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To be honest, I think AR games won't be big unless Google Glass and similar HUD devices work out. But if they do, I could easily see them becoming very popular. The difference between having to use your phone or tablet to view an AR tableau versus just seeing is a big one to me. Something like Eye of Judgement becomes a lot less clunky in that sort of situation. One thing I think tablets and smartphones would work very well for is simulating a true fog of war situation. In most video games, fog of war refers to something that blocks your view/restricts your information at the start of a match, and is gradually reduced or made inconsequential. Historically, fog of war refers to the opposite effect. A general knew the most information before a battle started - where their own units were, the condition of those units, the lay of the field - and as the battle progressed the amount of accurate information decreased, initially mostly because events shifted too quickly for courier communications to keep things up to date, and then when guns started to be common on battlefields, due to the smoke obscuring what was happening. A more "accurate" war game would use a smart device to keep track of the real condition and position of units, while the players would have to figure out what to do with steadily more out of date information. You could have a similar effect with the Starfleet Battles idea RBH mentioned, but have the smart device represent a game resource - the ship's computer. If it gets damaged, you lose access to more and more data, and have to rely on what you can literally see on the board. The trick is balancing the informational content for each phase of the game. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 23:25
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Whatever his past sins were, Tianxia is probably the best implementation of a FATE powered game yet, even in what is more or less a beta stage. There are a few rough spots and balance issues, but not many.
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Nov 21, 2013 15:59
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Covok posted:If this is the gospel truth, then Moon Design was clearly in the wrong: they did not obtain permission to create this product from the holder of the copyright and yet still tried to get funding for it and produce it. The law is the law and, surprisingly, is pretty clear cut in this case. GMS is Gareth Michael Skarka, a pretentious windbag and internet tough guy who was a game designer, but doesn't actually publish things anymore.
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Dec 1, 2013 06:50
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stoutfish posted:However, aren't many boardgames essentially simpler, cheaper, and broader miniatures games? I just can't see the sell to a normal when it comes to that level of nerd depth. Don't get me wrong, it's lovely that the toxic community pushes away non toxic people who have an interest in the hobby in spite of said community. Are you actually using that un-ironically? Because while the terrible models are definitely more offensive in general, the kind of attitude that leads to statements like that is probably as much or more a problem. Treating people who haven't gamed before like some kind of other, or taking on some persecution complex over it, definitely drives people away from the community.
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Apr 20, 2014 04:03
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Kai Tave posted:The point is that cheesecake-pose figures aren't some sad truth of tabletop gaming that you just have to live with if you want a successful game, the Kickstarters doing stuff like this are doing it because they know they can part these people from their money by doing that easier than they could through other means available to them. It turns out there's a market for that. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 04:20
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I don't have the links handy on this computer, but the research suggests that sex and violence don't sell, in fact. It gets people's attention, but what happens is people remember the sex and violence instead of the product.
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Apr 20, 2014 04:30
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Mr. Maltose posted:I love this argument because it comes up for everything. Comic books, video games, minis, any sort of nerd poo poo. Why do people think "well being a shitlord makes more money, c'est le guerre" and shrug this poo poo off? A combination of intellectual laziness, privilege, and stealth defense of being terrible yourself. At least that's why I used to make those lovely arguments before I realized I was being a jackass and corrected myself. It's an ongoing process but things are more fun now, so it's worth it. Dulkor posted:Assumption that a market doesn't exist because no one currently exploits it is something of a long running fallacy in nerd hobby companies. This is the hardest part of this. How do we get publishers to actually provide good products if we're willing to buy their lovely ones at a high enough rate to keep them afloat? I have some hope for RPGs since all the good recent projects basically provide me with more than enough games to not have to spend a dime on crappy ones, but minis... well, the above shows it's harder. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 04:39
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Brainiac Five posted:Okay, so now you've decided to treat me as less than human, because you're posting pedantry in the apparent belief that it will convince me when it wouldn't convince a god drat dog. EDIT: The failure mode of clever is rear end in a top hat, so color me with that. I'll just rephrase to say that Mr. Belvedere is making a pretty good case for having less basic empathy than any of the pets I've ever owned. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 03:36
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Buddy, at the rate you're digging you'll need a backhoe instead of a shovel.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:34
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Forget the backhoe, he hit rock bottom and decided to break out the picks and blasting caps.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:49
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SilverMike posted:Been hearing about restaurants putting up lures and getting increased business + tips. There's a coffee shop near me that is keeping a lure up whenever they're open. From a business perspective, the things are cheap enough that it only takes a couple extra sales to make it worth while. Doing some quick calculations, if you're open 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, it's $120/wk to have a lure up all the time. If your average sale nets you $4.50, you'll make profit starting on your fourth extra sale each day. It wouldn't take much analysis to improve that further by looking at peaks and lulls.
