Table Top Industry Defeatism

[Daniel]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

[Korwin]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

Sounds...

[Longes]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

So you roll in chargen to deterimne your anal circumference, sexual preferences and fragility of your heart?

[Korwin]

DSA 4 and 5 is point buy, no dice rolling allowed.

[nockermensch]

-An English edition of Aquelarre... Maybe it will be big with Latino'

Something big with Latinos would be a Saint Seiya or Dragon Ball tRPG.

I'd accuse you of prejudice, but in this case, you're spot on. Tormenta, the most popular Brazilian RPG, is full of 90's anime influence.

Tormenta's DM shield

[Daniel]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

So you roll in chargen to deterimne your anal circumference, sexual preferences and fragility of your heart?

That is FATAL you lugnut.

In DSA you play a rosy cheeked dirndl clad girl named Heidi who can slay demons by yelling 'fulminictus donnerkeil triff und töte wie ein pfeil' at them. But most of the time Heidi works as a cheesemaker, not just any cheese, Gruyère.
Admit it, this sounds AWESOME

[Rasumichin]

It sounds awesome until you run into the massively bloated rules that define DSA4 and 5, or the DSA1-3 combat system that makes every combat encounter an endless series of rolling for attack and parry in a futile attempt to grind enemy hit points down.

As has been mentioned itt, the basic rules for DSA5 are 414 pages, and that contains next to no description of the setting and relatively little shovelware pagecount bloat through intro fiction and the like.
And there's actually DSA4 players who complain that there's not enough bullshit rules in that book, or that divine magic got streamlined into working similar to arcane magic (they flip a shit at the very notion of divine magic because miracles worked by cleric willpower and supernatural energy are somehow supposed to be non-magical) or that cartography and pottery and brewing are not seperate skills anymore.

Just to illustrate how unimaginbably bloated DSA4 was, conjuring and spellcasting tests where actually modified by the type of shoes or undergarments your mage was wearing, because demons get offended if you're wearing something under that wizard robe and because dinosaur leather boots have a mystic affinity to combat spells.

DSA4 is the most bugfuck insane, most unspeakably German RPG to have ever blighted this planet. It's everything that's wrong with this country, turned into a game.
At least 5th edition isn't openly racist anymore and ditched giving stat and skill modifiers to various human ethnicities.
Seriously, black people (sensitively called Utulu in the setting) got bonus points for singing and dancing in 4th edition and players actually defended that shit because racist carricatures are so damn flavorful.
And because there can't be such a thing as too many fiddly rules details, DSA4's racism extended to every playable non-human species as well, so you had a solid mathematical foundation for being a riparian elf racial supremacist.

[Daniel]

Dear Rasumichin,

I basically agree with you. There is a reason that I (as Korwin pointed out) say it SOUNDS awesome and not that it IS awesome.

[Daniel]

Additional issues Rasumichin did not mention yet.

The DSA 5 basic rules also lack the rules for at least 2 common DSA magic user types (Druids and Schelmen).
On top of that DSA player characters are clearly strongly tied to a specific setting. And the 5th edition basic book provides only the bare minimum setting info needed to create a pc.
It is like D&D in that you need 3 books to run the game.
http://www.ulisses-spiele.de/sortiment/ ... -hardcover
http://www.ulisses-spiele.de/sortiment/ ... bestiarium
http://www.ulisses-spiele.de/sortiment/ ... -hardcover

[Longes]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

So you roll in chargen to deterimne your anal circumference, sexual preferences and fragility of your heart?

That is FATAL you lugnut.

In DSA you play a rosy cheeked dirndl clad girl named Heidi who can slay demons by yelling 'fulminictus donnerkeil triff und töte wie ein pfeil' at them. But most of the time Heidi works as a cheesemaker, not just any cheese, Gruyère.
Admit it, this sounds AWESOME

DSA 4 and 5 is point buy, no dice rolling allowed.

So it's nothing like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay then? Since you make your own character and can actually fight demons and stuff.

[Zinegata]

So... why and how would the industry have shrunk so much?

