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What's this talking about GW blaming the sales staff after they froze their pay? Did I miss something?
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Nov 2, 2015 21:18
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Business Gorillas posted:What's this talking about GW blaming the sales staff after they froze their pay? Did I miss something? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3603841&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=732#post452213729 GW training people because the AoS release was botched.
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Nov 2, 2015 21:21
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fnordcircle posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3603841&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=732#post452213729 Ignore that they 'trained' people to release AoS as well :p
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Nov 2, 2015 21:23
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My favorite thing about the reeducation camps is that GW will view them as a spectacular success and the only reason 30k outsells AoS by a huge margin.
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Nov 2, 2015 21:24
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Shoehead posted:How do you try to fix a setting like this? Like WOD ended but that didn't have the luxury of going "welp 300 years have passed and the setting sure has changed". Plus this new game seems like it would have been cooler if it was in parallel to the Old World with Sigmar doing poo poo in the Warp or something and the Sigmarines being some sort of Valhallen host. But nope, instead they nuke a high fantasy setting that's been around since the late 70s in favor of weird planar stuff that's conceptually interesting but from what I'm reading is super thin. I just want to point out that "a bunch of magically connected universes where anything is possible in each universe" isn't conceptually interesting at all unless you're stuck in an 80's gamer mindset (the exact mindset of GW fans). Like, fiction is interesting because it has limitations. Look at why people love Spider-Man but hate Superman-- Superman is thought of as boring because he has no limitations, but Spider-Man has a handful of things going for him and a shitload of things going against him. Not nearly as many people watch streamers play Minecraft in Creative mode as there are people who watch Survival mode. The most interesting parts of speedruns are sequence breaks, because players find ways to creatively push their characters' limitations. Battlestar Galactica was a better version of Star Trek Voyager, because BSG respected that a flotilla left wandering in enemy space for years would suffer from attrition in so many ways while Voyager was designed to be syndicated and thus showed no attrition. The good parts of Space Marines are the last stand battlepiles. A big heap of dudes all covered in (their own) blood, firing at the menace surrounding them, doing heroic and valorous deeds in the face of getting wiped out. The parts where Space Marines drop down on a planet and just annihilate everything are only tolerable when used in stark contrast to the mortality of those very marines-- see The Fall of Malvolion for a great example of this. Stormfront Eternals are infinitely respawning supersoldiers greated by an invincible god that shoot lightning and homing hammers and crush any opponent they face. The Age of Sigmar takes place in a multiverse of worlds connected by stargates, and each world is literally random to the point where they're white noise. Here's a fire world with lava dwarves. Here's a world that's maybe The Old World. Here's a world in the 40k universe. Chaos might have won? It doesn't really matter, because if you want to escape Chaos you can just walk to a world with no Chaos and then break the door behind you. It's just like 40k, where it's a gigantic grapeshot fiction universe where literally anything can happen and 99.999% of the fiction is pure poo poo, but unlike 40k there's less of a volume so the 0.001% that wouldn't be poo poo amounts to a fraction of a word.
