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MalcolmSheppard posted:Generally when you work for a company full time, it means that every product under your purview passes over your desk. He was the editor in charge of Hero and RM from the late 80s to the early 90s (http://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory8.phtml), so he worked on pretty much everything released from that company, not just what you might turn up with some Googling. (And now I miss the old pen-paper.net, which wasn't too bad about recording creator credits.) I seriously doubt he has no more than 15 TSR credits (RPGnet's listings are incomplete, and list maybe 18, not including a few dozen Dragon Magazine articles). Oh for gently caress's sake. I've been basing my comments off of the bibliography on Monte Cook's own webpage, which lists 16 books books he wrote for TSR, one he "evaluated", and one unreleased product. If you want to imagine he did more than he personally takes credit for, feel free, but 16 is still a lot! That's an awful lot of books! But it's not vast, and it's not as much as the 25+ books he's done for Malhavoc (without even counting his other d20 output). MalcolmSheppard posted:The rest of this sounds like "Surely nothing notable was done in the field before the existence of web forums!" Okay, I get that you don't like the way he designs games, but he was an extremely experienced writer, editor and designer before he was involved in D&D, and didn't get momentum to do his own thing purely out of a sense of entitlement. I'm not talking about how he designs games - he's at least a step up from a lot of d20 publishers (damning with faint praise, I suppose, but he was one of the best). I have a fair number of Monte Cook books on my shelf from Malhavoc, TSR, and WotC, and I'm glad to have them there. If I hated him, they wouldn't be there. It turns out I can criticize him or dislike things he's done without hating him as a person. I can sigh in exasperation at his introduction to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and still proudly slide Beyond Countless Doorways onto my d20 shelf. Amazing, but true! But I think a lot of his success comes from how he's sold Monte Cook rather than how he's sold his work. That doesn't invalidate his work as a whole, but lets us take a more objective view of it.
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Oct 10, 2013 15:10
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BrainParasite posted:I have the strangest urge to buy a Numenera license and write the worst officially licensed supplement of all time. Honestly there is probably some cash to be made doing some quick $5 PDF supplements for DTRPG using the licence, I bet there is enough reactionary pro-Cook sentiment that you could make some decent cash on the quick even with the $50 fee.
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Oct 10, 2013 16:14
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Pumpkin_Paine posted:Honestly there is probably some cash to be made doing some quick $5 PDF supplements for DTRPG using the licence, I bet there is enough reactionary pro-Cook sentiment that you could make some decent cash on the quick even with the $50 fee. The main reason I want to recommend against this is if you happen to make $2000 off this*, even if that's unlikely, all of a sudden your current agreement no longer applies. You're now on the hook for a new agreement and you have no idea what it is. Your options are either to stop selling a surprisingly successful product or be at the mercy of Monte Cook Games, hoping they give you a good deal. I don't think Monte Cook Games is necessarily predatory in this instance, but you should never enter into an arrangement where the other side can just change the details like that. *note that this is $2000 before accounting for any expenditures and any hosting costs. You have also have to account for the cost of the license. DrivethruRPG requires 35% of the profits if you're not exclusive, so if you sell exclusively pdf you're only going to make $1250 at most. If you sell physical copies of something, you're looking at losing between $3 and $5 from that $1950 for each sale before taking into account DrivethruRPG's cut. This also assumes you don't hire anyone to create art, you write the entire thing and handle all of the layout yourself, and you also spend your time publicizing the game instead of working on something with no sales ceiling.