..

Sad as it is, we are in a dark age of role playing because the industry is producing garbage that people don't want to buy. Not because people wouldn't buy products from the industry if there was good stuff to be had.

-Username17

Or maybe it's because people who used to play the hobby have moved on to other tabletop alternatives: Namely board games.

The local tabletop scene in Metro Manila used to be dominated by Table Top RPGers about ten years ago when I was fresh out of college - at least the tabletop players who weren't into Magic or Warhammer minis (each of whom had their own distinct peer groups). Then the Euros and FFG games started trickling in, and in the past ten years aside from a few die-hards most players simply switched to these games. The old local RPG club for instance was eventually infiltrated and then devoured by boardgaming until it was eventually disbanded and replaced by half a dozen boardgaming groups (each centered on different districts).

Indeed, the boardgaming hobby has grown to such an extent there are now half a dozen boardgame cafes catering specifically to boardgamers; and the newest one is posh enough to have the luxury of private play rooms (not that kind of kinky play). This is ironic given that the tabletop club had originally dreamed of setting up this kind of establishment for RPG gamers.

And I pretty much get it. The sheer volume of available games nowadays simply makes it easier to buy a game that caters to your group's particular thematic itch rather than having one of you try and DM a game. Wanna do Walking Dead? Dead of Winter scratches that itch. Want to be stuck on a desert island? Robinson Crusoe is available. And most of these games tend to be much more balanced and playable.

As an added bonus for board game players, drama is minimized after a bad boardgame session because we can all agree that the designer (e.g. Martin Wallace) was clearly behind on paying rent and half-assed the testing of his newest game. By contrast a bad result in an RPG session very often leads to bad feelings among the players or the DM.

Sure, the rule sets of recent RPG releases are a mess that make a balanced game such a headache, but even the die-hards are mostly playing with older systems to begin with. Even a smartly designed and balanced D&D 6th Edition rule set is no longer a guarantee of success.

Hence, the hobby is kinda doomed because the tabletop scene has gotten utterly dominated by board games in addition to the still-going-strong TCGs/LCGs and miniatures. Indeed, there are worrying signs that the boardgaming hobby itself is heading towards an unsustainable glut - in 2014 they were getting pretty close to having a new game released each day on average and that count probably didn't even count a lively indie self-published scene and expansions to existing games.

In short, the board games have become so common that they've gone from "hipster" (back in 2005), to "cool" (around 2010), to "God there are so many of them! We're no longer cool and everyone plays them now!" today. That leaves a lot less space for the RPGs to wiggle in.

To survive, I think RPGs are going to have to make the same transition as traditional chit-and-hexes historical wargames - which are surprisingly still alive but in a much different form. And that means dipping into fresh new themes and fresh new mechanics.

Wargame publishers found that they simply could't rely on old standbys with overly complicated rule sets like Advanced Squad Leader anymore - sure they still have a market but it's largely shrinking as its players are literally dying. Instead they've had to broaden the genre from simply fighting the same old WW2 (often Eastern Front) battles into dealing with more current topics. One of the most outstanding successes in recent times was Volko's "COIN" series - which deals with various counter-insurgency conflicts worldwide - and is defined by how victory often has very little to do with military success because what really mattered in these wars were hearts and minds.

RPGs simply hadn't experienced a similar renaissance. In many ways we're still dealing with the same rehashes of the traditional fantasy milieu. Until it gets past tactical skirmishes and dice resolution for non-combat encounters, it's going to be stuck as a shrinking niche.

[Daniel]

The DSA setting has almost the same tech level, supernatural power level and cultures as the Warhammer World. You could run WFRP's signature campaign (the enemy within) in DSA's Avonturia by just swapping names.

There are 2 key differences.

In DSA 5th, player characters are a lot like L5R power level wise. They must carefully specialize to be any good, but they can be very good in their fields of specialization. When comparing pc power levels it is more like Warhammer Fantasy battle (where monsters that are basically unbeatable in the rpg, routinely get clobbered by models of famous individuals) than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

Where Warhammer stresses how filthy and corrupt everything is, DSA stresses how picturesque and folk tale like, but still grounded in a certain form of realism it all is.