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Nov 2, 2015 21:24
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fnordcircle posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3603841&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=732#post452213729 
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Nov 2, 2015 21:33
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I agree with your point, Broken Loose, but Superman was a poor example, because he's easily the most iconic, beloved, and popular super hero character of all time. The thing is, Superman has his alter ego, right? The hero is all-powerful and invincible, basically a god... but we can relate to Clark Kent's relationship woes, and we can also relate to the alien trying to live among humans and be one of them, and we can also relate to Superman's burden of duty as he tries to care for a people who refuse to care for themselves. Sigmar is so much worse in Age of Sigmar because he's completely unrelatable, in addition to being all-powerful, immortal, willing to do anything to advance what he sees as his goals, having no vulnerabilities whatsoever, and according to the writers, enjoying universal and unwavering support and acclaim by everyone who qualifies as One Of The Good Guys. And meanwhile his army of faceless generic resurrecting warriors ought to be utterly terrifying and alien to the normal people, but the writers are completely blind to that and instead want us to believe that everyone loves them and is happy to see them and that they are noble and heroic. They're a nightmarish vision of despotic fascism, presented without irony as being the best of the good guys doing what they must for everyone's good. GW doesn't understand that people actually legitimately relate better to their red-skinned blood-drinking skull-hoarding straight up daemons of violence and rage, because at least they have human emotional qualities and behave as though there's something at stake and also we can actually see their faces, so we know they have faces. Imagine if Superman wore armor he never took off, had no alter ego, was not vulnerable to kryptonite, didn't live on Earth, was willing to sacrifice everyone on Earth for centuries in order to go "rebuild his strength" whatever that means, and cared more about his magic hammer than a few million humans. And he led an unstoppable immortal force of slavishly-loyal uncaring golden-armored knights with magic lightning and thunder powers. It's tough to think of a good analogous character that everyone would have heard of, because nobody who creates such terrible characters has enough success for everyone to have heard of them enough for it to make a useful analogy.
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Nov 2, 2015 21:38
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Thundercloud posted:Yes, while not reinvesting in development and the studio, carrying no debt to do so either, and just shovelling money to the shareholders (who contain the whole senior leadership team). Writing credit has been a thing that GW has had problems with for years. When I worked there, the rule was that the primary author got the writing credit, even though a lot of the rules, balancing, and a non-trivial amount of  would have been contributed by others in the game dev department or the wider studio. This was because they didn't like the situation that had arisen previosuly where the credits list included literally everyone who worked at the studio and who might have stopped for a word with the primary writer about the book. Artists however still got credit for any book that contained any of their illustrations. So, I wrote a lot of colour text for codices, army books and so on but didn't get any credits while an artist who provided even as much as a page number frame got a full credit. Editors also got a full credit as did the 'Eavy Metal painters.To be clear, I'm not complaining that artists, editors and the 'Eavy Metal team were getting something undeserved, I wanted everyone to get a credit who'd worked on something but that was apparently advocating for Full Communism and an end to social orders so I stopped having that argument right quick. I worked on maybe 20 projects of various types and IIRC my only listed credit is 3rd ed 40k and maybe one in Digganob (I don't have that book to hand anymore).
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Nov 2, 2015 21:55
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Leperflesh posted:I agree with your point, Broken Loose, but Superman was a poor example, because he's easily the most iconic, beloved, and popular super hero character of all time. I guess maybe the Emporerer and his Stormtroopers trying to bring order to the Galaxy? Maybe Galactica and his faceless heralds as he devours worlds not worth a saving? The brave Kryptonian survivors in Superman sending their robots to Terraform Earth to be like krypton? Maybe the noble chaos gods of the old world who managed to deus ex machina (literally) open the warp gates and save everyone? The noble Cylon of BSG cleaning out the human plague / menace? All great literary equivalents of Sigmarines. I don't see the problem why people can't relate!