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Jul 13, 2016 00:45
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Jimbozig posted:I'm pre-emptively judging all you drinkers for drinking in anticipation of the future timeline in which intoxication becomes seen as a moral evil once we have direct cortical stimulation to reproduce the positive effects of any drugs with no downside.
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Jul 16, 2016 02:24
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Dr. Quarex posted:I enjoy thinking of early Dungeons & Dragons as a thing that the gamemasters were powerless to stop, so every time someone showed up and wanted to play Gary Gygax had no choice but to start running a game even if he were in the middle of dinner or about to leave on vacation. One reason I tend to cast shade on OSR in general is way too little of it is interested in the weird ideas from the early days. Early D&D had a ton of assumptions about how gaming worked that are alien to modern players. Exploring those things in a systematic way could yield some really cool ideas. But there seems to be so little work done in that vein. It's not just the weird subsystems that weren't necessarily busted but were dropped in the name of cohesion - which was a reasonable choice. It's readily apparent that early on, no one had the concept that each DM would be running their own campaign. In fact, the default assumption was that a player would bring the same character to every game, regardless of who was DMing, and the other DMs would just go along with whatever weird poo poo that character picked up between sessions. That's the source of why people hate overly generous (Monty Haul) DMs so much, in fact. It makes zero sense that people bitch and cry about it these days, when every game is separate. As long as it hasn't made things unfun for that group in their campaign, why should anyone give a poo poo if they've all got bags full of vorpal holy swords or whatever? But back in the early days it really was an issue, because if Anne and Bob played with Cindy and Doug, and Cindy handed out powerful items like candy, it could totally gently caress up Doug's game (with Elisa and Frank, who didn't play in Cindy's game) since half his players have way better stuff than the other. So what another DM did actually had a direct effect on your own game. There are shared world games out there - the Living campaigns - but things like assuming crossover PCs, rotating DM duties, and so forth were really baseline assumptions for early D&D, and it'd be cool to see a newer game try to intentionally leverage stuff like that.
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Jul 17, 2016 18:07
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:ADB's original agreement was through Franz Joseph, who made the Technical Manual, and then this transferred to Paramount once they realized what they had. As stated before the manual was created during a time where Star Trek was dead and merchandising was nowhere near what it is today. ADB can't even use the original cast, only certain elements of TOS and TAS like races and governments. It's kind of like a more reasonable and civil version of the Battletech and Harmony Gold rights debacle but handled much better. Harmony Gold hasn't done anything with the Robotech license, and in fact blocks access to the entire Macross line, with zero attempts to actually make money off it. They just squat on the license and occasionally sue the poo poo out of some poor sap who wanders too close. They rarely even make any money on that, is the craziest bit. Actually, it's not the craziest bit. The craziest bit is that it's near certain that Harmony Gold doesn't even have the license it says it has. It take some creative reading of the original agreement to give HG the authority it claims to begin with. On top of that, there was a lawsuit in Japan over the international rights several years ago, the upshot of which was that the group that sold the rights to HG didn't have ownership of them or the right to do so. So HG's license is based on a shaky reading of a document that has no actual legal standing. The trouble is that HG has good lawyers and deep enough pockets to outlast the people who trip over the landmine, and no larger company with a competent legal staff is going to touch the mess with a ten foot pole. Anyone who actually forces the issue to court would almost certainly win, it just has never been worth the trouble for anyone with the money to do it. Eventually HG will piss off a company big enough that they'll get crushed - HG is hyper-litigious and the people running aren't terribly rational - but it's anyone's guess where that will lead. Probably with the rights being confirmed as returned to the original creators, as per the Japanese decision.