[Zinegata]

This was always the norm. RPG is a fringe market which will keep being obfuscated by cardgames/boardgames/videogames.

It could be worse though. Just look at the wargames market.

Not really. In the 90s and early 2000s there were very, very few boardgame releases in terms of the number of titles, and most of these were in the (old) Avalon Hill wargame section that was probably another rehash of an old Eastern Front game.

RPGs at the time were small compared to the casual boardgame crowd playing stuff like Monopoly, but in terms of the number of titles the boardgame scene hadn't exploded yet.

For the past three years my core gaming group has, literally, never had a shortage when it came to playing an all-new board game every week. Indeed, it got to the point that we started looking at a game like 504 (which may very well be the future of boardgame design or the final stage of Friese's growing madness) to blunt our growing dependence on the "Cult of the New" and to have some of the older games played again.

[Prak]

DSA 5, it's like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay except everything on the player character side is covered in romantic quaintness instead of shit.

You know what, that actually sounds like a very good game.

So you roll in chargen to deterimne your anal circumference, sexual preferences and fragility of your heart?

That is FATAL you lugnut.

In DSA you play a rosy cheeked dirndl clad girl named Heidi who can slay demons by yelling 'fulminictus donnerkeil triff und töte wie ein pfeil' at them. But most of the time Heidi works as a cheesemaker, not just any cheese, Gruyère.
Admit it, this sounds AWESOME

You can do that in FATAL too, Heidi can just pick up prostitute as a second job and get xp for letting the demon fuck her first.

[Zinegata]

But as far as I know: Monopoly is still at the top of those charts. Hasbro can't even decide which version of challenge is the actual one in Scrabble. You only get to see discards instantaneously in Dominion. And you still have to make strategic decisions without knowing anybody's score in Ticket to Ride. At least the euro-snobs at BGG have finally grown the sense to disdain Munchkin, although it "the community" still buys enough that Munchkin continues to be a sales leader for Steve Jackson Games.

There are a ton of board games that have awful rulebooks or just awful rules in general, and they cover for the lack of mechanical precision with a focus of theme, miniatures, or both. The rules for Betrayal at the House on the Hill are fraught with ambiguity and imprecise descriptions, but the point of the game is a thematic experience.

I would argue that imperfect information like not knowing exactly what other players' scores are in Ticket to Ride is intentional and thus not an issue of a poor ruleset. If it described certain tickets that were publicly visible, but others that weren't, and those tickets weren't distinguishable by any means other than guessing by flavor, that would be a bad ruleset.

Things like not being able to look through your Dominion discard pile are more unfortunate choices in rules than they are bad, necessarily. It's a similar issue in Small World, where everyone's coins are hidden information, but you start with a certain amount and it's public whenever you gain an amount of coins, so if you really care you can count. It's not poorly written or defined rules, they're just annoying to work with because it only makes sense from a meta perspective (it speeds up gameplay so people aren't constantly counting cards/points every turn).

You can argue that they're inelegant solutions, but I don't think they're necessarily bad or poorly written.

And, to be fair, most of the examples cited are old games. Munchkin was published way back in 2001. Betrayal is barely younger and was published in 2004.

Rule-writing in board games has quite simply improved a lot since then - and not just in the way the manual is written, but also because of the consistency in iconography in the player aids and on the board itself.

Eclipse, which was published in 2011, was in many ways a watershed of how far rule-writing had become, because it was about as complex as many of the older 4X Space implementations in boardgame format (e.g. Twilight Imperium) but was so much easier to teach and play because of its smart use of iconography. Much of the iconography easily made the transition to a computer game version; which adhered to video game standards in the sense you can learn how to play the computer version of Eclipse without really needing to read a manual.

Terra Mystica, published a year later, was a very rules-dense (and in many ways incoherent) game yet it jumped to the #2 spot on BGG because of how the iconography managed to transcend all of the rules problems and make such a complex game comprehensible for the average player.