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Nov 2, 2015 22:00
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Leperflesh posted:It's tough to think of a good analogous character that everyone would have heard of, because nobody who creates such terrible characters has enough success for everyone to have heard of them enough for it to make a useful analogy. Actually, Batman. I know, right? I'm a huge Superman fan, mainly because I've read good Superman. But I'm seriously mindboggled at the normies who unironically go "Superman is boring because he's too powerful, unlike Batman who is a billionaire detective genius ninja who can beat literally anybody if he's prepared in advance." Thing is, Batman is popular in spite of that poo poo; the best Batman is things like TAS where it was very noir and down to Earth. I think that it's possible to convey the concept without needing the prototypical example of how not to do it. John McClane exists! Die Hard was the turning point in action movies where the protagonist went from unstoppable ubermensch to bleeding mortal, and you couldn't make Rambo III again if you wanted to. poo poo, just look at the direction superhero films have taken in the last 30 years to see how giving the characters and universe palpable limitations drastically improves the quality of the content.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:01
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Broken Loose posted:I just want to point out that "a bunch of magically connected universes where anything is possible in each universe" isn't conceptually interesting at all unless you're stuck in an 80's gamer mindset (the exact mindset of GW fans). I might be projecting my love of Spelljammer and Planescape a bit.. GW not understanding why an infallible invincible force of good guys is boring is really weird when you consider they created a universe were humanities only hope lies in space-fascism and blowing up worlds with billions of people on them "just in case". A universe were, for example, to have something as fundamental as space navigation they have to feed thousands of psychics to a God's life support chair, every day.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:06
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Leperflesh posted:It's tough to think of a good analogous character that everyone would have heard of, because nobody who creates such terrible characters has enough success for everyone to have heard of them enough for it to make a useful analogy. Darth Vader was the epitome of awesome evil baddy. He's an utterly ruthless evil wizard who will use the most valuable resources of an entire Empire to achieve his personal goals. He's shrouded in mystery to begin with and we gradually learn more about him over the course of the original trilogy, his shadow grows longer until finally he's forced to confront what he has become and take a stand against literally everything he's built. In his last scene, we understand him completely and empathise with what he's lost. Then they decide "Nah gently caress that character growth and dark origins stuff! Let's make him a whiny, shitwhistling cumweasel who needed to be punched in the face more often as a child"
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Nov 2, 2015 22:08
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You're a pretty good poster.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:10
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There's a reason Poochie comes up so frequently in Age of Sigmar chat.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:27
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Helen Highwater posted:When I worked there, the rule was that the primary author got the writing credit, even though a lot of the rules, balancing, and a non-trivial amount of So who was the egomaniac who wanted to keep "his" faction? I've seen this argument before and it tends to indicate two things. Firstly, that someone can't stand the idea of anyone touching his beloved sacred texts. And secondly, where royalties agreements specify payouts to all those who have writing credits. Since I can't imagine GW would ever pay royalties to a staff writer, this leaves option #1 as the most likely explanation.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:32
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Loxbourne posted:So who was the egomaniac who wanted to keep "his" faction? I've seen this argument before and it tends to indicate two things. Firstly, that someone can't stand the idea of anyone touching his beloved sacred texts. And secondly, where royalties agreements specify payouts to all those who have writing credits. No-one gets royalties. Otherwise there'd be knife fights over who got to write Space Marine codices. Mostly certain devs had factions that they were well-known for and would be the automatic choice to write. It wasn't really a case of defending turf, more the case that, if there's going to be an Eldar codex then Gav will write it because he just does Eldar and so on.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:51
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Doctor Borris posted:I guess maybe the Emporerer and his Stormtroopers trying to bring order to the Galaxy? I assume you mean Palpatine? Nah, he's got personality. He laughs at his own evilness and enjoys tormenting Luke. Galactus? A pretty good example, yeah. My familiarity with Galactus is strictly from certain runs of comics in the 1980s, and back then he was OK with just eating any planet. Silver Surfer was relate-able because he wanted to save people but was also a slave to Galactus' will, mostly. SS is an example of a character that is a minion of an ultra-powerful godlike being, but is still interesting because he has his own priorities and desires and failings. Don't know anything about kryptonian survivors Wait when did the chaos gods save everyone in the end times?I thought they won and scoured the earth and Sigmar was the only survivor. Cylons are relateable particularly in the new BSG series because while they are alien computer AIs, they've turned themselves into pseudo-humans and get all mixed up with human emotions and stuff, and also they have a serious daddy complex. Broken Loose posted:Actually, Batman. I know, right? I'm not