Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2020 1:37 am
EDIT: Unproductive comment.
I ask that question every time a community I'm in dies, and not once have I ever gotten an answer for that. I'm starting to suspect that people just fuck off to their Discords where they have more control over the content people post. Because fuck archiving information, I guess.Aryxbez wrote:Anyway, who else have we lost, what is the current state of things here, and worst case, where should we migrate to?
There's frankly an enormous amount of RPG design related resources outside of the Den. Not to mention a much larger growth of game design discussion in general - particularly video and board game design.Aryxbez wrote:where should we migrate to?
Since this is something you commonly do, would you have some examples of websites, and resources outside of the den that are particularly good? I am also interested in these forums you speak of as well.Zinegata wrote:There's frankly an enormous amount of RPG design related resources outside of the Den. Not to mention a much larger growth of game design discussion in general - particularly video and board game design.Aryxbez wrote:where should we migrate to?
A lot of the places Denners have traditionally shit upon are actually much better now especially in terms of design critique. Folks actually bring up things like actual math/probability tables in RPG.net nowadays.
Citation Fvcking Needed.And that's because contrary to popular belief, there's actually a glut - rather than a shortage - of competent designers in the market now. Lots of folks in fact understand how to put the math together and make a game. The shortage is instead in the creative ideas / marketing section - because with so many games coming out it's very hard to make one "stand out".
RPG.net:Aryxbez wrote:Since this is something you commonly do, would you have some examples of websites, and resources outside of the den that are particularly good? I am also interested in these forums you speak of as well.
First of all - in the tabletop RPG space there are now so many new releases that the second most-played RPG in the 2020 report of Roll 20 (an online RPG tabletop tool) was "Uncategorized"Citation Fvcking Needed.
Wow, you're terrified of a subreddit that "Basically talks mostly about the same stuff as the Den does, except with less circling over the same damn things over and over again and with a fair bit more activity." Really?The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I'd rather choke on a thousand barrels of cocks before even looking at that subreddit, to say nothing of actually posting on it.
Why so hostile? Give the devil his due, Zinegata actually provided resources when asked. Has r/RPGdesign pissed in your cheerios or something?The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I'd rather choke on a thousand barrels of cocks before even looking at that subreddit, to say nothing of actually posting on it.
I don't usually play tradRPGs for tactical combat, but Lancer had a pretty impressive tactical engine with plenty of room for interesting classes and builds. They did a pretty decent job of sectioning that off from the non-combat systems too, though I think a hacker mech with a friendly robo-brain probably gives you more out of combat power than a bighuge melee mech that has to be manned.Orion wrote:Those are all on the story-game side of the fence, of course, but I actually think these games have lessons and mechanics that the D&D / Shadowrun / "Trad" game playing market would do well to incorporate. And even on the trad side of the fence things are not all doom and gloom. There are things about 5th edition that frustrate me, but it is not a strict downgrade from 3rd edition. It does a lot of things better, it does some things worse, and of course it has incommensurable differences in priorities from 3rd edition. I think it's pretty clear that if modern-day WOTC wanted to make a 3rd-like game, they would make something better than 3rd edition.
Just a rejoinder - my "inside info" consists of the tabletop industry as a whole, not just RPGs. Indeed at this point we only carry very few RPG books (5E D&D).Orion wrote:I also share Zinegata's opinion that the waterline for commercial products is rising. The huge number of releases doesn't inherently prove anything since they could all be drek, but in fact I've seen a lot of new games I consider pretty good coming out in the past few years.
An important trend to note here: A big reason why pen-and-paper RPGs have moved steadily towards the "story game side" is because of the emerging popularity of the Dungeon Crawl boardgame genre.Those are all on the story-game side of the fence, of course, but I actually think these games have lessons and mechanics that the D&D / Shadowrun / "Trad" game playing market would do well to incorporate.
Ehhhhhh.Orion wrote:There are things about 5th edition that frustrate me, but it is not a strict downgrade from 3rd edition. It does a lot of things better, it does some things worse, and of course it has incommensurable differences in priorities from 3rd edition. I think it's pretty clear that if modern-day WOTC wanted to make a 3rd-like game, they would make something better than 3rd edition.
Here’s the thing though: Trad RPGs don’t exist in a bubble. Indeed, during their heyday they shared the spotlight with traditional chit-and-hexes wargames.Emerald wrote: So while we're almost certainly in a Tabletop Golden Age for board games, and RPG design spaces like RPG.net, EnWorld, Reddit, and such are generally all-in on 5e, OSRs, rules-light games, and their ilk, I'd say the field is pretty barren when it comes to rules-heavy/"traditional" RPGs.
Thing is, there's no way to avoid GMs needing a how-to guide before a session, no matter how heavy or light a game is*. Someone who hasn't played an RPG before isn't going to intuitively know how to run the PCs through a given scenario with the given game rules, whether that's a dungeon crawl in D&D, a Matrix infiltration in Shadowrun, a dinner party in Fate, or a seduction attempt in Blue Rose.Zinegata wrote:In the same vein, needing an entire how-to-guide for DMs just to start a session shouldn’t be exactly seen as a “feature”; and it’s very likely why the articles you link describe it as a “lost art”. If given a choice, I suspect most people would rather NOT have to invest the time and effort to learn the art of DMing in favor of just playing Gloomhaven.
Cook did nothing of the sort, as the oft-repeated "ivory tower game design" thing almost always misquoted or misinterpreted. The article was not claiming that the designers deliberately built imbalances into the game, mwahaha, but rather that they (A) weren't going out of their way to prioritize balance over carrying 2e stuff forward ("Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away") and (B) could have done a better job of signalling the intent behind different rules items ("[The Toughness feat is] also handy when you know you're playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don't want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).").Finally, I have to say that in the context of trad RPGs I would say that it is at best an exaggeration to say 3.0 cared about math or mechanical rigor all that much. Cook for instance was infamous for explicitly making gimped feats and making Fighters far weaker than spellcasters.
It doesn't matter that CfNA isn't actually a sublimely accurate wargame the likes of which shall never be seen again, what matters is that the designers did the research because they valued accuracy in the first place. One assumes that if you got the same design team together for CfNA 2: Saharan Boogaloo they would likewise create a well-researched yet imperfect game because they care about internal consistency and statistics and won't just throw math at the wall without testing or do whatever the wargame equivalent of "tell DMs to Rule 0 half the game" would be.That’s why I don’t agree with the idea that nobody can design a “trad” RPG anymore - because people make the same claims about chit-and-hexes wargames too. Wargaming grognards for instance still keep claiming that Campaign for North Africa is the most exhaustively researched wargame ever and we’ll never see its like again... when in reality the designers had already admitted years ago that they made up a lot of stuff when designing the game such as the infamous rule where the Italians were penalized for not having water to boil their pasta rations (in reality, the designers found in their research that the Italians performed far better than commonly thought; but they had to make the Italians look incompetent to pander to their audience).
Seems pretty cut and dry. Some stuff was deliberately worse than other stuff.Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.
First off, I'm not ignoring the rest of your reply out of a desire to dismiss your points. You make a lot of good ones.Emerald wrote:It doesn't matter that CfNA isn't actually a sublimely accurate wargame the likes of which shall never be seen again, what matters is that the designers did the research because they valued accuracy in the first place.