SunAndSpring posted:

I've been giving Monte Cook and friends some more benefit of the doubt than I should because I kind of liked Numenera, at least for the setting, and because I've got a knee-jerk reaction to people who use words like "erasure" after looking at that thread about Tumblr on GBS, but what the gently caress is this poo poo. This looks like something I'd find in an Old World of Darkness supplement. Why would you release something like this in 2015 and claim its actually super good for the Native American community?

clockworkjoe posted:

edit: a rebuttal from a liberal resident of Indiana: http://www.shakesville.com/2015/03/stop.html

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

She's one of those people who writes really bad gay "romance novels" and acts like she's blazing the trail for queer people everywhere, isn't she?

clockworkjoe posted:

Really? I'd never heard of her before someone linked to her on the metafilter discussion about the RFRA.

dwarf74 posted:

Everybody celebrate.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2580-Sean-K-Reynolds-just-rehired-by-WotC

Captain Rufus posted:

Actually that grog.txt post was from me and I still pretty much stand by it.
But thanks dude that said I clearly live in my basement. As opposed to owning my own paid for home and making pretty decent money.

Inflation is kind of true AND false all at the same time plus perception and age. I am 40. 20 bucks to me is gonna feel different than 20 bucks to someone graduating High School this year. Obviously it goes a lot less further generally, even if I went from 5 bucks an hour at my first job out of the Navy in 96 to 28 or so now. (Gas has practically doubled but it was a 1.40 in 96, down to a buck in 98, about 4.50 or so in mid 00s, now around 2.80.) Hell, snacks at the work vending machine were like 65 cents in 98 and now they are .85-1.00.

poo poo goes up in price and wages go up but generally not remotely to the same level. Plus as one gets older things like savings, home improvement, medical, ect take up more and more money as opposed to most of my paycheck being for stupid nerd crap. (Not even getting into space to store it, and time to properly utilize it all!)

And you know, I am pretty much cheap as poo poo. I don't mind spending money but I want value out of it. Why buy a 4-5 dollar comic book that is maybe 15 minutes of entertainment when that same amount gets me a game on Steam or IOS? (Speaking of a thing that has rapidly outpaced inflation. I was doing some inflation stuff for laughs and giggles in my Game Collection posts: http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2015/04/operation-game-collection-dungeons-and.html by my calculations comics should be under 2 bucks as opposed to Secret Wars issue 1 being five dollars. Marvel and DC books were 2 bucks back in the mid-late 90s. Given how comics are kind of in the same niche market as RPGs it is kind of appropriate but to be fair if you do look at inflation hobby gaming has generally kept closer pace with inflation, with 1977 vintage era White Box OD&D being 38 dollars in now money. Iron Kingdoms Unleashed starter box is 45 MSRP, though its cheaper online. More GOODIES in the box but it isn't remotely as complete a game as ODnD was.)

I look at how much crap I have and honestly I don't need or have much use for as much so price will matter. Once you add in all our modern tech and the fact you can get good products both old and new for free or under 10 bucks in a digital only format and it really does make these huge rear end inconvenient loving 60+ dollar coffee table monster RPG corebooks look a lot less attractive to longer term gamers or newbies who compare them to other products that on the surface seem similar.

(Like comparing Games Workshop model kits to what Bandai, Fine Molds, Kobo., Tamiya, ect are doing. GW doesn't come close in either quality or value.)

I mean I am planning on running a play by facebook post campaign because a friend who moved to the rear end end of nowhere W.Va wants me to run something. I ended up choosing Basic Fantasy because the rules are all free PDFs and even Lulu or Amazon printed versions are sub 10 bucks. (5 for core rules in softcover. I spent 10 for spiral bound because it is easy to use and keep open. They are GAME BOOKS. Spiral bound is fantastic for reference work.) Grab some Ravenloft modules from my collection and we have a campaign!

Though it seems like most folks want full color busy rear end massive doorstops of RPG core and expansion books. I am still happy with black and white sub 128 page count ones. poo poo, even for modern games I sometimes would rather just grab a PDF, edit the fluff out, and make a more useful and portable book out of it that fits on my ipad and won't give me a hernia!

