. Nor does it change the S-grade work done by the set designers, the foleys, or the actors who both found ways to say Lucas's lines and had the balls to change the lines when they felt they knew better. Star Wars is a prime example of the idea of filmmaking as a truly collaborative process, and shows how having a movie where everyone is on their A-game creates a really excellent film. Trying to pick out any one person and claim they were what made the movie great is pointless because everyone made that movie great.
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Sep 28, 2023 18:00
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People are also adding in layers of new shows on top of old ones and trying to create some kind of coherent continuity. I'm reasonably sure the original series rarely goes into the specifics of Federation society beyond the fact that there was a really nasty series of wars and humans have since moved past that so completely that a black woman is 3rd in command of a starship, which is piloted by a Japanese man and has a Russian as bridge crew, and also works peacefully side by side with strange aliens. The entire thing was kind of a pushback to the tropes of "alien invaders" and racial and world politics at the time the show was created. TNG is where the "gay space communism" stuff really starts showing up, where everyone brings their families onto the ship, and the entire ship is same evenly lit carpeted hallway with everyone living in exactly the same size quarters. That's where I think you first start hearing about there being no money, no illness, and no strife. Apparently healthcare is good enough that people don't even get headaches, much less have mental health issues, or serious congenital diseases. In the world of TNG humanity had reached a kind of Zen peace with itself and all strife came from without. Stuff like the Picard vineyard makes sense because that kind of thing would be appreciated and probably preserved as an important part of human culture and history, and people would work on it because it's fun. My wife loves to break her back gardening, it's not easy but she takes a lot of pride in doing it. If my wife didn't have to go to work everyday, I'm reasonably sure she'd be happy to go to some kind of gardening co-op everyday and just grow vegetables that would be passed out for free to everyone in town just because she enjoys it. DS9 is where poo poo gets saucy, since it was created as an intentional dig at TNG. That show pushed really hard back at the idea of a post-racial utopia society being a single beige-carpeted hallway going on forever. Benjamin Sisko is black, and in the society of the Federation his being black has not hampered him in any way, but he is still black and he carries with him the culture and unique aspects of his forefathers. Sisko cooks because his father taught him how to cook, and his father learned from his father and so on, and Sisko cooking is the same manifestation of his cultural heritage as the very visible Afro-art in his quarters, etc. In fact, DS9 as a whole basically takes all of the TNG species and decides to give them more nuanced culture. There are opera singing Klingon chefs, Ferengi engineers and labor strikers, Cardassian well *points to all the Cardassians in the series*, and so on. Basically the series takes the kind of homogenous gay space communism of TNG and says, "Actually, all these cultures can survive and thrive and keep humans interesting without conflict." And despite all of that, Sisko and his dad don't get along, because there's no medical cure for humans just not being able to agree with each other and for dads and their sons butting heads.
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Sep 30, 2023 06:18
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I don't have much hard data to add, but I feel like people have been talking about the death of LGS's since before I stopped posting in the Trad Games forum in 2010 (and back then people were still blaming it on Amazon and B&N (lol)). A solid chunk of gaming stores did die, but I just checked out where I lived back then are there are actually more stores there now than there was in 2013 when I left. I live in a place where I wouldn't expect to see too many gaming stores and somehow we have 5 within a 20 minute radius of my home, and I've commented before that I'm surprised at how successful they seem to be compared to the anemic stores I shopped at in the early 2010's. I think the key, however, is that pen & paper games like D&D/PF/CoC have very little to do with the bottom lines of these places vs. miniature games, card games, and board game nights. I play D&D with one of the owners of the store we play in, and I've mentioned to him that I always go out of my way to buy new books at his store if I can, and he basically was like, "Thanks" but also that someone like me buying a D&D book once a month was barely a blip compared to them unloading "Leviathan" WH40K boxes or $210 2-player starter sets for Lord of the Rings. Basically every vibrant gaming store I see now is basically some variation of constantly running mini or card tournaments, or being membership pay at the door places where you can run your tournaments/board games/tabletop games.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:00
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The only reason I got into the nWoD was because Barnes and Noble carried all of those books during the early 2000's. I still remember picking up the Hunter: The Vigil book in B&N back in 2008 and starting to read it on one of the couches they used to have for customers. I ended up buying that and a number of other splats directly from B&N because my local gaming shops didn't even carry nWoD products. Presently my local B&N has a single shelf for "role playing games" which is 75% D&D, about 20% PF, and the remainder is off-brand "dungeoneering" books which are probably meant to be used with D&D. It's a far cry from the variety they had back in 2007-2010.
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Oct 5, 2023 17:26
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Since this is the Trad Games forum, I for one enjoy the fact that I all my local gaming stores/clubs have Discord servers so that I can engage with those communities directly and can more easily organize meeting times/game interests/room reservations. Discord was and continues to be a game changer in my Trad Games life because it lets me talk to my whole group at once, keep track of downtime activities, re-post handouts they saw during the game, etc. etc. This of course doesn't even take into account its main purpose, which is just being a place to voice talk with my friends while we are playing games on Steam together.