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Jul 22, 2016 00:12
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, the thing is that Robotech is of vanishing importance thanks to the growth of anime fandom abroad. That's not to say it doesn't still have major name recognition amongst old nerds, it does, but there's less and less reason to care about it now that getting access to straight translations of Macross (or even Southern Cross or MOSPEADA) is trivial. Harmony Gold will cling to their old localization but as time passes it's more a weird artifact of fandom and translation history than anything particularly essential to watch. What it comes down to is the fact that less and less people will care about it over time and they'll probably hang onto it simply because the interest isn't there. But the fact that HG is also blocking any sort of sales of the Macross and other series is the tricky bit now. Netflix just dropped a fair bit of money on Knights of Sidonia and the new Voltron. Crunchyroll is making pretty substantial profits. Amazon is pretty voracious is catching up with its streaming competitors. Macross would be a nice addition to a back catalog - 139 episodes in the four series, another 19 in OVAs, 2 movies (though they are adaptations of two of the series), plus future access to popular series, and potentially a shot at a Voltron-like nostalgia series for Robotech. Not to mention 23 episodes of Southern Cross and 25 of MOSPEADA. Fighting it out with HG would be expensive, but not as expensive as paying for that much new content, not even after factoring in paying the creators for the license. If HG was smart they'd just cut a deal with someone and get royalties or a nice one time payment out of it. But HG isn't terribly smart. And for a streaming service, the prize is starting to get big enough to justify taking on the legal headache.
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Jul 22, 2016 02:55
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Kai Tave posted:What does Harmony Gold even DO these days? Like, is "owns the American Robotech license kinda sorta maybe" their entire business model? So basically HG is in a really precarious state with an aged founder and no real future prospects, and with a rational company in such straits a cash in of their assets would make a lot of sense. But HG has never been run in a particularly rational way. There is a chance they might finally just go bankrupt themselves, which would also probably resolve the issue.
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Jul 22, 2016 03:27
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Mors Rattus posted:In fairness, this exact thing happened to Apocalypse World, too. There are definitely a bunch of weird (and not particularly functional) basic reskins of AW and a slew of crappy PbtA games (especially the early ones) but there's also a good number of examples of people taking the conceptual bones of the system and reworking it extensively for different genres. Fellowship, Monsterhearts, Blades in the Dark, and several others are clearly descended from AW but aren't just AW with a coat of paint slapped one. The proportion of Black Hack hacks that were exactly that was much greater. No attempt to recontextualize or innovate off the core ruleset, just slap on a poorly thought out subsystem and an inch deep weird setting idea and call it good. That's really the frustrating bit about OSR. Even if you strictly compare it to shared rulesets like FATE or PbtA, the percentages are way worse for OSR. There are certainly lazy FATE adaptations, but for every one of those you have someone at least attempting to leverage it for something different, even if it doesn't always work out. PbtA is even more skewed towards successes and ambitious failures, as opposed to dull copying. If you compare OSR to storygames as a whole, there's just no contest. As a design space the OSR community has continually disappointed me. The Renaissance part is fine - I disagree a bit with ARBco in that I think there is something very valuable about re-examining the old games. A lot of them were made with really different base assumptions when you compare them to modern games. In fact I'm going to steal his analogy.  