The Gaming Den

Welcome to Tome Island!

And now what you've all been waiting for...

The second part!

"Tonights rant: Why fighters can't have nice things to stab goblins in the face with"

Only problem is, I don't think Frank and K can do enough puns per second.

Also, did anyone else like "Welcome to Lodoss Island" way more than the actual show besides me?

Monte Cook is not a good game writer. I read Book of Experimental Might. Both of them.

Also, this thread has provided material which has spawned "303 posts and 63 image replies omitted." This pleases me immensely.

link? even if just in pm?
...apparently I need to do more than just lurk b...

God I'd love for Wizards to ditch 4th's obsession with World of Warcraft play mechanics. In fact, I wish the owners of the D&D IP would fire every person who tries to rip off an idea from WoW mechanics shamelessly, and then blackball them from the industry. Never happen, but I can dream can't I?

Also, I have to second jumping on Wizards for not really advertising their products. I didn't even *hear* about the tome until 4th ed had already been released for some time, when other folks were discussing it. Might have been useful to have known about. Granted, I wasn't following any of the D&D news tributaries; I was playing different games at that point, but I *would* have gotten back into it if I had heard of a overhaul of whack-bonk characters. My LGS didn't tell me, I didn't hear either way through word of mouth, I got nothing. Major fail.

At this point, I think D&D is the only major RPG out there that is releasing huge, untested swaths of rules and errata every few weeks. It feels like nobody there knows what the f*ck to do and they're in panic mode and just spewing whatever out that they can. It *has* sullied Wizards' reputation as a game design company, to the point where for 5th edition, they might want to spin off a new company and "license" D&D to them, just to get rid of the bad WotC Dev stink associated with the current dev team.

This might be a bit off topic, but:

FrankTrollman wrote:

Give character classes lots of choices

Token explosion

What does "token explosion" mean?

RobbyPants wrote:This might be a bit off topic, but:

FrankTrollman wrote:

Give character classes lots of choices

Token explosion

What does "token explosion" mean?

Each base class in Iron Heroes has a separate pool of "tokens" (i.e. points for powering that class's powers) that they can build up in some way. So if you multiclass, you can end up with a whole mess o' different tokens to keep track of.

The sad thing is, the system would have been much cooler if the classes had a common pool of tokens. But nope, Mike Mearls wants you to play Iron Heroes with a Poker Chip set handy .

As long as I get to say 'All in' at some point.

TheFlatline wrote:God I'd love for Wizards to ditch 4th's obsession with World of Warcraft play mechanics. In fact, I wish the owners of the D&D IP would fire every person who tries to rip off an idea from WoW mechanics shamelessly, and then blackball them from the industry. Never happen, but I can dream can't I?

They should also ditch the Far Realm Lovecraftian ripoff and Dawn War Exalted ripoff. 4e has no originality in terms of mechanics and fluff.

DragonChild wrote:Also, did anyone else like "Welcome to Lodoss Island" way more than the actual show besides me?

As someone who grew up on the original 13-episode OAV, the TV series really pissed me off in a sort of nerd-rage, "I hate 4e" sort of way.

Lodoss Island was the only part of the show I liked, and that part I LURVED.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=451748

Okay, so THIS thread talks about translating an RPG and some of the challenges there-in.

One of the posters mentioned that it took them about 150 hours of work to do a translation of a 50-page document. And according to them, that was doing an extra-professional job where they did the pictures and went over everything.

It'd probably be too expensive to have your own in-house translators (and probably too dodgy, too, you wouldn't know how the translation went over until it got released), but for an RPG the size of D&D this could be extremely profitable. Imagine that it costs $15,000 to translate a book the size of the 4E PHB in three weeks and they sold overseas at some reasonable price like 40-45. You really would not have to sell that many copies to 'get over'.

The problems I forsee are mainly A) some markets will have TTRPG competition in them already like Japan and Germany (which means that you REALLY have to step up your game) and B) a bad or even mediocre translation will really, really hurt your bottom line. I cannot understate point B enough. If you have to pay an extra four-thousand dollars for a translation to get a translation of, say, B- to a plain ol' B, that's a huge bargain.