Some rules-writing still remains in the dark ages - particularly from new and indie titles - but my sense is that there has been a general improvement in rules-writing technology. And that has allowed some really bleeding edge ideas to come into fruition like 504's spiral rule book - which has 3 flip sections that allow you to combine several different modules into 504 different permutations (and hence play 504 different games!). Compared to Betrayal's scenario booklet that was over a hundred pages long, the 504 modules were contained in only 9 pages (of 3 sections a piece, for 27 total pieces) of rules.

[Daniel]

DSA 5 does have prostitute as a profession in the corebook.
http://www.f-shop.de/media/image/thumbn ... 20x600.jpg

Ofcourse in DSA you don't get xp for fucking.
While in FATAL prostitutes are decidedly less likely to ever learn combat magic than in DSA.

[Rasumichin]

It is like D&D in that you need 3 books to run the game.

I wish. But no, DSA can't be as "easy" as that.
You actually needed six books in DSA4. One book with chargen and skill rules, one book with combat rules, one book with arcane magic rules, one book with divine magic-but-not-actually-magic rules, one book with setting description and a monster manual.
Of course, the monster manual was mostly a treatise on mundane animals and a description of various herbs for healing, poisoning and getting high as fuck. But no demons or chimeras or ghosts or golems or elementals or elmental golems because these are in the arcane magic rules. Because DSA simultaneously wants epic, world-threatening demon apocalypses and picturesque down to earth basket weaver stories about your not-Brasilian former plantation slave collecting black lotus and ingredients for ayahuasca in the jungle.

That's why DSA4 had a basic rules book that included a bit of chargen, skill, combat and arcane rules, a brief setting description and a small selection of humanoids, monsters, animals and herbs.
So, a bit of everything besides clerics, but clerics sucked in DSA4 anyway. All in all, the DSA4 basic rulebook a crunchy, but halfway reasonable package that you could actually play with. I'd say it worked a lot better than the madness-inducing full set of 6 shelfbreaker books.

But that basic rules book became entirely redundant as soon as you bought the full rules. So people where unhappy with that and viewed the full set of 6 books as the only valid way to play DSA.
Except that nobody bothered with the single shelf breaker of setting description, because that one also became redundant as soon as you bought all the thirteen 200 page + hardcovers with in-depth setting description.

If you wanted the full DSA experience (which you had to want, because the grognards would fly into full autistic rage mode if you got a minor detail about not-Arabian half-mage belly dancers or the psychedelic wood elf hive mind wrong), you needed to fight your way through about 1400 pages of rules and about 3000 pages of setting description.

And that's just the basic stuff. It does not include the 12 faux leather crystal dragon jesus bibles, the in-setting cookbook, the expansions for more demonology, alchemy and elemental magic, the various wizard college sourcebooks or the unworkable trade simulation rules and all the other shovelware that's part of the DSA business model of milking bibliophile grognards for money.

I don't know how DSA5 will partition that monstrous demand for more details, but it's a given that the three "core books" will not be the full package by any stretch of the imagination.
It seems they have avoided the problem of the core book becoming redundant with the expansions, but they have not avoided the problem that playing DSA "correctly" is about the same amount of work as getting a liberal arts degree.

The DSA 5 basic rules also lack the rules for at least 2 common DSA magic user types (Druids and Schelmen).

Demanding the inclusion of magical changeling pranksters who have a reputation comparable to pookahs and fishmalks is something i'd absolutely subsume under "people complaining that there's not enough bullshit rules". Not because i have any problem with Schelmen, but simply because of the amount of page and conceptual space you have to waste to write up a magical tradition in DSA 2-5.