The Model T is a good comparison here. It looks like a modern car, but it was designed before standardized controls. So instead of an accelerator and a brake pedal and a shifter, you have a throttle lever on the steering wheel, three pedals on the floor (clutch, brake, reverse), and a floor lever that is for neutral, second gear, and emergency brake. And the Model T is downright boring compared to other early automobiles, in regards to control arrangements, engine design and placement, even power source.A lot of old RPGs are like that - even the ones that look kind of normal have some weird rear end ideas and design decisions buried in them. And others are really off the wall from from a modern viewpoint. Some of those ideas are out and out bad (a steering wheel mounted throttle) but some are just different (a reverse pedal) and had things gone a little differently, would have become normal. That latter stuff could be fertile soil for new games. It's sort of what-if RPG design. As game design advanced, it sloughed off a lot of things that flat out didn't work, but it also set aside some really interesting ideas in the name of standardization. Not that the standardization was all bad. In a lot of cases, it wouldn't have mattered which direction they picked, they just needed to pick something. To me, mining old games for the good ideas that missed the cut has real appeal to it. I just wish the OSR actually did that. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 17:53
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Zurui posted:I wouldn't agree that AW or Fate have a smaller percentage of dreck. I can only think of a couple games that did anything new instead of just reproducing AW but with rethemed moves/playbooks and a few bolted on systems for a different genre. Off the top of my head: Monsterhearts (introduced the idea that a playbook is a minigame), Fellowship (codified that the players make the world, not the MC), and maaaybe games like Masks that layer "face" moves over a "class" playbook. Don't forget World Wide Wrestling and Night Witches (which honestly isn't good but at least trying something new). It's that latter that really stands out - there have been some ambitious PbtA descended games that failed, but at least they tried. And yeah, there's a lot of crappy, half-assed PbtA hacks out there, but I feel pretty comfortable saying there's a lot more crappy half-assed OSR "hacks" and a lot fewer games that are bad because they were overly ambitious. Hell, even Urban Shadows (to stay on topic) really played with ideas like factions and favors. Ultimately it's that the PbtA descended stuff has a lot more diamonds in the rough, and there are clear reasons for that. And OSR isn't just comparing itself to PbtA - it's set up next to storygames in general.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:37
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Lightning Lord posted:Don't forget all that Fate shovelware that's just the SRD with a handful of really bad genre specific rules attached.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:48
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I feel like if someone else was doing this we'd think it was a cool idea. An RPG with all the necessary components in one box, with everything themed appropriately, and including unusual game play pieces (a game board in an RPG sounds neat as hell, really) sounds like something right TG's alley. Especially since it also has old school box set pieces that are just there to give it some weight, like that cloth map. But it's Monte Cook, so the track record tells us it's mechanics will be be D&D 3e with a thin gloss of ideas someone else would make better use of, and the setting will be the least interesting possible take on a clever idea. Notable only for an embarrassing and socially tone deaf gaffe someone will uncover shortly after release. EDIT: Also the price point is pure nonsense, even with all the stuff in the box. Freemarket did basically this same thing at about a third of the price.
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Aug 15, 2016 21:59
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Evil Mastermind posted:But that's the problem; most of the game seems to be there to give it some "weight". Putting box space towards that stupid overpriced hand and the 500 spell cards is 100% Monte Cook. Someone with a better grasp of whats actually interesting about this would use that box space in a way that was more intelligent and useful. I just wish someone like that would take a stab at an old school style box set with lots of game bits and feelies, and do it at a reasonable price point.