Translation is going to cost a couple of cents per word, and then you're going to have to do editing and layout over again at a couple cents per word for each. D&D books have as late allowed themselves to get way to long in the word count. But even if we pair it down to essentials, we're looking at something in the 100-200k range. Creating a set of printing proofs in Italian, Russian, or Chinese is gong to set you back somewhere between $6k and $20k. Then you can print it from scratch. I have no idea what a good print run is for the Chinese market. Seriously, none at all.

TOZ wrote:As long as I get to say 'All in' at some point.

No. The tokens are used to buy various actions. Multiclassed people don't ever get to trade all their tokens in, because there is no token transparency between classes. Single classed characters can sometimes say "All in" when the cost of an action they are buying is exactly equal to the size of the token pile they happen to have.

It's an incredibly terrible system actually. It got completely undeserved praise at the time because it laid out a set of (unrealized) design goals that people wanted to see completed. Differentiated sword-base heroes with open multiclassing between distinct martial classes who had diverse abilities and did not need to rely upon magic in order to complete challenges. Fuck yes. It's just that... IH did not actually deliver that, and never would. Because even if Mike Mearls tried to finish the project (which he himself admitted that he had not), ultimately many of the project directions were complete dead ends.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Creating a set of printing proofs in Italian, Russian, or Chinese is gong to set you back somewhere between $6k and $20k.

Here's the question, though. Is that 6-20K buckaroos the cost of a mediocre, decent, good, or excellent translation? And what's the marginal cost between the level of quality of those translations?

FrankTrollman wrote:

TOZ wrote:As long as I get to say 'All in' at some point.

No. The tokens are used to buy various actions. Multiclassed people don't ever get to trade all their tokens in, because there is no token transparency between classes. Single classed characters can sometimes say "All in" when the cost of an action they are buying is exactly equal to the size of the token pile they happen to have.

It's an incredibly terrible system actually. It got completely undeserved praise at the time because it laid out a set of (unrealized) design goals that people wanted to see completed. Differentiated sword-base heroes with open multiclassing between distinct martial classes who had diverse abilities and did not need to rely upon magic in order to complete challenges. Fuck yes. It's just that... IH did not actually deliver that, and never would. Because even if Mike Mearls tried to finish the project (which he himself admitted that he had not), ultimately many of the project directions were complete dead ends.

-Username17

But if tokens were more like the power points of psionics, where you get 3 from being a bug man, psychic warrior gives a few, and psion gives more, and you can do shit like take Aberrant Mind to get more, and so on, it would be better?

I'm guessing Complete Token Transparency is more the way to go, and is the way I prefer, but I'd like to know what you're thinking.

Prak_Anima wrote:

sake wrote:Better idea would be doing a cartoon series. Between Hasbro and the D&D name req, I think you could probably get enough backing to pull it off. Make it a mix of action/adventure with a bit of comedy(actual comedy, not OotS style in jokes), pay some korean animation sweatshop to make it quasi anime style, and then stick it on Adult Swim. (that way you get the little kids, the teenagers, and 20 somethings watching it)

Oh and make it about the actual god damn iconic characters and setting. That way it would help build interest in the world, make people actually give a shit about your Iconics as characters rather than just some random people that keep showing up in your book's artwork, and even give new players a direction to go in when they start playing ("Ooo! I wanna be Jozen but with bow", or "Can I play a mage like Mailee, only female?") rather than being being overwelmed by all the choices.

now you have me curious about the viability of a Tome cartoon, that ends every episode, or story arch, or whatever, with a little cartoon Frank or K ranting about something...

Strangely enough, we have been asked on occasion by people to podcast our hours long conversations about gaming by people who walk in on the middle of them.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Here's the question, though. Is that 6-20K buckaroos the cost of a mediocre, decent, good, or excellent translation? And what's the marginal cost between the level of quality of those translations?

I can say for a Russian translation: mediocre with islands of decent, maybe, unless you find fans that are willing to put their hearts and souls into a project while being paid as for average technical translation drudgework.