a DC fan in general but at least the Dark Knight batman and the recent christian bale movie batmans were all pretty fallible, prone to making mistakes, etc. and also caring about specific people, and while the writers use his kit and money to make him effectively unbeatable, that's true of every persistent superhero character. The conceit within the setting is that although he's a super ninja with lots of cool toys, he's still a human being and could die from being shot in the head or whatever. We all know that with few exceptions, no sensible company would simply kill off their popular characters and not resurrect them, because that'd be throwing away money, so we all know that "really" those guys are unkillable and immortal. But within the story we can still relate to their mortality and vulnerability. Not even Games Workshop could sustain killing off the most popular Fantasy characters, right? That's why most of them are going to just pop back up in Age of Sigmar with a hand-wave and something about Sigmar bringing them back or whatever. Superman on the other hand, at least as envisioned during the 20th century, was only vulnerable to kryptonite and otherwise was essentially a god, in the setting. Shoehead posted:GW not understanding why an infallible invincible force of good guys is boring is really weird when you consider they created a universe were humanities only hope lies in space-fascism and blowing up worlds with billions of people on them "just in case". A universe were, for example, to have something as fundamental as space navigation they have to feed thousands of psychics to a God's life support chair, every day. GW is a legal entity. The people who created the Warhammer and 40k universes are mostly or entirely not at GW any more. So it's not that weird at all. Sad... pathetic, even, yes. But once you understand that the people that made GW great don't work there any more, everything makes more sense. Helen Highwater posted:Darth Vader was the epitome of awesome evil baddy. He's an utterly ruthless evil wizard who will use the most valuable resources of an entire Empire to achieve his personal goals. He's shrouded in mystery to begin with and we gradually learn more about him over the course of the original trilogy, his shadow grows longer until finally he's forced to confront what he has become and take a stand against literally everything he's built. In his last scene, we understand him completely and empathise with what he's lost. Yes. Lucas literally didn't understand why his most iconic characters were good. Probably because they were mostly good due to the work of other people. Also Ignite Memories posted:You're a pretty good poster.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:52
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Leperflesh posted:Imagine if Superman wore armor he never took off, had no alter ego, was not vulnerable to kryptonite, didn't live on Earth, was willing to sacrifice everyone on Earth for centuries in order to go "rebuild his strength" whatever that means, and cared more about his magic hammer than a few million humans. And he led an unstoppable immortal force of slavishly-loyal uncaring golden-armored knights with magic lightning and thunder powers. Isn't this just a description of Darkseid?
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Nov 2, 2015 23:03
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I had to really stretch for good examples of faceless emotionless examples of evil. Dammit Leperfish. You and HH are both excellent posters. Why do you think GW has entirely dropped author credits? Finding out who was in charge of a codex was shockingly accurate to its writing quality, shockingly. Privateer press does credit but they seem to have multiple authors working together. I can't imagine how GW codex writing works these days.
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Nov 2, 2015 23:10
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Leperflesh posted:GW doesn't understand that people actually legitimately relate better to their red-skinned blood-drinking skull-hoarding straight up daemons of violence and rage, because at least they have human emotional qualities and behave as though there's something at stake and also we can actually see their faces, so we know they have faces. This is a common problem. I loathed DnD 4th edition, not because of the mechanics changes, but because it displayed this problem when they turned the alignment system into a linear tradeoff between 'lawful good' and 'chaotic evil' with a no-mans-land of disrespectful bullshit in between called 'unaligned'. GW and WotC are showing their immorality, because they can't define what morality even is. They can define immorality no problem. In fact, they love having their cake and eating it too so much on that side, that they go out of their way to find methods for people to enjoy being the 'bad guys' only good, for arbitrary reasons. I think it points to the people being complete creeps. Good isn't about 'You're good if you obey the Good Guy' (which, given who they think this must mean, is even creepier). Good is about being committed to the premise that kindness, mercy, and cooperation are inherently superior strategies that make a better world. That they can and should occur regardless of hierarchy or cultural differences. Or in the weirdo modern dnd world, endlessly distinct racial origin. I remember as a kid, this was the dividing line for a lot of cartoons. You had something like He-Man, where he was good because he was superior, and he was superior because he was good. In other words, for no reason. You were supposed to root for him because they told you to. Skeletor wasn't a good guy, and he wasn't charismatic, but his main focus was killing He-Man, and that seems like a pretty ok goal, to me. He was a passive tyrant. I mean. Ask Orko, how he felt about the regime. Maybe I'm getting off track here. Anyway, GI Joe was different. Cobra wanted to rule the world and hurt people to do it. The Joes won because they trusted each other, and could be trusted. Cobra lost because they were so conniving and back-biting they were always undercutting each other. More than anything else, the transition from a gray-area, filled with complicated tradeoffs to a shithouse God is Just because We Say So world irritates me.