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Aug 16, 2016 01:06
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Mors Rattus posted:One of the issues is that a lot of early Kickstarters tried that and got loving killed on manufacturing and shipping. That poo poo ain't cheap. That's where a lot of prestige board games clock in at, between 30 and 40% of this price point, and it'd be about the right price point for a project like this. Maybe bump up towards $100-$120 - around the range of giant games like Twilight Imperium. Including frobs purely to make it look cook is something I'm okay with - one of my favorite RPG items ever is the cloth Dark Sun map from the old box set. That kind of thing or metal coins or whatever is nice because it has an actual usability, and it has a wow factor at the table. That hand has none of that, and clearly has a significant increase to the production costs. Cut that and you're already a good step to getting towards a reasonable price. Basically there's a lot of stuff in this box that is drives up the cost for really marginal benefits.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:I mentioned this in the KS thread, but the "everyone pools their money to support a system" idea would be a better proposition if it meant everyone gets their own copies of corebooks at some kind of group discount: buy three get one free or something. The players no longer need to pass the single book around while playing, and the publisher moves more product.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'd be all for it, but I know some people are really averse towards using PDFs. RPG print runs are usually just not big enough that the guaranteed extra sales push the total order past a breakpoint that reduces the per unit cost in a meaningful way. Especially in the current printing environment. It makes a ton of sense for books in the low-to-mid price range, but for the more expensive games, if someone is that adamantly opposed to PDFs then they're gonna have to suck it up and pay for a book. Ultimately any of these approaches only work for games with the standard "you need this book, paper, dice, and maybe one special thing." If you've got a box set where the extra components are actually needed to run the game, there's no reasonable way to do this. It's hard to imagine an (n)-for-(n+1) where the dev isn't going to be losing money, and conversely just throwing in extra rulebooks, whether pdf or physical, doesn't get you anywhere. Plus if you design a box-set properly, then the things the players get handed at the table should have all the rules they need to play anyways. In those cases, you really have to lean on a board game group's model - you're buying the game for the group, and if one person ultimately ends up with the box, you'll have to work out a way to make it square among yourselves. Ewen Cluney posted:One pretty cool thing they do in the Japanese RPG scene is that publishers will put out a small paperback core rulebook that costs like 800-1000 yen (making it super-easy for everyone in the group to have a copy) and then a good selection of supplemental material, including full-sized books. (Though I guess Savage Worlds has something kinda like that with the Explorer's Edition.) It'd be great for FFG's Star Wars games, as a current example. A box set with the hardcover and special dice and some extra bits, softcover and the dice app for everyone else. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 18:08
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I dunno, I kind of figure we could reverse engineer the rules just with what we already know, given that Monte Cook came up with it.
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Aug 17, 2016 04:25
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I want to know what the deal is with the giraffe/mantis thing further in the background. Not $200 worth of want to know, though.
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Aug 17, 2016 14:46
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MadScientistWorking posted:Isn't his boss the person who basically did exactly what we criticized Diaz for? That's the thing with Diaz. If he'd just said "wow I didn't really understand the situation, sorry I hosed up" most of us would accepted that. There'd still be room to critique the fact that he should have looked into it first because it's not some giant secret. Instead he doubled down in the most cowardly, predictable, enabling manner possible.
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Aug 29, 2016 02:50
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Slimnoid posted:This, yeah. We know who the worst people are, they're identified, and the best tactic used against them is to ignore them unless they do something arrest-worthy.
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Aug 30, 2016 01:02
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It's one thing to make an rear end of yourself talking about game design, or to be too up his own butt about layouts and poo poo. I've defended Crane to the extent that we put up with a lot worse in the industry for much less output. Running your business interactions that way is downright stupid and insulting.
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Aug 30, 2016 18:46
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moths posted:Wasn't there some other stupid thing about his digital distribution, though? Like you had to PayPal him personally and wait for an email or something dumb. Even if you wanted a legit paid-for copy, he wouldn't sell you the expansions. The PayPal thing was more a legacy of the fact that when he first did it, there weren't good ways to distribute game books online. Apocalypse World for a long time worked the same way - you had to wait for a personal email to get an access link to the pdfs. There was a little more customer facing stuff to the order process, but it boiled down to the same thing. I think the catch that Crane doesn't get, and that some other companies have internalized, is that you aren't losing many actual sales to it. There's certainly nuance there - pirating pay-what-you-like books or stuff sold for charity is pretty rotten, for example. But the evidence suggests that most piracy is driven by people who wouldn't have bought the media in the first place.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:05
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Monte Cooke is the moon.