K wrote:Strangely enough, we have been asked on occasion by people to podcast our hours long conversations about gaming by people who walk in on the middle of them.

That isn't strange at all. Although I'd rather see it as a Microsoft Cartoon Chat log.

Prak_Anima wrote:
But if tokens were more like the power points of psionics, where you get 3 from being a bug man, psychic warrior gives a few, and psion gives more, and you can do shit like take Aberrant Mind to get more, and so on, it would be better?

I'm guessing Complete Token Transparency is more the way to go, and is the way I prefer, but I'd like to know what you're thinking.

I don't even know what you are talking about.

Iron Heroes runs on a set of non-interactive power point reserves that are each charged, supercharged, and recharged in completely arbitrary ways. What I m "thinking" is that that set of subsystems was not salvageable and there is little point in even talking about it save to remind people that Mike Mearls was in fact always this bad.

-Username17

Prak_Anima wrote: But if tokens were more like the power points of psionics, where you get 3 from being a bug man, psychic warrior gives a few, and psion gives more, and you can do shit like take Aberrant Mind to get more, and so on, it would be better?

I'm guessing Complete Token Transparency is more the way to go, and is the way I prefer, but I'd like to know what you're thinking.

The problem there is that the different classes gained tokens at different rates in different ways, and so you'd have instances where you completely ignored a class' token generation ability and feed the class abilities from another class' token generation.

Now, if you actually *did* rip of power points, and just give each character class X number of points per level per day to spend on class abilities, with a few innate class abilities here and there to generate say one or two power points, then multiclassing works fine.

Iron Heroes seems to me to work far better with a Winds of Fate style system than what was generated. It was a really interesting concept, one that I would have loved to have gamed with, but I've never gamed with it, and probably never will. It's a huge paperwork mess, so I can't even get into gameplay to *see* how broken it is. I mean, it's a system practically begging for a straight up Greek Mythology game, and had the system worked, would have actually delivered mechanics akin to the mythos.

I'm saying "what about just a pool of points, they're all the same kind, and each class uses them, so you don't get paladin points and knight points, you just get points and paladin, knight and wizard abilities all use them."

Prak_Anima wrote:I'm saying "what about just a pool of points, they're all the same kind, and each class uses them, so you don't get paladin points and knight points, you just get points and paladin, knight and wizard abilities all use them."

So you're talking Final Fantasy Tactics / Chronotrigger style SP?

Such systems are kind of a lot of bookkeeping. They work OK for CRPGs because the processor subtracts the points for you. They work less well in table top, where a WoF (such as dice or a literal deck of cards) or power charges (like spell prep or eve 4e powers) work a lot better. Having more than 20 or so power points is a real drain.

-Username17

Prak_Anima wrote:I'm saying "what about just a pool of points, they're all the same kind, and each class uses them, so you don't get paladin points and knight points, you just get points and paladin, knight and wizard abilities all use them."

The Iron Heroes tokens each get recharged in a different way (e.g. one class might recharge tokens by getting punched in the face, and another class might recharge tokens by using a standard action to aim better). So it would be slightly weird to have a wizard who recovers spells by getting punched in the face.

FatR wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Here's the question, though. Is that 6-20K buckaroos the cost of a mediocre, decent, good, or excellent translation? And what's the marginal cost between the level of quality of those translations?

I can say for a Russian translation: mediocre with islands of decent, maybe, unless you find fans that are willing to put their hearts and souls into a project while being paid as for average technical translation drudgework.

According to that Sword World RPG thread I linked earlier a technical-quality translation for legal documents costs like 20 cents a word. That is of course in Japanese.

Meaning that if you wanted to have an excellent-quality translation of a 150k word, RPG book, it would cost you... 30K to translate to Japanese, which means that you'd need to sell about 1.5K books to break even. But really, you should be able to sell six-thousand copies of a D&D book easily--especially if you already paid for ahead of time the high-quality artwork and playtesting. I don't know if it's more expensive to translate things in Russian.

I mean, it's doable for the major languages and certainly within the price range of anyone rich enough to own D&D IP. You would just need not to sell an ass product.