Maybe I am just part of the problem because I don't want to spend stupid amounts compared to other forms of entertainment that are easier and cheaper even if hobby games stuff should maybe cost more than it does. I also irritate retro gamers because I don't think spending 100 bucks for a loose N64 Conker is anything other than loving ridiculous. Hell, I got my copy when it was on clearance racks for 10 and only kind of feel it was worth that.

I generally get gas station coffee over Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts because its like a third of the price. I am a cheap bastard and kind of proud of it! Though I bet some of the extenuating reasons I am cheap would make a Therapist slaver in delight...

And since I have so much of this silly nonsense I just don't need to pay 60 bucks for Deathwatch core or whatever Call of Cthulhu 7th is since I am happy with 5th even if it doesn't remotely look as pretty as the newer release will.

Leperflesh posted:

Ah, yeah that's a 1-on-1 game. I meant, there used to be adventure supplements where the game book served as the GM, and you could just play your one character. Like a choose your own adventure book, but with more crunch.

Lemon Curdistan posted:

Anecdotal I know, but everyone I know who doesn't play RPGs has been way more into the idea of "high school monster romance drama" than dungeon-crawling or post-apocalyptic stuff. You just need to pitch it as "like Twilight but without all the glorification of abusive relationships and creepy secondary characters falling in love with babies."

The trick is to find a game that has enough of a system that using it well is something they can learn, but isn't rules-heavy (because it needs to be easy for new players to learn in its entirety) and has player participation (so they learn good habits before bad ones). I normally start people on Fiasco and then get them to apply what they learned from it to playing PbtA games.

Feng Shui 2 would probably be a pretty good one too, actually, since it's not very complicated and 90% of the rule is schticks the players will never see.

Terrible Opinions posted:

A large revision of the underlying math/balance like 2nd edition Dark Heresy, or the new versions of World of Darkness would be worthwhile.

MalcolmSheppard posted:

It depends on how integrated it is into D&D's business plan. If the design document is "We're supporting market research that says people want X and Y by designing this way, to hit the targets in Z," then yeah, it's not just a rubber stamp. D&D is ultimately managed as a brand, which means that there is a demand for a consistent experience associated with it, and a planned, definite way to translate that into selling stuff, including the game. In any event it looks like Greg Bilsland (their digital marketing guy) does know about D&D as a pastime, and if that's the sort of person doing that work then they need to know how the game is designed, and what the resulting vibe is going to be.

Finally, marketing this sort of thing seems way more sensitive to early fandom than it used to be. They know that the first in to any spinoff will include large numbers of TT players who will use word of mouth blogging and social media to judge it according to some notion of the "D&D experience." And nowadays, they know that the sense of authenticity can be taken away from them.

kaynorr posted:

I think this is (in part) because the ease by which people can, and have, and maybe should, houserule various things make them much more emotionally invested in something that is essentially static and under glass. Complain all you want about the Elder Scrolls attributes system, unless you're in the 1% of people who can mod that poo poo you're going to have to live with it. Eventually you build some familiarity and assuming the game designers were right and the new system IS actually better, everyone goes on to live their lives until the next E3 announcement. But with tabletops there is a cultural tradition (partially brought on by lazy and/or terrible design) of "don't like it, change it!". Encouraging generation after generation of mediocre armchair designers to make tweaks and become invested in the game as a whole much the same way a player becomes invested in a character. Stockholm Syndrome sets in hard because not only do you live in that prison but you helped renovate it.

Rafferty posted:

If formalism is rated on an axis, then many people will fall all across the spectrum.... And that's assuming you could even measure such things on an axis in the first place. For example, the 13th Age RPG is both formal (with a gazillion rules for combat) and informal (with barely any rules for backgrounds).

Pope Guilty posted:

"Tryhard" refers specifically to somebody who isn't good at something.

Bongo Bill posted:

I win at games because I try hard to improve my skills.

rkajdi posted:

That's awesome, but I worry about abuse. As in, a bunch of gamer MRAs filing false reports on whoever is their current "SJW ruining our hobby" and getting stuff taken down or demonetized. Considering it's a small community and nerds are the worst, it seems like a plausible thing. The proper answer is actually reading and vetting what you are selling on your platform, but a lot of the e-commerce stuff I've seen is as low-effort as possible.