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Sep 23, 2016 18:01
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TG is hardly unique. Just look at Vox Day and his nonsense, or the way Zack Snyder behaves (he's stopped just short of actively calling on his fans to go after people, but only just). More than a few devs threw their lot in with gamergate. It's fair to say that TG is particularly bad about it. It's so niche there's essentially no public opinion cost to being a shitlord, even less than with video games. Plus there's much less buffer between creators and fans, and toxic assholes make up a bigger percentage of the total on both sides of the fence. That has more to do with it being niche - everyone who does TG is a hardcore fan compared to the audiences for most other media.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:46
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I think the problem with this is that the public opinion response isn't "wow that particular TG designer is bad." If it gets noticed at all, it's "wow TG is awful." There are a lot of people in the hobby who'll harass critics purely because they don't want to brought up at all, for fear of tarring the whole community. How often do we pillory some designer for essentially telling the harassed that they should just ignore their harassers? That it'd be better for everyone if they shut up about it? Once a week?
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Sep 23, 2016 20:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'd say it's more accurate that D&D seems to be kept largely around for licensing. In real terms, D&D just doesn't make enough money as a game to justify much attention from Hasbro. The license for Forgotten Realms and the video games and so forth is a lot more valuable than the game itself. From a business perspective, it would make more sense for Hasbro to let someone else pay them for the right to make D&D. But the D&D team at WotC want to keep their jobs, so they need to convince management that they can put out a product that will make bank. So they show up and say, hey - here's what 3.x made, and here's what 4th edition made. All edition warring aside, the evidence points to those being pretty similar. Next, they actually use the edition wars and Pathfinder to their advantage and argue the two editions have mostly separate market bases. So then comes the over promise - the same over promise they made to consumers. We'll make one edition to rule them all! It'll keep the 4th edition fans, and steal the 3.x fans back from Paizo. So they get to add the numbers from earlier together as the potential for the new edition. Layer on the DDI subscriptions and tighter IP control of 4th - very attractive at a corporate level. There's no real reason a new edition can't keep those rolling. Now you've got something that's worth Hasbro's time. So Hasbro greenlights it. From there, we know what happens. The D&D team doesn't deliver. The game is a not as well executed regression to 3E, which means it turns off 4E fans and doesn't do enough to lure back the 3.x people who left for PF. On top of that, there's a series of own-goals in terms of PR during the development and early release. You've got Mearls pissing someone off every time he opens his mouth, the weird Monte Cook is back/Monte Cook is gone again thing, and finally the controversy over the contributors. Plus, the online portion crashed and burned, so there goes subscription money. By all accounts what 5th Edition books are out sell well - but well in terms of the RPG market. It's probably doing about as well as 3rd and 4th. In a vacuum that would be fine, but in context? It's significantly less than what was promised, and it came with a lot of entirely avoidable PR messes. Now Hasbro is in a weird spot. They really only want D&D to license it, but now they've got this game tied around their neck and it's not delivering what was promised, and clearly never will. But they can't turn around and license it out immediately - they can see enough about how the RPG market works that there needs to be a little breathing space between editions, lest they compound fan ire. In the meantime, they don't want to kill off what sales they're getting by axing the team outright and cancelling the line. So they let it die of inattention. The team attritions out and isn't replaced, releases occur less and less frequently and eventually stop altogether. The end game is simple - let things cool off for a bit, then turn around and sell the license to make D&D tabletop games to someone who actually wants to, then get rid of whatever's left of the WotC D&D team. Hasbro keeps the really valuable part - the right to sell D'rizzt novels and get a cut of digital games. Essentially, they run D&D like Lucasfilms used to run the Star Wars licenses. My guess is Fantasy Flight Games ends up with the license to make D&D by 2020. They're on record that they want to be the biggest player in the RPG market, and you pretty much have to be making D&D for that to happen. Plus they have a lot of experience with similar agreements, what with Warhammer 40k, Star Wars, and now L5R. At this point it makes a lot of sense for both parties to do a deal. e: This is also why they don't give a poo poo about burning bridges with their international connections. They don't plan to work with them in the future anyways. As long as whoever they're talking to isn't also handling MtG or something else they actually care about, it doesn't matter. Most likely, the people who actually knew how to do this left already, and they've given some marketing hack a directive to extract every dollar from this white elephant possible before they cash out. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 07:44
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Liquid Communism posted:It makes sense, but I wouldn't make any large bets on it happening. Irrationality in this market is a norm, see also how FF lost the 40k license. I still feel fairly comfortable with it as a prediction. It requires only that Hasbro/WotC not be as much up their own asses as Games Workshop. That's a pretty safe wager, not because Hasbro/WotC have a clue, but because GW clearly has a sharp deficit of clues.
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Mar 29, 2017 08:07
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I know I'm coming back to this a bit late, but I wanted to revise a particular point I made before. Specifically, about D&D not making enough for Hasbro to bother with. I way oversimplified that argument. Also, it gets repeated a lot generally in a way that I don't think accurately reflects what's happening. The thing is, D&D does make enough money for Hasbro to bother with. It just doesn't do it consistently, and its the way the sales cycle works for D&D that turns Hasbro/WotC off. Also when I say the D&D team is talking to Hasbro, I don't mean the board or CEO or anything. I'm saying it as shorthand for them talking to a WotC exec and/or a Hasbro brand manager, who are talking to their superiors, on up the corporate chain. But the policy for what is acceptable is being set at the higher level. So it's not a Hasbro Senior VP or whatever deciding "get rid of D&D." Instead, that VP is telling their direct reports what ratio of investment to return on a product line is acceptable and in what circumstances, and that filters down. In any case, while RPGs are a relatively small market, they still generates enough money to be worth chasing, and D&D is effectively bigger than the market. There's a lot of players who buy only D&D and don't even look at other RPGs, but anyone who plays other RPGs knows about - and often also buys - D&D. So when a new D&D edition launches, it absolutely does make enough money to be worth Hasbro/WotC's time. Especially given it's an independent secondary product of a subsidiary that has a well established money maker. Unfortunately those sales begin a long downward trend after the core book release. Every splat book costs about the same to make, but trends downward in sales. Even that would be okay - the sales figures for the first few years are still good enough to be worth it. The trouble is that this cycle lasts something like six to eight years. Because of how the market and product work, you can't toss out a new edition at the around the three year mark to restart the sales cycle, which from a business perspective would be the ideal thing. You've got to wait out the next few years, and only then can you reset. It's that long downslope that turns WotC/Hasbro off. It's not a long tail either - you're still spending just as much on development in the midst of it. Maybe more if you're gearing up for the next edition. Meanwhile the investment/return ratio has been outside what WotC/Hasbro deems acceptable for a long time. The 5E pitch had to solve that issue. The solution Mearls et al went with was to argue they could start at a much high point, so that even the end of the slope would be at an acceptable sales number. Unsurprisingly given who was involved, this solution is basically "the same but more so." The obvious problem is you have to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars in terms of initial sales figures for it to have a chance of working. In a vacuum, the 4E + 3.x + more argument makes sense, but in practice? I'm not surprised it worked in a pitch meeting, though. It's not the only potential solution. One alternative is to revamp the game model enough that you can shorten the major release cycle to roughly ever four years. But that would take a pretty significant rethink about how D&D works on a very basic level, which certainly wasn't in the offing with Mearls' team, and to be fair would be a tall order for any developer. Another would be to find way to stabilize sales. Essentially, to make a shallower downslope, where by the time you're ready for the next edition, you're still above the acceptable mark. Potentially a subscription centric model might have worked for this. I honestly expected this to be the way WotC/Hasbro was going near the end of 4th, but oh well. Fake edit: As an aside, 3.5 and Essentials are in large part an attempt to get a three year reset. 