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The Foundation, the first attempt at a d20 Supers game, was notably awful by all accounts. (For example, it's currently going for -one cent- from Amazon.)
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Nov 11, 2014 14:21
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potatocubed posted:This sounds amazing, especially since my other half is hooked on X Factor at the moment. Hah, and now I'm imagining a Persona game set in a reality show--maybe crossing the streams with Dangan Ronpa for the intro. Can you reveal your true self when everyone around you is dedicated to a camera mugging falsehood?
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Nov 11, 2014 14:51
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moths posted:The Hobbit is the first time I've wanted a collector's edition that tosses out 3/4 of the theatrical material.  Bucnasti posted:I gotta admit, I would watch the hell out of Michael Bay's The Mouse and the Motorcycle.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:Fast Forward Entertainment made a ton of bad supplements, including Dungeon World (which I own). When I'm not on my tablet I can tell the tale of how FFE imploded because it's pretty funny. Please do! Also explain d20 Dungeon World, it sounds uniquely horrible. A Fast Forward adventure (one of the pamphlet-style ones) was my first third-party product. Horrrrrrrrrrrible. I never ran it. If nothing else, Paizo made sure to put out quality actually playable stuff when they were just doing third-party 3.5 stuff.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:15
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unseenlibrarian posted:The Foundation, the first attempt at a d20 Supers game, was notably awful by all accounts. I actually saw a copy of this once. The interior art was just those hero silhouettes you can get so non-artists like me can draw your character's costume over it. They didn't even bother to fill them in. Arivia posted:Please do! Also explain d20 Dungeon World, it sounds uniquely horrible.  Anyway, the sad tale of Fast Forward Entertainment. FFE was the d20 publishing house of James "Drawmij" Ward, one of the original D&D players/designers. Jim designed the original Metamorphosis Alpha, the old Greyhawk Adventures hardcover and Gamma World, and co-wrote the original Deities & Demigods. So yeah, he's an important figure in the history of the hobby. When 3rd Edition came out, he and a few other TSR guys founded Fast Forward as a publishing house for d20-compatible product. Like Kai Tave said, they were part of the d20 shovelware boom; 128-page hardcovers full of nothing but magic items, spells, and so on. They also released the terrible "Dungeon World" setting, which was supposed to be a sort of otherdimensional megadungeon where adventurers go when they die, but was instead just a bunch of dungeon levels jammed together. Now, as we all know, the way d20 licensing works was that there was the System Reference Document, which was all the official rules that anyone could use in their products. If you wanted to use an official spell or monster or whatever that wasn't in the SRD, you couldn't because it was WotC's intellectual property. It wasn't complicated. As the sheer amount of third party product demonstrated, even non-industry folks could figure out how it worked. Not Jim, though. Four of FFE's releases (a book of mini-adventures, Dungeon World, a Dungeon World supplement, and a 128-page book of rings) contained references to numerous D&D gods like Lolth and Gruumsh, numerous non-OLG monsters, and (hilariously) the major Greyhawk character of Drawmij. Surprisingly, none of these characters were open gaming content, so FFE wasn't legally able to use them. Which, again, wasn't that big a surprise if you knew how the SRD and OGL worked. Except that Jim didn't. He didn't work off the SRD, he worked off the core books. Not the same thing. So of course WotC finds out, and tells FFE that they broke the OGL and are violating copyright. Which meant that FFE had to destroy all their undistributed copies of four of their books, as well as shelving a book they were working on at the time. Jim Ward made a public apology where he accepted the blame then shifted it immediately to WotC one paragraph later. quote:There is no way in the world that designers and editors can be expected to do their job and keep track of the thousands of legal details the ogl dectates. These were honest mistakes that have caused Fast Forward to pull product off the shelves. Life happens. As you can imagine, people weren't really sympathetic to Jim's problem since there were dozens upon dozens of people with zero industry experience who managed to release stuff without violating the OGL. On top of that, FFE's fans would try to explain to them "no, that's not how this works, just do this and you're good" and the advice was ignored. Not that it mattered; between the overall poor reception of their products and having to pulp a large chunk of inventory, FFE wasn't long for the world after that.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:39
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Going off memory, Ward had a major issue with criticism as well, and soured what little reputation FFW had every time he responded to basically anything.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:54
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Were they the ones who put out that Green Races book? I remember hearing that was bad even for shovelware.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:59
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Pretty much all that's left of FFE is threads on other forums (the official site has long since been deleted, as near as I can tell), but apparently the fine folks at FFE would respond to poor reviews by stating on their official site that the reviewer was 12. e: dwarf74 posted:Were they the ones who put out that Green Races book? I remember hearing that was bad even for shovelware. Yup. Here's a fun review.