Serf posted:

Yeah, that makes sense. Like I said, it's bizarre. Their previous business models were based around putting out tons of books, adding content and keeping customers engaged. The online tools were another revenue stream.

Does 5E have online tools? I saw they're not putting out any books in 2016 apparently. Other than DM's Guild and existing products, how else are they going to be making money?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Yeah, I mentioned this in the next thread, but the context of "OGL will allow all sorts of shovelware to be shat out" is different when you don't have any official products for the shovelware to outshine. It's a way for people to answer "well look at all these third-party products!" when someone pipes up about how there hasn't been an announcement for a new adventure/supplement in months.

Serf posted:

Y'know, I keep saying this: Vin Diesel loves D&D. People love Vin Diesel. A Dungeons and Dragons movie starring Vin Diesel would put asses in seats.

I mean, I'm not pulling for D&D here because 5E is trash, but c'mon.

Lightning Lord posted:

I'm pretty sure that the D&D movie is going to be a flop because they're going to go for some half-baked epic political fantasy of epic epicness that heavily features Drizzt and Elminster. The novel fans are going to be pissed because Drizzt eats a slice of mumbleberry pie when it was clearly established in book 9 of the Spider Queen War that he hates that and prefers razium cake. General moviegoers are going to be disinterested and actively bored because it's going to be a poo poo fantasy dimestore version of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings that doesn't make use of any of the interesting things about D&D. A good D&D movie would be something like a group of adventurers wandering about for gold and glory and raiding dungeons who stumble across something that will end the world or piss off an evil wizard. We're gonna get not Gondor in the form of Cormyr and Shadowdale vs not Sauron in the form of some chosen of Bane or some poo poo.

Also, the few official mentions of the D&D movie I've seen bring up Warcraft, and they're going to wrongheadedly compete with it, confirming what I say above even more.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Well, they tried.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

That's the thing, D&D's milkshake has been drank so many times it doesn't have a lot unique to provide other than name recognition. Which I wouldn't underestimate, but the fact that D&D hasn't had any memorable products outside of the RPG itself in well over twenty years is pretty amazing.

GrandpaPants posted:

What about an Asian dude?

Payndz posted:

Just making the setup like Jumanji (or the old cartoon) is probably the best bet if the movie ever gets made. Embrace that D&D is a complete mish-mash of every mythical or fantasy world ever created, and have a bunch of players who get sucked into the game world by a magic d20 or whatever undergo the Last Action Hero/Galaxy Quest arc, turning from mocking unbelievers through panicking that the dangers are real and everyone they meet takes it deadly seriously to ultimately become genuine heroes. I'll take cash, not bitcoin, please.

bongwizzard posted:

That was my exact point, that in my experience getting people to "play pretend" is actually pretty hard if they don't have any context for doing so, beyond it being "something little kids do". Getting over that hurdle alone is tough as hell with teens especially.

Countblanc posted:

Yeah young people both have a lot of time to read for leisure, and often can use the same books they read for fun as something for class. Plus they're heavily marketed to with book fairs and poo poo.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Hasbro has been loving up a lot in general because they've been playing things way too conservatively. Barbie sales are garbage for the same reason Disney profits on "princess" poo poo has been plummeting, for the same reason "girl toys" in general are doing god-awful - it ain't the loving 50's. Hasbro apparently has a loving massive stockpile of Kyle Ren toys from the new Star Wars movie that nobody wants because "it's the white dude" is no longer proof of a hit toy - and likewise lost a grip of money over their refusal to make toys of Rey.

The toy industry period is in a state of weird fluxuation because all the decisions are being made by people so disconnected from the actual average consumer that they may as well be slaughtering cows and reading entrails for advice on what sells, except no, that'd still probably work better.

Lightning Lord posted:

I believe the weird internally competitive atmosphere at Warner Bros probably has something to do with YJ's cancellation too. DC Nation was outright cancelled, despite doing well. The new Justice League cartoon will probably be swiftly cancelled too. Beware the Batman seemed to have been instantly cancelled. Cartoon Network seems to have much more interest in original properties, and that probably stems from not wanting to be beholden to any other subsidiaries of WB. Not that I object to this too much when the products are things like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe and Gumball.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

This is complete dross that comes from being in an epistemic nerd bubble and reading articles from comicbookmovie.com all day. It's dangerously close to a tautology.