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Oct 13, 2023 15:29
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All of these complaints about Discord feel like they're coming from people that aren't really aware of Discord's features. You can absolutely control notifications on a micro-level so that the app doesn't ping you except for specific circumstances, and you can mute entire channels if you want. You can pretty easily drag your servers into any order, and even hide channels in servers so you aren't seeing constant unread indicators. Channels also can be made into separate threads that are hidden unless you click into the threads view to see which ones are active, so sub-topics can be discussed in smaller groups without the whole channel even seeing the discussion (unless they specifically want to and click into the thread). As for each server requiring you to read their rules, and create roles, well that makes complete sense because every server is it's own community and it's good to know the rules of a community before you start posting. It's also only really a chore if you are joining lots of servers sequentially, but I'd wager most people only join a new server every so often and certainly not many in less than an hour. The crux of this is that a lot of you are pinning for a forum design that doesn't really exist anymore for good reasons. It wasn't some vast corporate conspiracy that caused SomethingAwful and other forums like this to become less popular. As a larger portion of the population went online and started forming communities, large broad umbrella forums where posting was controlled by the whims of a relatively small number of mods and admins didn't really match how most people like to communicate. Reddit with all of it's subreddits, Discord, Slack, and even Mastodon starting to replace Twitter, all allowed people to form their own little enclaves where they could communicate with like-minded people easily. All of these micro-community apps work really well for that, so no poo poo they are doing well. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 08:40
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The thing that really upsets me about these firings is that it's exacerbating a problem that has been rampant in a lot of new games I've been trying out recently, and that's a lack of institutional knowledge when it comes to game design. I'm not going to name any names here, but I've been dipping my toes into a few other tabletop systems and have been broadly disappointed at the quality of the writing, organization/layout of the books, and ease of understanding of how to run the games. I've basically been chalking it up to lots of these being tiny little companies that lack the kind of experience that comes with having a consistent crew of designers/writers/editors that can refine the stuff being put out. I can't tell you how many times I've started reading a game book, checked out the company's website and found that they don't even have an office and everything was put together by email and "virtual" work by mostly freelancers. Jump down my throat all you want, but both WotC & Paizo were at least keeping some of that institutional knowledge in house, and now it appears WotC is going to dump a lot of that and just hire newer, cheaper people to pick up the slack. I fully expect to see a huge drop in the quality of the output from WotC because of this.
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Dec 14, 2023 23:19
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The strange thing about that entire weird spiel just posted is that he's pointing at Paizo and PF as some kind of new thing. Paizo has been making its competing product since 4E, and yet both 4E and PF1 did well even though they were on the same market wavelength. I'm really not sure what the dude's actual point is. The big issue with the new D&D edition coming out is that they are claiming you can mix and match old and new books, which seems like a disaster in waiting as players and DMs start using different versions of the PH and DMG with no clear idea of which one is the correct rules.
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Jan 4, 2024 03:48
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Megazver posted:In industry-related news, Swen Vincke of Larian just said they're completely done with BG3 and D&D. No DLC, no sequels: gently caress. That absolutely blows. I'm on my third group of people I'm teaching 5e to who have said that game got them interested in checking it out.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:02
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Hunter Noventa posted:Considering hasbro literally sacked everyone they worked with on BG3, I'm not shocked at all. Yeah, I mentioned before that the mass firings is probably the only big thing Hasbro/WotC did last year that will seriously affect their ability to produce good product over the long-term. None of the controversies that popped up on the internet really had a lot of staying power (or in some cases even broke the surface of being noticed by people who are not terminally online), but the firings are really going to screw up the day-to-day decision making within the company. Dexo posted:It's very funny Larian is framing it that way, when I'm willing to bet almost anything it is talks breaking down with WotC over money such as cost and how much WotC rent seeks. I agree with this, or at least that this was a big part of it. Larian’s CEO literally popped off last night about greedy executives and the problems with mass firings and short-term profit chasing. My bet is that everyone they worked with got fired (we know this happened), and the same C-suite big brains tried to re-negotiate with Larian with terms that were unacceptable. I’m also going to disagree with the sentiment in this thread. I agree that Larian is obviously an excellent set of game developers who proved their commitment to making a great game that was worth it’s price and more. However, I absolutely would have never picked up that game if it hadn’t been called ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’, and I’m reasonably sure that’s the case for a lot of people. Maybe they’ll be able to spin “From the makers of BG3” to carry the audience over to their next game, but the D&D IP still holds a lot of weight, and I don’t think they’re actually that happy with not being able to work on it again. I’m not exaggerating when I say that BG3 has caused a significant swell in the interest in D&D in my city, and it’s been very exciting to see so many new faces from such a variety of backgrounds that I don’t typically see playing the game. It’s shame that we might not get a repeat like that in a few years.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:48
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Does anyone actually have any insider information on GW's thoughts on this? Because all I ever see on forums is people kind of guessing or making fun of GW about not licensing to video game companies when my personal experience has been that they kind of have been...for at least two decades. Dawn of War came out in 2004. Is this just that thing where goons have lost track of how much time has passed since certain milestones in their lives (like the 80's being 40+ years ago)? 20 years is a huge amount of time in gaming company time and over that time I can recall playing a poo poo-ton of WH games. There's the Dawn of War series, Total War: Warhammer series, Space Marine, Space Hulk, Vermintide, Eisenhorn:Xenos, etc. I think there's been close to 50 games released over the last 20 years, which seems like they're doing exactly what you guys say they should be doing. EDIT: I mean, if you want to get really technical, then Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000 was released in 1997; Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War was 1999; and Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels was released in 1995! I remember playing 40k video games in high school, so it was definitely pre-2000's. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 17:44
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