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Oct 10, 2013 16:28
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At the risk of pointing out the obvious, how would he even know whether you made $2000? And doesn't the license agreement just say "you know what you have to do, it's the thing to do"? If your Numenera thing really is flying off the shelves and you're really getting close to that kind of money, you probably SHOULD contact him, to get more cross-promotion or (maybe even) some help/work from Monte later.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:07
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homullus posted:At the risk of pointing out the obvious, how would he even know whether you made $2000? And doesn't the license agreement just say "you know what you have to do, it's the thing to do"? If your Numenera thing really is flying off the shelves and you're really getting close to that kind of money, you probably SHOULD contact him, to get more cross-promotion or (maybe even) some help/work from Monte later. I can just about guarantee you that his contract states that you have to provide sales figures. If it doesn't, then yes, you could skirt under this. The real issue is that he won't post the contract online, so we can't determine what the terms are. I imagine it's something along the lines of "If net sales of the Product exceed $2000, this agreement will be held null and void thirty days from that date. The Licensee must contact Monte Cook Games in order to negotiate a Professional contract" and then a definition of net sales that excludes things like sales fees.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:16
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homullus posted:At the risk of pointing out the obvious, how would he even know whether you made $2000? And doesn't the license agreement just say "you know what you have to do, it's the thing to do"? If your Numenera thing really is flying off the shelves and you're really getting close to that kind of money, you probably SHOULD contact him, to get more cross-promotion or (maybe even) some help/work from Monte later. They reserve the right to ask you for sales figures and numbers at any time. It's listed on the page.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:17
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The horror really does seem to me to be the unknown here, and it hurts the dozen people who are either A) seriously thinking of writing a thing that they can only imagine being based on Numenera, or B) actually Monte Cook. The rest (who are thinking of writing, but their thing could go with another system) will probably just do that, so . . . I feel bad for Monte and the other 11 people.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:30
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Martin Wallace, of Treefrog Games and A Study in Emerald, sent out an update today saying that he forgot to have one of the stretch goals made and that sending them out individually would cost more than they stand to make from the game. It's only a poster, so I'm not worried about the item itself. It's just... how do you miss an entire component like that? The art for the poster wasn't even commissioned.
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Oct 22, 2013 15:05
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So I've been thinking about something for a while, and this post inspired me to talk about it. (Context: Gareth-Michael Skarka finds out a single person backed out of Tianxia because he was involved, loses his poo poo):quote:Ah. There we go. The RPGnet crowd begins the "we're not going to back Tianxia because Skarka is tangentially involved" drumbeat. So, what is it with designers and having problems engaging with forums? Are there any designers (besides Stolze) who interact with the RPG community regularly and not like an idiot?
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Nov 20, 2013 23:30
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I haven't heard much bad about Fred Hicks.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:34
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Do posters here count? Because Mikan then.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:41
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Ettin posted:So I've been thinking about something for a while, and this post inspired me to talk about it. (Context: Gareth-Michael Skarka finds out a single person backed out of Tianxia because he was involved, loses his poo poo): Rose Bailey hasn't hosed up anything that I know of.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:42
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I think I've mentioned on grogs.txt way back when, but as somebody that's mined the Pathfinder forums, Jason Bulmahn and Lisa Stevens come across really well. Really, most of the Paizo employees do, people like SKR and Ryan Dancey are in the minority. We also have a good number of perfectly decent designers and reps here like Mikan, Gnome7, CroatianAlzheimers, WadeRockett, and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:44
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Not me though, I'm hostile and awful.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:49
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Ettin posted:So, what is it with designers and having problems engaging with forums? Are there any designers (besides Stolze) who interact with the RPG community regularly and not like an idiot? I don't know that it's unique to RPGs. There's any numbers of authors who are terrible with their fans, people who do video games, whatever.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:14
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Man, what a lovely thing to say. Like Skarka is a loving rockstar RPG designer. Truly, the King of the Nerds, writing poo poo in your underwear at home.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:17
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On a side note, what has Skarka even produced in the past decade?