Halloween Jack posted:

The common refrain from comic book fans is that Marvel comics are more about the personalities of the superheroes as more-or-less relatable people, whereas DC comics are more about superheroes being "iconic." Perhaps it's more meaningful to say that the people managing the Marvel brand understand that their properties need the underpinnings of good drama, whereas DC is more prone to leaning on the brand name to sell the characters instead of vice versa.

Both companies seem to be struggling to make their comics accessible to people who are interested in the screen adaptations, though.

Leperflesh posted:

Marvel's movies suddenly became good when Marvel Entertainment Group created Marvel Studios to in-house their major franchise films (previously they licensed properties to other studios) and started making the movies themselves. You can see the line plain as day: the first two fully-inhouse Marvel movies were Blade in 1998 and X-Men in 2000, both of which were wildly successful and profitable. The success of those early in-house films can largely be credited to Avi Arad, head of Marvel Films at the time. Marvel also started self-financing their films in 2004. They've also been re-aquiring the film rights to their most important properties that were held by the likes of Sony, New Line, Lion's Gate, etc. ever since.

This is a really good read for all the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Studios

It makes sense. Having full control over the scripts, being able to select studios to partner with, set budgets, etc. all give Marvel the ability to ensure their film projects aren't treated the way Hollywood had normally treated licensed properties to that point. No low-budget garbage productions from a license-holder hiring a no-name director to churn out a bad movie for five million dollars to try to make seven million in the market. No more apathetic directors looking at a comic book franchise they don't care about as a stepping stone to maybe getting a real actual film to direct in a couple years. Marvel still made a few stinkers, of course, but just compare Marvel's track record, to how well Sony has done with Spider-Man.

Kurieg posted:

The DC Animated movies have been pretty good recently. And the Paul Dini era cartoons were amazing, the difference is now Dini's working for Marvel on some of their cartoons.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

An epistemic bubble is a term for when you surround yourself by people who mirror your own opinions back to you until you believe that they are far more popular and accepted than they are. You can usually tell when this is happening because the person starts using meaningless quantifiers like "good" and "bad" to describe things.

The fact that you deny this and then go on to dismiss listening to other critical perspectives as "a CD thing" is dryly amusing.

Countblanc posted:

A lot of people in the bubble weren't actually playing very much, lots of people who know "D&D-isms" have literally never played or played in a game back in college a decade ago where everyone was drinking every session anyway. I know way too many toilet readers who seemed to think that Monks were the most OP thing in 3.5/Pathfinder.

Effectronica posted:

I think it's rude to make fun of Sean Reynolds just because he can't spell crunk.

ProfessorCirno posted:

NorCal is fuckin' wild, and the day this dumb tech bubble bursts will be even wilder.

Gerund posted:

"I mean, you have six friends with this poo poo who'd love this, and I've got six friends with this poo poo that would love this, there must be a huge market for this!" said the socially-isolated disruptor.
"Genius, bro. Millions of dollars headed your way." said the VC.

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

Tendales posted:

The game does not promise intersectionality.

gradenko_2000 posted:

http://support.dmsguild.com/hc/en-us/articles/216504408


They're asking people to cut up their own old game books, scan it, arrange the PDFs, host it themselves, let DTRPG download it and review it, and potentially rehost the file for resell back to the market, for 50 dollars store credit.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I certainly can't think of any 3e books that crack the $50 mark. There are books like Frostfall and Book of Nine Swords that can go over retail but I can't think of any that might go over $50 unless prices have spiked in the past year.

LatwPIAT posted:

To elaborate, there's a tradition in Swedish (and Norwegian, Danish, etc.) roleplaying of what is essentially freeform roleplaying that involves people sitting around a table (or in the case of Jeepform, a car) and acting out their roles. If there are rules, they're there to structure the situation. It's like LARPing, only you don't dress up or act. Or like tabletop, only you don't do all the tabletop staples like dice.

bongwizzard posted:

All of that sounds just awful and I would rather just play video games and chat via Skype or whatever.

I totally admit that the nostalgia thing is huge with me but the traditional trapping of "playing d&d" are a big part of the charm for me. Hell, I am slowly trying to track down old copies of the 1st Ed books rather then buy the reprints because I want them to have that "old book" smell that will forever remind me of gaming.