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Nov 2, 2015 23:18
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Rob Heinsoo's failed attempt at unshackling D&D from the bullshit that is Alignment has very little to do with immorality.
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Nov 3, 2015 00:35
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The alignment system in any edition of D&D is horrible.
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Nov 3, 2015 00:54
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im chaotic gay
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Nov 3, 2015 01:00
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Look, I got like four pages of fuckin polearms to pick from, I don't have a lot of time to figure out who I am supposed to stick them with. Just case a Detect spell and get to adventuring.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:04
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Moola posted:im chaotic gay That's a Luceren Hammer, let's do this thing.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:05
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Alignment is bad and 4e would have been better served chucking it entirely.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:06
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Esser-Z posted:Alignment is bad and 4e would have been better served chucking it entirely. 4e pretty much decoupled alignment from game mechanics, if I recall correctly. No more detect alignment spells, no more alignment-dependent feats and poo poo. You could completely ignore it without having to make any other adjustments to the game, which is exactly what every group I played with did. It was basically a field on a character sheet that you could choose to write something in, there entirely because the designers (correctly) surmised that grognardy D&D nerds would pitch a shitfit if they got rid of it. Loathing 4e entirely because they got rid of Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil strikes me as really weird. It does maybe speak to a designer's failure to understand that evil isn't always foaming-at-the-mouth berzerk, which OK I guess, but if you read any of the fluff in the monster manual or adventures or campaigns it's clear the writers understand that perfectly well. There are plenty of conniving, well-organized, or institutional bad guys, and there are plenty of good guys who have a problem with authority and working well with others. (Thank god though for finally stopping the trend of encouraging players to play an rear end in a top hat who can't get along in a party setting, though!) I think they did what they did because they wanted to not have to explain the four corners of the alignment grid to new players in their game any more, because that was not only a confusing distraction but also created all kinds of problems with the tenor of the game and an emphasis on a particular view of morality that inevitably runs counter to the veiws of many potential players. That's a good thing, even if they didn't finish the job. TheCosmicMuffet posted:More than anything else, the transition from a gray-area, filled with complicated tradeoffs to a shithouse God is Just because We Say So world irritates me. This is really the key, yeah. I hate that GW decided to end their world instead of making it better, but it's so much worse that they decided to replace it with a world of black-and-white morality, and deeply ironic as well as bad that their black and white morality isn't even moral by any decent human standards. "This nightmarish tyrant and his fascist immortal armies are the good guys" is a perfect indictment of the people running Games Workshop today. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 01:19
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Moola posted:im chaotic gay This is an alignment system I could get behind.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:19
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quote:"This nightmarish tyrant and his fascist immortal armies are the good guys" The thing is, if this had been done with even a shred of self-awareness or irony it could've worked, but lol, GW
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Nov 3, 2015 01:23
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There was like one Paragon Path in 4E that gave you bonuses to fighting capital-E Evil opponents but that was about it.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:25
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if I made an RPG it would have 3 alignments moral, amoral and immoral
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Nov 3, 2015 01:27
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5e is bad cuz it went back to alignment. And obfuscated game mechanics, etc.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:40