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Nov 21, 2013 00:21
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Monte Cook and Steve Jackson actually do a decent job of talking to people like adults.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:26
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Well, it looks like he's mostly working in open license game systems and self-help manuals (e-publishing guides, hah) with a very few early forays outside that. Mostly what he's done in recent years is short fiction anthology stuff, and even that's not a lot. So uh, yeah. Doesn't really have any kind of credentials that other small-time freelancers don't, aside from maybe over a decade of experience and a proven record of not delivering on time.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:27
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Gary published a poo poo-ton of shovelware through Adamant Entertainment. He and Louis Porter jr. are awful 'designers'. Even Fields brings in some creativity as vile as it may be. GMS did release an interesting rules lite game called Underworld in 2000 or so and wrote the Skull&Bones game for Green Ronin's 'Mythic Vistas' d20 line.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:28
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Ettin posted:So I've been thinking about something for a while, and this post inspired me to talk about it. (Context: Gareth-Michael Skarka finds out a single person backed out of Tianxia because he was involved, loses his poo poo): Fred Hicks, Rob Donahughe, and co. Jenna Moran. Cam Banks. Joe Macaldando. Hell, I think that the persistent idiots (as opposed to the occasional foot-in-mouthers) are in the minority just about everywhere. As for what Skarka's done, Amazon makes him second author for Dr Who: Adventures in Time And Space and Icons - although I can't see him on the credits page of my hardcopy of Dr Who. Which is ... interesting.  (It probably doesn't need proof, but...) neonchameleon fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Nov 21, 2013 |
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Nov 21, 2013 00:41
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The thing about GMS is, in a hobby where people will line up to breathlessly extol the virtues of even mediocre designers, a perennial also-ran. He's published a bunch of stuff and nobody cares about it. Who's pushing for a revised Underworld? Where's the enthusiastic fan-community for his Napoleonic+magic game? Or the Barsoom knock-off he wrote? Where are all the GMS fans? He doesn't have any outside of those gamers who venerate anyone who calls themselves a "professional game designer." John Wick might get poo poo talked about him, but he can at least point to L5R and go "yeah, I made that, and you still talk about Seventh Sea too." Except for some reason GMS also has the ego of a rock star to go along with his complete lack of anything noteworthy in his publishing career which has resulted in the most amazingly hilarious case of sour grapes you'll ever see. His jealousy and resentment over the fact that gamers won't bow down at the altar of his experience as a
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Nov 21, 2013 01:15
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I've also been pretty impressed with Dave Brookshaw (the nMage developer) who posts here and elsewhere. He seems like a pretty cool dude and generally has useful things to say, to boot.
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Nov 21, 2013 01:16
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Kai Tave posted:Where are all the GMS fans? He doesn't have any outside of those gamers who venerate anyone who calls themselves a "professional game designer." He truly and honestly seems to have gotten into (and continued) his career as a game designer solely because it gives him a perch from which he can look down on the common lumpen gamer. (Is he still advertising his services as a gaming business consultant? Because that would just about murder me with laughter.) There was a segment a couple of weeks ago on the Ken Hite/Robin Laws podcast (which you should all be listening to) where they declared that the biggest misconception about game industry pros is that they have really strong, tribal feelings about games and companies and designers in the same way their most intense fans do. K&R pointed out that most people in the industry get along with each other very well, and for obvious reasons - it's a small field, you will encounter everyone in person at cons, reputations matter, being a troublemaking loudmouth will result in your not getting assignments, and your next gig may be for a company that's the exact opposite of what your last gig was. They cited the example of 3E vs. 4E D&D over which so much e-blood has been spilled by fans, and how the two games' designers not only are great friends, but they seamlessly collaborated on their own well-received fantasy RPG, 13TH AGE. Skarka and Wick and similar belligerent loudmouths really do find themselves consigned to the peripheries of the industry, releasing their work (or not, snicker) on the indie/self-publishing/kickstarter tip because no one will hire them for more than the occasional one-off. Professionalism matters, kids.
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Nov 21, 2013 02:27
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Oh, and the Pinnacle Entertainment Group guys. They're consistently pretty cool. Clint Black's a great guy, in particular.