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Nov 11, 2014 16:05
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All this time speaking about bad OGL products, and from veterans of the FATAL and Friends thread, without mentioning Chris Fields? And his terrible abortion battle setting and Black Tokyo?
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Nov 11, 2014 16:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:As you can imagine, people weren't really sympathetic to Jim's problem since there were dozens upon dozens of people with zero industry experience who managed to release stuff without violating the OGL. On top of that, FFE's fans would try to explain to them "no, that's not how this works, just do this and you're good" and the advice was ignored. You'd think it would be hard, but I recall working on a d20 project where we were trying to do a collection of hells for planar adventuring, and no matter how many times I would mention "by the way, we can't use Planescape material", people would repeatedly bring up canon demons or locales or factions or whatever. Never underestimate the willful ignorance of fans. Night10194 posted:All this time speaking about bad OGL products, and from veterans of the FATAL and Friends thread, without mentioning Chris Fields? And his terrible abortion battle setting and Black Tokyo? Well, we're speaking more historically of the glut of crap during the d20 boom, which Fields post-dates.
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Nov 11, 2014 17:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You'd think it would be hard, but I recall working on a d20 project where we were trying to do a collection of hells for planar adventuring, and no matter how many times I would mention "by the way, we can't use Planescape material", people would repeatedly bring up canon demons or locales or factions or whatever. Never underestimate the willful ignorance of fans. I wouldn't be surprised if Jim Ward thought he was going to get the by because he was one of the original members of Gary's crew.
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Nov 11, 2014 17:22
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Night10194 posted:All this time speaking about bad OGL products, and from veterans of the FATAL and Friends thread, without mentioning Chris Fields? And his terrible abortion battle setting and Black Tokyo? Besides post-dating the d20 glut, that Black Tokyo is bad goes without saying.
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Nov 11, 2014 17:43
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The Book of Erotic Fantasy sorta-kinda put the brakes on the D20 glut going full Fields, because after it came out they hastily revised the d20 System license to have basically a 'no porn' clause. (You could still publish your creepy D&D porn sourcebooks with just the OGL, but.) IIRC the pathfinder license doesn't have that clause, possibly because otherwise they'd have to give up Hillbilly incestuous rapist ogres as a core thing, I guess.
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Nov 11, 2014 18:31
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What's the difference between the d20 license and the OGL? What do you lose by not adhering to the former?
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Nov 11, 2014 18:35
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Arivia posted:What's the difference between the d20 license and the OGL? What do you lose by not adhering to the former?
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Nov 11, 2014 18:38
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Wasn't the entire point of the OGL to crowd out other, better games by cramming the shelves full of D&D poo poo?
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Nov 11, 2014 18:40
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unseenlibrarian posted:IIRC the pathfinder license doesn't have that clause, possibly because otherwise they'd have to give up Hillbilly incestuous rapist ogres as a core thing, I guess. I don't believe Fields uses the Pathfinder Compatibility License (which does have a decency clause) for the Black Tokyo line but instead publishes under the OGL. I believe he uses it for some other publications, tho. Paizo isn't beholden to live up to their own licensing standards since they aren't licensing themselves, naturally. (And they don't.)