When every tradition of spellcasters has their own spell list, most of which other casters will never learn, and their own rituals, artifacts and other gimmicks, which are even more exclusive to them, it takes up a lot of page count to give you a bare minimum of options to generate and advance a DSA caster. And that's just the full casters - there's also half-mages and quarter-mages who do crap like magical belly dancing.
And clerics work under a completely different subset of rules than arcane casters and each deity has a list of exclusive "spells" as well, and there's 12 major gods and a bunch of minor deities.
And most of the traditions have different sub-traditions, too, so ork shamans work completely different from ice barbarian shamans and both need their own five-page writeup for their comparatively tiny selection of shit that is brokenly useless compared to lizardman cristallomancers, wood elf treetop runners or other not-shitty traditions. And of course there's three dozen wizard academies and different witch covens and different sects of druids and a different tradition of dwarven druids and different kinds of changeling pranksters and different magical elven artisans from songsmiths to glacier shapers and they all have their own spell list, too.

It's all insanely granular and so horribly caught up in details that you develop a clinical case of OCD just reading this crap.
It's downright impossible to squeeze all of that in one book that includes anything else besides magic rules. The DSA4 magic rules where a shelf annihilator with 432 pages - and that included no divine casters at all, because they had their own book and the mechanics for how they did supernatural shit had absolutely nothing in common with arcane casters.

You can't port more than the tiniest fraction of that into the core rules of a new edition. There is absolutely and most definitely no other choice but to cut things down to the bare minimum. The most essential types of casters and their most essential abilities. And you have to streamline everything unless you want to end up in the same hot mess as DSA4.
They tried that, but failed utterly. Nobody needs grey mages from Lowangen or toad witches in the core rules, but there they are, wasting space. The obvious complaint would be to ask for less. What they have for conjuration, alchemy and artifact crafting is nothing but a useless teaser for the expanded magic rules. They may as well have left it out entirely so that new players need one semester less to wrap their mind around this incomprehensible behemoth of a game.

Why they included clerics of Hesinde is also beyond me. Playing a cleric of an eldritch horror posing as the goddess of education is fringe even by DSA standards. When your selection of clerics already covers paladins, inquisitors, healers, divine cleptomaniac libertarians and prophetic death cultists, it's batshit crazy to waste even more page count and conceptual space on a cleric who uses the powers of a reptilian elder god to alphabetize dirt farmers and buff library research.
The only thing more crazy than that is to complain that there's no rules for clerics of the minor demigod of polymaths and wisecracking or for quarter-mages who use their bullshit dilletante magic to buff leatherworking skill checks. But of course, there's insane pigfuckers who whine about that, too.
It's like being upset that a new edition of V:tM doesn't include Salubri antitribu or Daughters of Cacophony in the core rules. No, worse: It's like crying bitch tears about the new V:tM core rules not including changelings and wraiths and mummies.

DSA is held hostage by grognards who are completely oblivious to the fact that the crushing amount of detail they have become addicted to creates massive entry barriers to new players. That's a problem for every established RPG, but the idiosyncrasies of DSA make that problem much, much worse than in other game lines. And any attempt to reduce that madness by streamlining things is met with retards going berzerk on the forums because muh flavor.

[name_here]

Why they included clerics of Hesinde is also beyond me. Playing a cleric of an eldritch horror posing as the goddess of education is fringe even by DSA standards. When your selection of clerics already covers paladins, inquisitors, healers, divine cleptomaniac libertarians and prophetic death cultists, it's batshit crazy to waste even more page count and conceptual space on a cleric who uses the powers of a reptilian elder god to alphabetize dirt farmers and buff library research.

That sounds hilarious and awesome. Someone go write this up for a sane rules system.

[Longes]

Well, you've just sold me on DSA setting. I only need to learn German now, and find a group.

[Prak]

DSA 5 does have prostitute as a profession in the corebook.
http://www.f-shop.de/media/image/thumbn ... 20x600.jpg

Ofcourse in DSA you don't get xp for fucking.
While in FATAL prostitutes are decidedly less likely to ever learn combat magic than in DSA.

That's why you multiclass.

Of course, I'm not sure any multiclassing in FATAL compares to the potential xp of a Berserker/Bandit/Assassin for raw abuse of the shitty xp system.

[Daniel]

Prak,
That you are willing to play a female in FATAL says something profound about you. But I don't know what it says.