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Nov 21, 2013 04:26
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Kai Tave posted:John Wick might get poo poo talked about him, but he can at least point to L5R and go "yeah, I made that, and you still talk about Seventh Sea too." To be fair, a squad of unsung writers really helped to turn Wick's (very) rough draft into what we know as Legend of the Five Rings, but it's hard to deny Wick hasn't certainly made some interesting games since. Oh, and the Crafty guys, Alex Flagg, Patrick Kapera, and Steve Hough are really cool. There's a reason why nobody's calling for their heads even though a lot of their projects have been running hideously late. Transparency earns you a lot of forgiveness, as it turns out.
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Nov 21, 2013 06:19
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David Hill is good people. He's doing work for the new Demon and publishes his own stuff too. Really nice guy.
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Nov 21, 2013 07:02
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I have a copy of Underworld! It's pretty hilariously amateurish and badly edited- there's numerous places where the art just obscures the text and somehow nobody caught it before going to print.
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Nov 21, 2013 07:36
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FMguru posted:There was a segment a couple of weeks ago on the Ken Hite/Robin Laws podcast (which you should all be listening to) where they declared that the biggest misconception about game industry pros is that they have really strong, tribal feelings about games and companies and designers in the same way their most intense fans do. K&R pointed out that most people in the industry get along with each other very well, and for obvious reasons - it's a small field, you will encounter everyone in person at cons, reputations matter, being a troublemaking loudmouth will result in your not getting assignments, and your next gig may be for a company that's the exact opposite of what your last gig was. They cited the example of 3E vs. 4E D&D over which so much e-blood has been spilled by fans, and how the two games' designers not only are great friends, but they seamlessly collaborated on their own well-received fantasy RPG, 13TH AGE. I'm absolutely convinced that the only reason the Tianxia Kickstarer brought GMS onboard to contribute to the fiction anthology stretch goal is because Jack Norris must be buddies with Skarka (somehow). I don't know why else you'd choose to work with someone synonymous with being an insufferable, egotistical internet tough guy and whose own Kickstarter is two years overdue with no drop date in sight. Alien Rope Burn posted:To be fair, a squad of unsung writers really helped to turn Wick's (very) rough draft into what we know as Legend of the Five Rings, but it's hard to deny Wick hasn't certainly made some interesting games since. Oh yeah, it's absolutely true what you say about L5R, but even still Wick can legitimately point to L5R as a game he had a significant hand in and is still going strong today with an active fanbase. GMS doesn't even have that.
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Nov 21, 2013 07:57
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Jack Norris is hardly a bastion of good industry sense, either.
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Nov 21, 2013 08:17
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Well no, but for all his own overinflated sense of self-importance he's at least managed to attach himself to a number of games significantly more impressive than anything GMS has ever done...he's got credits on the DC RPG that was put out by Green Ronin using M&M3E and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, possibly some other Cortex credits, and credit where credit is due the Tianxia Kickstarter has delivered in a way Far West has thoroughly failed to do. He also did Scroll of the Monk for Exalted 2E which most Exalted fans and even other Exalted writers seem to hold in low regard but I guess they can't all be winners.
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Nov 21, 2013 08:30
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Pope Guilty posted:I have a copy of Underworld! It's pretty hilariously amateurish and badly edited- there's numerous places where the art just obscures the text and somehow nobody caught it before going to print. I have Underworld too! The other thing is that GMS loves working on stuff for d20, but Underworld is about as far awy from that as possible and has some actually interesting ideas too  Broken clock twice a day etc...
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Nov 21, 2013 09:05
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Vincent Darlage (who did lots of Conan stuff for Mongoose) has always seemed like a cool friendly guy, along with Keith Baker who was very active on the Eberron forums at least a few years back.