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Nov 11, 2014 18:43
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ErichZahn posted:Wasn't the entire point of the OGL to crowd out other, better games by cramming the shelves full of D&D poo poo? Pretty much. The idea was that if everyone could make d20/D&D product, then nobody would ever play anything else! Everyone would just buy the core books and WotC would corner the market! It's an amazing fundamental misunderstanding of human nature in general and gamers in particular. Like how, for example, if you release all your rules in one big free document people are less likely to shell out $90 for the books.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:11
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There's some conspiracy theories that the whole "We'll crowd all the other games out of the market" was basically just a snowjob for the Hasbro suits and it was really meant so that eventually Ryan Dancey could steal D&D out from under the company when the time came, and thus Pathfinder. I think this ascribes a level of competence and low cunning to Dancey that is not actually evident. On the other hand, there's the whole 'reading emails he shouldn't be able to see to manipulate the vote" GAMA thing. And basically everything about Pathfinder Online.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:23
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Oh, I've got one. A company got a license to make a WWE RPG, and after massive delays the "Know Your Role!" (GET IT?!?!) RPG came out, running on D20/OGL variant rules. There was also an attempt at a "Capcom World Tournament" RPG (with sourcebooks for Street Fighter, DarkStalkers, etc.) that never got published, and which also, for no apparent reason, ran on OGL rules. And then this happened:  FMguru posted:D20 license allowed you to use D20 branding and logos, in exchange for agreeing to some additional restrictions. ErichZahn posted:Wasn't the entire point of the OGL to crowd out other, better games by cramming the shelves full of D&D poo poo?
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Nov 11, 2014 19:24
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Evil Mastermind posted:Fast Forward Entertainment made a ton of bad supplements, including Dungeon World (which I own). When I'm not on my tablet I can tell the tale of how FFE imploded because it's pretty funny. At one point they bought the magazine Games Unplugged and the lead review was this hilariously transparent shill, opening with a paragraph talking about how people were thanking FFE for breathing new life into the OGL movement.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You'd think it would be hard, but I recall working on a d20 project where we were trying to do a collection of hells for planar adventuring, and no matter how many times I would mention "by the way, we can't use Planescape material", people would repeatedly bring up canon demons or locales or factions or whatever. Never underestimate the willful ignorance of fans. That's funny, doubly so because I'm going through an old huge thread on RPGNet about FFE, and you mentioned it there too 
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Nov 11, 2014 19:42
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Oh god and I'd forgotten all about this:quote:Fast Forward Offers Lifetime Subscription Two grand for all the d20 shovelware you can stand!
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Nov 11, 2014 19:47
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And did they manage to produce $2000 worth (MSRP) of content before folding?
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Nov 11, 2014 19:52
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Going by this list, that's 37 products. Even guesstimating $25 a book on average, they didn't even break four figures.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:58
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I have a staunch "no lifetime memberships ever" policy and that is why. Every single company I have seen that offers a lifetime subscription of any kind has folded faster than Superman on laundry day. I have a couple friends who bought into that for some MMO, I wanna say it was called Hellgate? Total WoW/D2 ripoff from what I saw of it. I think they got almost half of their "lifetime member" value in game time before the company folded.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:38
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Yawgmoth posted:I have a staunch "no lifetime memberships ever" policy and that is why. Every single company I have seen that offers a lifetime subscription of any kind has folded faster than Superman on laundry day. I have a couple friends who bought into that for some MMO, I wanna say it was called Hellgate? Total WoW/D2 ripoff from what I saw of it. I think they got almost half of their "lifetime member" value in game time before the company folded.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:53
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Speaking of the D20 glut's infamous companies, I picked up a copy of Mongoose's Quintessential Drow back around 2005. One of the mini-games in it was called "The Game of Bones," a simulation of drow political machinations. Rules for opposed dice challenges, determining the consequences of success and failure, resource management in the terms of holdings, financial clout, public image, all that stuff between competing factions and individuals. Sounds like some competitive potential between player and GM, or player vs. player? However, the text pointed out that the purpose of it was to be used to generate what goes on in drow cities while the PCs are away at the time and return later. Meaning that this intricate mini-game is the GM playing with himself while the players sit around the table doing nothing. Seriously, what's the point even going into all those rules when a simple narrative fiat would do? "Last time you visited the city of Zashoor, the clergy of Lolth was in power, but your latest visit appears much different. The statues of the Spider Queen are demolished into so much rubble, replaced by red and black flags depicting a fist wreathed in fire. The temples are now home to great pits of extraplanar flames, and the people of the city pray not to Lolth but to the Fire Lords." Boom, easy. With the game of bones, you get this: "Last time you visited the city of Zashoor, the clery of Lolth was in power. Hold on, I need to spent 10 minutes rolling dice and consulting stat blocks to see who gets killed, who gets disgraced..." Rolls dice. Hang on, House Calgress lost control over the Merchant's District, so they're going to get slaughtered in the coup for this weakness. That is, unless they happen to secure an alliance with the Tracha College of the Arcane to supply them with magical defenses." Rolls dice again, and so on and so forth. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 20:58
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Libertad! posted:Seriously, what's the point even going into all those rules when a simple narrative fiat would do?