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Leperflesh posted:Loathing 4e entirely because they got rid of Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil strikes me as really weird. It does maybe speak to a designer's failure to understand that evil isn't always foaming-at-the-mouth berzerk, which OK I guess, but if you read any of the fluff in the monster manual or adventures or campaigns it's clear the writers understand that perfectly well. There are plenty of conniving, well-organized, or institutional bad guys, and there are plenty of good guys who have a problem with authority and working well with others. (Thank god though for finally stopping the trend of encouraging players to play an rear end in a top hat who can't get along in a party setting, though!) If they'd done it from the beginning, I think the writers who contributed to the settings would have made something much less rich and interesting, for precisely that reason. That they still had interesting cultures was a hold over from the previous eras. They took things like a god of art and music and made it 'unaligned', yet it still was the enemy of some chaotic evil god, because that's who *used* to be its enemy. Nobody ever had to give a poo poo about alignment in the first place, anyway: that's how DnD in general worked. I mean, how many people followed encumbrance rules? Or the swimming distance stuff? Did you track rations and the progression of disease? Chance to bend-bars? DnD was a jumping off point for different people to play different games. You could go the wargaming route, or you could use it for theater of the mind. Given that 4th was about making a more understandable, tighter game that people could wrap their heads around in its own right, rather than the existing ballast of complicated multi-layered rules (how fast can your chariot go before it has to make an animal handling check during a sudden maneuver? Ok, what if you are a psychic from the Darksun ruleset?), it seems like a really weird effort to dumb down something that didn't need dumbing down. It also doesn't take up a very big footprint in the book. Want to free people from rigid requirements? Fine, take the requirements out. But to me, the fun of the game was that it wasn't *just* a rule set, it was a big collection of interesting ideas to tell a story. And all they did in 4th was reduce the richness, in a way that I found condescending, and even kind of weirdly insane--especially when you got into the stuff where formerly good things were now 'unaligned'. Or premises where some group had a strong philosophical bent became 'unaligned'. It was also pandering like crazy. You could be a half-demon furry, or half-dragon, or golem, for fucks sake. Like, anything a 13 year old had sketched in a notebook was now being actively encouraged. As for your point about curing the party rear end in a top hat, I don't think there is a cure for people being assholes. The obsession (not saying you--just in general) with first identifying and then somehow stamping out rear end in a top hat behavior as a function of a ruleset is kind of weird to me. It's one thing if you're comparing a game with a hidden traitor mechanic to a fully cooperative one, I guess--then there's expectations and you can kind of see how, for the game to work, you have to fulfill your role. And maybe some people don't like that, and they can avoid your game. But even then, I would say that there's a totally acceptable place for being a 'spoiler' provided you're with a group of people who enjoy that element and enjoy you doing it (sometimes called 'friends'). At a certain point, you have to be personally responsible for who you play with and whether you're a good sport. The game shouldn't try to mandate it, and the more you try, the more often you see something tone def that implies that the person trying is the problem--like that weird 'Show some balls and play Warmahordes like a man!' thing that privateer has since rewritten. Moola posted:if I made an RPG it would have 3 alignments Moola, Amoola, and Immoola.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:41
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E:reply is not edit and quote or whatever. Sorry
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Nov 3, 2015 01:42
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Moola, Amoola, and Immoola.
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Nov 3, 2015 01:59
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TCM just needs to go to the grognards.txt thread 
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Nov 3, 2015 02:03
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That thread is dead.
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Nov 3, 2015 02:03
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:If they'd done it from the beginning, I think the writers who contributed to the settings would have made something much less rich and interesting, for precisely that reason. That they still had interesting cultures was a hold over from the previous eras. They took things like a god of art and music and made it 'unaligned', yet it still was the enemy of some chaotic evil god, because that's who *used* to be its enemy. Every opinion you have about D&D is objectively wrong, HTH
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Nov 3, 2015 02:16
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Moola posted:if I made an RPG it would have 3 alignments i see you're a fan of the dragon age 2 form of alignments
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Nov 3, 2015 02:19
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dont talk to me about dragon age 2....
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Nov 3, 2015 02:20
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