All of your stuff is objectively better but I want some touchy feely crap.

AlphaDog posted:

Would an online rules site that you pay to access and have to be logged in to use not solve all these problems? It works just like a physical book - you can lend your login to someone, but you can't both be logged in at the same time.

Kai Tave posted:

4E Dark Sun was ironically the one setting for that particular edition where they paid the greatest heed to its 2E predecessor. The general rule of 4E settings was "if it's in the game then it has a place in the setting," so you get eladrin and dragonborn and tieflings all up in Eberron where they didn't really exist before even though it's not really all that awkward an inclusion, but 4E Dark Sun straight up said "Hey, no Divine Classes. Yeah, you can add them if you want we guess but for real, no Paladins or Clerics, go Primal or go home."

Lightning Lord posted:

One group I'm in a bunch of dudes railed against 4e's additions. They legit didn't know that tieflings and even eladrin predated that edition.

Kai Tave posted:

I will say that back when regular official D&D web articles were a thing that they had Keith Baker do a lot of short, quick "here's a campaign seed/collection of plot hooks for an Eberron game" deals and they were, to my foggy recollection, pretty decent. But of course they deleted all that poo poo and now there aren't even any official D&D forums because that stuff takes too much effort, along with going to Gencon and making supplements.

Kai Tave posted:

The digital tabletop initiative falling through because of the lead developer being involved in a murder/suicide probably didn't help matters either.

quote:

Ryan Dancey, formerly the Dungeons & Dragons brand manager for Wizards of the Coast, recently explained how the brand failed to meet its $50 million sales goals by transitioning to an online format. Dancey shared a pivotal moment in that failure: a sad story of domestic abuse.

"The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools. Unfortunately, a tragedy struck the DDI team and it never really recovered. The VTT wasn't ready when 4e launched, and the explicit link between 4e and DDI that had been proposed to Hasbro's execs never materialized. The team did a yoeman's effort to make 4e work anyway while the VTT evolved, but they simply couldn't hit the numbers they'd promised selling books alone. The marketplace backlash to 4e didn't help either."

That tragedy was the death of Melissa Batten, shot by her estranged husband Joseph Batten. Batten then committed suicide by turning the gun on himself. The effect on the gaming industry was far-reaching.

Melissa Batten was a Harvard-educated lawyer and Software Development Engineer in Test for Microsoft, supporting Rare on their Xbox 360 titles. Working for Microsoft since 2002, she earned credits in games such as Halo 3 and Gears of War 2. When she was previously a public defender for the Mecklenburg County Public Defender’s Office.

Joseph Batten's LinkedIn profile (now defunct) listed him as Senior Manager, Digital Technology Projects for Wizards of the Coast since February 2008. Prior to that he was Senior Technical Producer for just three months, with responsibilities for supporting Gleemax.com, integrating Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI) with Gleemax, and overseeing the backend infrastructure that all of Wizards of the Coast multiplayer games run on.

Melissa had obtained a restraining order against Joseph the week before her death:

"In her request for a protection order, Melissa Batten described how her husband had called her more than 30 times on July 19 and 20 and warned her never to hang up on him. She also described a chain of circumstances that led to the phone calls, including how her husband broke into her workplace at Microsoft on July 16 and was caught by security guards.

"The biggest incident which clouds all his subsequent behavior occurred on June 5," she wrote in the request. "He had, unbeknownst to me, obtained a gun."

At that time, she continued, the couple were living together but he discovered she had had an affair and he confronted her about the affair at dinner, then "brandished the gun from the back waistband of his jeans and pointed it at me," she wrote.

Joseph Batten then showed the gun was loaded and the safety was off and he put the gun to his head and said he was going to kill himself, Melissa Batten continued."

Melissa moved to an apartment on 156th Avenue Northeast in Redmond, where she was staying with a friend. Joseph confronted her in the parking lot, shooting her several times with a 9-mm handgun and then shot himself in the head.

We may never know the full impact of this tragedy, but in light of Dancey's recent comments, it definitely delayed 4th Edition's plans in the online space. With 5th Edition on the horizon, it remains to be seen if Wizards will make another effort to revive its digital strategy.