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Nov 11, 2014 21:11
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Yawgmoth posted:I actually got into this very argument on IRC about a week ago. Apparently some people really hate having any sort of agency in their own drat game and/or haven't got a single creative cell in their entire body. And I guess they work on a sort of "generate your own examples" kind of way, but good lord if I found out someone was running a game for me and just randomly rolling plot hooks/developments, I think I would make fun of them at least a little. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great inspiration - random tables and lists are common outside of gaming to give everyone a bit of creative juice. No one is an island of perfect creative originality always.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:19
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The problem isn't using tables to spark ideas or give you an idea you probably wouldn't have thought of. Everyone does that; sometimes all you need is a simple spark to get you going into your own thing. The problem is when the tables take the place of creativity, becoming so detailed you don't have to think of things outside of "well, the table says..."
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Nov 11, 2014 21:21
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Doodmons posted:I'm in a GURPS TL0 caveman game right now. Just had my eye replaced with a magical marble after having it shot out during an ambush last session. Now I can see the spirit world. I've been wanting to run a TL0 caveman game in GURPS because of the rules support GURPS would give such a campaign. My only problem is coming up with the right hook. It sounds like adding magic like your game does is the way to go.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:23
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unseenlibrarian posted:There's some conspiracy theories that the whole "We'll crowd all the other games out of the market" was basically just a snowjob for the Hasbro suits and it was really meant so that eventually Ryan Dancey could steal D&D out from under the company when the time came, and thus Pathfinder. I think this ascribes a level of competence and low cunning to Dancey that is not actually evident. Actually, it was Peter Adkison that believed that the OGL would free D&D from the suits and that it wouldn't be "imprisoned" again; ensuring that if Wizards of the Coast died, D&D wouldn't. Dancey originally proposed it from a business angle, as noted above. So it's actually partly true, but there wasn't one single reason the OGL was implemented. So I was reading the Mongoose history in Designers & Dragons after writing my post, and I just have to quote this: Designers & Dragons: the '00s posted:Enter Paradigm Concept’s announcement of “The Essential Elf,” which was eventually published as Eldest Sons: The Essential Guide to Elves (2003). When [Mongoose founder] Sprange heard of it, he immediately added The Quintessential Elf (2002) to Mongoose’s schedule — and actually beat Paradigm Concepts out the door. Sprange would later say that Quintessential Elf was the only book he ever publishing in reaction to a competitor — and only to protect the Quintessential line, which was by now big bucks for Mongoose. In case you're wondering - no, it's not a very good book.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:37
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Libertad! posted:Meaning that this intricate mini-game is the GM playing with himself while the players sit around the table doing nothing. I firmly believe that the vast bulk of 3.x content is designed as codified bedtime reading, never intended to see use. People "play" it like the deckbuilding half of a ccg. With this, at least the DM gets to roll some dice to find out what "really happens" (before applying his veto / fiat.)