[Daniel]

Rasumichin
In response to your passionate rant.

This is why if I am ever going to do DSA, it will be (relatively) soon, it will be 5th instead of 4th and I will make sure that I am the most autistic grognard at the table.

I disagree on 1 minor point. Adding a magic tradition in DSA does not take up any more space than a new spellcasting class in Pathfinder, or D&D. So that should not be an issue.

[Rasumichin]

I disagree on 1 minor point. Adding a magic tradition in DSA does not take up any more space than a new spellcasting class in Pathfinder, or D&D. So that should not be an issue.

One could argue that if you already have a shelfbreaker at hand, adding 10-20 more pages for two more writeups of fluff, special rules, artifacts, rituals and tradition-specific spells doesn't make much of a difference. But it also means you're stretching conceptual space even further, and that is a huge issue with DSA.
When you bring up changelings, that automatically means you bring up fairies and leave new players puzzled with yet another piece of the setting that isn't really explained to them. When you bring up druids, you bring up not-Gaia and the six elements and make everybody go "wait, why are there six of these and not four or five?" And if you're a DSA writer, you'll most likely make the mistake to bring up that there where originally seven elements and leave new players stranded in my head is full of fuck land.
The issue isn't so much that there's no room for the rules. It's about how many details you want to shove down people's throats. You and i know what a Schelm or a druid in DSA are and what their deal is. A new player doesn't. He's already left with questions about the mage guilds, the Twelfgods, the theological differences between mainstream religion and witchcraft, the culture of the elfs with its unique stance on authority, divinity and concepts like badoc and salasandra and so on. More traditions mean even more of these questions.
The same holds true to a lesser extend for any other character options. Each species, culture and variety of fighter or rogue that you include comes with questions attached to them, because these professions do not exist in a conceptual vacuum, but are all embedded within the setting.
If you give people rules for gladiators and tell them these can be found in the arenas of Fasar and Al'Anfa, you leave them puzzled as to what these places are and why they have blood sports when the rest of the continent doesn't. If you bring up prostitutes, you bring up the setting's morality - being a hooker is just much more of a big deal in Lowangen than in Belhanka, where people would only care if you're a classy and expensive courtesan or a toothless white lotus addict turning tricks for Selemian sour bread, whereas the Lowangian dualists would flip their shit if they saw a woman's ankle in public.
Anything you include is tied to other things that are not self-explanatory, because nothing in DSA is self-explanatory after 30 years of organic setting growth full of callbacks, easter eggs and inside jokes. That's something you have to keep in mind when you want a product that enables noobs to actually experience the setting with the book they just payed almost 50 € for. You have to make a selection of character options that reference each other instead of things outside the book so that you create a coherent starting point.
If you leave that out and get into the arcane secrets of the setting by introducing character concepts who are living examples of the antics of alien fey creatures who ruin people's lifes for shits and giggles, you only cater to your established demographic that demands all the previously available options ASAP. I don't think that's a wise decision for an RPG with mainstream appeal. Particularly not when said character concept is Aventuria's Malkavian and you inevitably have grognards flipping their shit because changelings are in and Sun Legionaires and Golgarites are not.

[Daniel]

The Forgotten Realms and Glorantha to name but 2 examples also have lots of dense background. You pick some content to start with and stick the rest in supplements later. DSA is not unusual, or even all that complicated in that regard.
What you stick in first is to a certain extent arbitrary. 5th has witches, but not druids. If I had been the line developer of 5th it might have been the other way around. Or I might have put 5 magic traditions and what a dark eye (the magic item) is in, instead of only 3 traditions and not cover ritual magic, alchemy, half elves and a bunch of cultures.

[Prak]

Prak,
That you are willing to play a female in FATAL says something profound about you. But I don't know what it says.

Actually, thinking about this stuff about FATAL on this thread yesterday, it made me sort of want to overhaul FATAL with a sledgehammer to make a decent hentai game.

I don't think there'd really be a whole lot remaining of actual FATAL other than xp for fucking, though.