3.5 mostly in terms of presentation and marketing, and Essentials just flat out. 3.5 had other reasons for existing - 3E pretty badly needed a revision and consolidation of errata at that point. Presenting it as a core book re-release and version upgrade was a clever bit of marketing to go after new edition sales numbers without actually doing a full on new edition. In fact, I would say it was a smart and very successful way to handle it. Essentials, on the other hand, had no real reason to exist except as a attempt to induce that reset. 4E didn't need that same revision/errata update - in part because lessons learned during 3.x lead to a tighter initial rule set, and even more because the way the edition worked allowed them to drop those revisions in a more piecemeal fashion. There just wasn't the same backlog of updates to collate into a single product. So Essentials really ended up being just more splat books with fancier marketing.
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Apr 1, 2017 19:24
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Siivola posted:I feel like "splats with fancier marketing" is selling Essentials a bit short. From what I heard, Monster Vault and the Rules Compendium were legitimately good, relevant products. The intro stuff was cool enough that I ended up buying into the game then, entirely oblivious to how iffy the new content actually was. I legit can't understand how 4E managed to die basically right after. The RC and Monster Vault were still great products. Most of the DM oriented Essentials releases are of very high quality, in fact, in contrast the PC material which was very mixed bag. It's a presentation thing. There was really nothing in the Essentials books that justified it as a 3.5 style re-boot except as a marketing decision. They didn't really have anything that made them essentially (ha) different from the original line. As a comparison, it's pretty easy to see the division between 3E and 3.5 just by looking at the rule material. In 4E, the division is clearly artificial. There's differences, sure, but you without prior knowledge you wouldn't be able to pick out the break point. On the player side, PHB3 is just as big a rethink of how classes could work. On the DM side, there isn't anything to point to at all.
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Apr 1, 2017 22:03
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Yeah, the marketing and discussion around it was pretty incoherent. The groups I was in were long time 4E stalwarts, and we all understood it to be 4.5 (and were encouraged to do so by a WotC rep). But even with just your example, it's clear the presentation wasn't the same to or for everyone.
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Apr 2, 2017 03:36
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Even the Slayer Fighter had some interesting design concepts underlying it. I know we mock the idea that fighters should be the "easy" class, but there was a real niche in 4E for a couple simple-to-play classes. Choice paralysis was a common problem with a lot of new players I taught the game to. In theory the Essentials Fighter could have worked well for this. An effective and cool default action (I charge in and attack!) with the option to increase complexity as the game goes on, since it has access to other fighter powers and features. In practice? You ended up with a class that was if anything overpowered in Heroic but fell behind fast after that. It wasn't properly balanced against the existing strikers, and they made no allowance for the fact that you were selecting cross-role when taking other fighter powers - because they didn't actually want people to do that. The simplification process was even less well executed with the other classes, ranging from so-so to terrible, and the fact that they made the wizard even more complicated really tipped their hand. The saddest part is that it could have been so much better. Besides what Halloween Jack brought up and the Slayer's unrealized potential, you have things like the Hexblade and Berseker, two classes exploring design space that had existed from day one but left largely untouched. And from a design standpoint, the Skald might be the most interesting class in all of 4E.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:03
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Kai Tave posted:Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh... The problem with Mearls is he saw that and decided that it was a minigame that someone should be able to win. That's where he and his team failed to understand the player base and the philosophy of the game they were designing for.
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Apr 5, 2017 13:49
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