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Nov 11, 2014 21:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:The problem isn't using tables to spark ideas or give you an idea you probably wouldn't have thought of. Everyone does that; sometimes all you need is a simple spark to get you going into your own thing. The problem is when the tables take the place of creativity, becoming so detailed you don't have to think of things outside of "well, the table says..." I kind of want to run a game with tables detailed to this extent with no GM, just a D20 to determine what happens next.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:47
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Arivia posted:There's nothing wrong with that. It's great inspiration - random tables and lists are common outside of gaming to give everyone a bit of creative juice. No one is an island of perfect creative originality always.  hamlet of porksausageshire, which has a mercenary guild with an honest bard as the leader." etc.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:47
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Adept Nightingale posted:I kind of want to run a game with tables detailed to this extent with no GM, just a D20 to determine what happens next. They exist, even for games where you'd think some preplanning would be required. I know Double Cross and Nights' Black Agents both have extra books that allow that play mode.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:49
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DocBubonic posted:I've been wanting to run a TL0 caveman game in GURPS because of the rules support GURPS would give such a campaign. My only problem is coming up with the right hook. It sounds like adding magic like your game does is the way to go. Magic is basically stories. If a story gets told and enough people start to believe it, it starts becoming true. The two main ways this happens are magical items and spirits. Every PC has at least one signature item. Basically if you do something story significant with an item, it gains some sort of power related to that thing you did. The more you do with it, the more powerful it becomes. The eye biting knife gets massive to-hit and damage bonuses when you're aiming for the face, for example. Or the twin sister hunter PCs, whose weapons give the other one a to-hit bonus on the same target. Spirits are what happens when there's enough unsubstantiated belief lying around. The spirit gains more power the more people who believe in it, and its powers and behaviour are related to what the story says it can do. Most tribes have some sort of totem spirit they have stories about, usually with a shaman to channel its power. This can be, and is, self reinforcing. Part of the problem with the miscarriage spirit is that the more babies were stillborn, the more people believed something was up and expected the next birth to go wrong, increasing the power of the spirit and the chance something will happen. Another good example is the Thunderbird tribe, who hunt these packs of giant predatory birds which appear seasonally. OOC we're 90% sure that these birds are spirits that only show up because the Thunderbird tribe go round warning other tribes to be on the look out for these things and spend all their time looking for them. It's not 100% belief based and once a spirit is established it can take on a life of its own. Our neighbouring tribe have a real problem that the deal they made with a local animal spirit to give their people animal strength is backfiring and their members are literally turning into animals at night. Our solution to this problem is to do a big ritual where our tribal totem takes dominance over the animal within them. This is part smoke-and-mirrors in that we're trying to placebo a solution to weaken the hold the spirit has on them and part actual magic in that we're pitting our totem against the spirit and hoping it can win. Behind the scenes, the GM has informed us that there's a relatively complex formula of how many power points a spirit is getting and how they're shared out between the people who believe in the spirit to let them do magic. Shamans can buy Power Investiture which increases their share of the power and lets them just suck some of it up to do magic, but we've been informed that if a totem has enough power to go around, even people without Power Investiture can do magic if they really need to and call on the totem. Hunters from a tribe we're feuding with have this annoying ability to dodge way more things than they should be able to even without PI, simply because their totem is stronk. The big advantage our tribe has is that we're PCs who OOC have a decent idea of how the metaphysics work and thus can exploit them to our gain. Our other big advantage is Speaks-Truth. Speaks-Truth (or, full name: Speaks-Truth-With-Lies) is a 140 IQ caveman being played by our resident powergamer who is specced out horribly for Performance, Diplomacy and Public Speaking. He has a special character advantage called Truth In Stories that makes his storytelling more magically potent, has the Hypnosis skill, has IC knowledge of how the magic system works and is generally an all around spin doctor and manipulator of the truth. This is suuuuper potent and a big part of our success as a tribe. People hear about the things we do (and importantly our version of the things we do) and we spend a lot of time evangelizing about how badass our totem is. Our tribe chieftain Swings-Like-Thunder is starting to get a fanclub from the hunters of the other tribes in our alliance, mostly due to the actions of Speaks-Truth. We're hoping he'll get magic at some point from this. drat, that was a lot of words about magical cavemen.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:52
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Adept Nightingale posted:I kind of want to run a game with tables detailed to this extent with no GM, just a D20 to determine what happens next. I'm not sure, but I think that's how the Mythic GM Emulator is supposed to work.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:55
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Yawgmoth posted:There's a big difference between randomly generating a thing to have a jumping off point for your own ideas, and "you enter the No, that works just as fine for generating inspiration. No collection of random tables is going to generate Waterdeep, Absalom and the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but they can give you the skeleton to make your own versions on.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:59
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