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Nov 21, 2013 10:07
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Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel are, in my experience, people who handle themselves well in online fora and are good to talk with also. Sage, in particular, had to put up with a lot of grief from people telling him he was trying to destroy the hobby, without using those exact words, and then he went to a certain site and answered questions in a manner that I believe was very even-handed. Rose Bailey seems like good people too but I don't know if I have a wide enough sampling to tell if she has ever had any flare-ups. To my knowledge, she hasn't. I think someone mentioned Jenna Moran already, but if not, she's someone I would include in the list of people who are professional and helpful. There's also Andy Kitkowski. He has done translation, mostly, but he has been a good conduit for people in the West to learn about Japanese gaming, and he also started story-games.com (which he publicly announced today (the 20th) he will no longer head up due to life changes).
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Nov 21, 2013 10:59
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Gasperkun posted:story-games.com (which he publicly announced today (the 20th) he will no longer head up due to life changes). That can't be good.
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Nov 21, 2013 11:01
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ravenkult posted:That can't be good. Basically, he is moving his family to Japan, where he will have a new job. He will have less time for admin-y type stuff. Apparently, in recent years he was looking for someone who could take over the reins as life became more complicated over time, for various reasons, and he found someone he felt would fit the bill.
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Nov 21, 2013 11:05
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Can't be good about Story Games I mean. It's an oasis of logic in a desert of lovely forums.
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Nov 21, 2013 11:09
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My personal interactions with Rose Bailey have given me no reason to believe she's anything other than a level-headed and pleasant person.
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Nov 21, 2013 11:30
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I think the greater part of RPG authors are chill enough. The knobs just stand out because they can be the most memorably unpleasant and hilarious. It's a pretty small community, especially online, so when someone's loud enough to make sure everyone knows they're a "straight-talker" or "rough and tumble frontiersman" they get heard much better than in larger communities.Kai Tave posted:He also did Scroll of the Monk for Exalted 2E which most Exalted fans and even other Exalted writers seem to hold in low regard but I guess they can't all be winners. Nope!  Jack's great crime against Exalted were the Merits & Flaws and half-blood rules in Scroll of Heroes. These were in many ways worse than the excrescence in Monk!Some poking was had over slipping in some entirely 1E-based stuff. No one really cared that much as it was probably an honest mistake and one of the least horrible things about his chapters, but Jon Chung made it A Thing for some reason and just would not stop hounding Norris about it. Jack basically threw down his gloves and went full-blown "the work I do for you people", going so far as to show up on the White Wolf boards just to get huffy with the more modest complaints there. It was mostly just Jon Chung after him, but Jack started snapping at everybody almost right out of the gate. Then he went into hermitage for a month or two, reemerging to poo poo out the most passive-aggressive, whiny two-part blog post about how put-upon the creative type is in RPGs and how hard it is to find a reason to go on subjecting yourself to the criticisms of fans. When he was blowing up on the WW boards he accused me of following him from RPGnet to hound him because of course. He also probably wrote the time travel and demon armies/reproduction stuff in Compass: Malfeas. Norris seems to have turned in some workmanlike product for Compass: South, because that book is universally bland but serviceable as far as "catch, tag, catalog and maybe expand a weensy bit on what 1E did." RPGnet also lists him for Scroll of Kings but he's not credited in the book and it's fairly well-known who did the Bad Thing in there. Regardless of his past, Jack Norris seems to have gotten a pretty good handle on himself since then. He's grown up enough to be unremarkably pleasant, meandering half-defenses of employed douche bags aside. Maybe he's trying to take Skarka along for the ride in hopes he will grow up, too? Gasperkun posted:I think someone mentioned Jenna Moran already, but if not, she's someone I would include in the list of people who are professional and helpful. Jenna Moran is pretty professional in public, whimsical at times, but after getting to know her privately I can't help comparing her favorably to Mr. Rogers. She isn't good people, she's best people.
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Nov 21, 2013 11:37
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Gasperkun posted:Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel are, in my experience, people who handle themselves well in online fora and are good to talk with also. Sage, in particular, had to put up with a lot of grief from people telling him he was trying to destroy the hobby, without using those exact words, and then he went to a certain site and answered questions in a manner that I believe was very even-handed.
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Nov 21, 2013 15:10
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