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Jacob_Orlove
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You mean the set they'd rather forget about and is considered to be their all-time low in terms of design?Jacob_Orlove wrote:Even if we ignore sets like Tempest and Mercadian Masques that feature the Weatherlight characters in new planes, or sets like Legends that include stuff from tons of different planes at once (like Segovia), there's still Homelands.
But, again, I'm not saying that Magic didn't say that other planes didn't exist before Kamigawa. The game is subtitled Duel of the Planewalkers after all. But the focus of the fluff had pretty much been on the Weatherlight crew and its overall effect on Dominara right until Kamigawa.
Magic pre-Kamigawa/Mirrodin was basically "The Adventures of a crew of Forgotten Realms misfits across random lands", whereas post Kamigawa the fluff resembles Manual of the Planes much more.
Put it another way - Magic didn't really focus on the world fluff until Kamigawa/Mirrodin to make the kind of setting source books Frank had proposed.
Last edited by Zinegata on Thu May 20, 2010 7:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Username17
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Legends, Dark, and Fallen Empires all had nothing to do with the Weatherlight crew. The connections tying everyone together into a happy family of legendary adventurers with flying boats was a later addition. Magic went for years with no continuity between characters in different sets. The idea that the same people were involved in each one was a retcon.
The original default was that there were different countries and races in every set. The original basic set had White mostly set in Benal, while in Ice Age the White kingdom was Kjeldor. The whole idea of a unified setting was invented in 1996 for Mirage. And for fuck's sake, Mirrodin happened before Kamigawa.
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The original default was that there were different countries and races in every set. The original basic set had White mostly set in Benal, while in Ice Age the White kingdom was Kjeldor. The whole idea of a unified setting was invented in 1996 for Mirage. And for fuck's sake, Mirrodin happened before Kamigawa.
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They were also all single sets rather than an entire block, which is why info for those settings is pretty thin.FrankTrollman wrote:Legends, Dark, and Fallen Empires all had nothing to do with the Weatherlight crew. The connections tying everyone together into a happy family of legendary adventurers with flying boats was a later addition. Magic went for years with no continuity between characters in different sets. The idea that the same people were involved in each one was a retcon.
Only Fallen Empires is honestly closest to being convertible into a "setting book", and only because it deals with the relationship between a whole bunch of races who don't like each other. I don't recall if Fallen Empires was originally a Dominara set though or it was just retconned into becoming a southern continent.
Edit: I checked around and the promo text all refer to the Brother's War, so it really was meant to be part of the same plane. Making Fallen Empires more of a nation/region book ala Forgotten Realms.
Um, nope. Ice Age was explicitly set in Dominara from the get-go. I read the manual for the starter setThe original default was that there were different countries and races in every set. The original basic set had White mostly set in Benal, while in Ice Age the White kingdom was Kjeldor. The whole idea of a unified setting was invented in 1996 for Mirage.
. Ice Age did feature different countries though, yes, but largely because the previous ones were supposedly wiped out.*sigh*And for fuck's sake, Mirrodin happened before Kamigawa.
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Stop being an ass.Zinegata wrote:(Well, okay, Mirrodin - the set prior to Kamigawa - was technically the first "whole new world" thing
Last edited by Zinegata on Thu May 20, 2010 8:57 am, edited 6 times in total.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Manual of the Planes: This book will be written pretty much just like it was in 3E. No changes here.
Oriental Adventures: Pretty much just like it was in 3E, too.
Epic-Level Handbook: Obviously the mechanics of the book will be much changed. And a greater emphasis will be made on coming up with suitably-epic adventures for the PCs (there will have to be TWO adventures, one for starting epic characters and another for epic + 3-5 levels). The NPC list was a fine idea, but a little less wanking would be nice.
Book of Vile Darkness: Also pretty much the same. However, there should be less of an emphasis on gross-out and more of an emphasis on grimdark. Less Drakengard, more Vampire.
Arms and Equipment Guide: Obviously, there will still be some magical items and mounts and combat equipment and all that to slake the thirst of powergamers. However, there will also be a lot of stuff in the book about just generic items in GENERAL. Stuff like ships, the price of blocks of salt, plenty of information on traps, and obscure-but-fun items to have in it like the spyglass and sextant.
Enemies and Allies: I made a thread stating the changes that would have to be made, but definitely have one of these books out.
Stronghold Builder's Guide: The iteration of this book for 5th Edition should be a lot like the 3E version. However, there needs to be more of an emphasis made on strongholds or buildings accessible to low-level heroes. There's no reason why a 4th level (out of 20) hero shouldn't have a nice wooden fortress armed with competent guards if they really care about such a thing.
Unearthed Arcana: This book obviously needs to come near the end of 5E's lifecycle. Basically this book is a compilation of houserules and playtest feedback accumulated throughout the edition.
Deities and Demigods: Less wanking to invincible supergods, more wrestling Amon to the ground and giving him a shot in the pills. Awww yeah boy.
Cityscape: Sort of like the 3E book, but completely different. You can read in this very thread the fail of this sourcebook and the suggestions for what it should be.
Maltheopia: This book will be the 'evil' counterpart to Cityscape. This book will have a bunch of stuff on living and surviving in evil cities (especially as a good character). There will be lots of suggestions for antagonists and organizations one might expect in Killfuck Soulshitterville. There will also be a lot of evil-city threats such as urban wendigos.
Wildlands: For our terrain books, writing compellingly about grasslands and wastelands is probably the hardest. So instead of wanking to the terrain, this is the book where we build and describe a fictional empire. In this thread I talked about creating an evil barbarian empire. This book will be primarily highlighting whatever we come up with here and will take great pains to detail about how savage and exotic the culture is.
Silent Desert: Like Sandstorm, but a little less ass. Like Wildlands, there is only inherently so much you can do to make the Saharan desert interesting so this book will mostly focus on the cool shit you can find in deserts and the organizations rather than the desert itself. I know you can talk about other deserts like the American West but we're saving that for another book.
Frozen Frontier: Like Frostburn, but a little less ass. You can do significantly more with the terrain in this setting than the other two because you also have shit like forests and mountains and underground ice palaces to talk about.
Field of Blades: This book should focus on fantasy warfare. Remember that blurb at the back of Complete Warrior that deconstructs typical European medieval-fighting with D&D mechanics? Like this; the book should give the whole Bronze/Iron Age wars the old D&D once-over. I'm talking artwork of goblins-on-worgs shooting down a fleeing troupe of halflings who had their line busted while gnomes prepare an alchemy ambush. In the very likely event that we don't get a good mass-combat minigame working in the basic rulebooks, it should go in here.
Forever Forest: Our (duh) forest book. This should be the easiest book to write because when you think of standard fantasy terrain, you think of fucking forests. Also you can have some swamps all up in here, too.
New Horizons: In this book we introduce some Steampunky Gaslamp Fantasy elements to the game. It's a new era and shit, airships are being built, people experiment with democracy seriously, and horror of horrors we actually have GUNS and shit! Oh, the humanity! But basically this book is supposed to be the setting which highlights a fictional transition from the Late Medieval Europe to Late Reinassance Europe. The theme of the book is almost completely exterminating the points of darkness still remaining in the world what with science and population growth and all and the focus on exploring the last frontiers.
Apocalypto: Blatant thumb in the eye to Mel Gibson aside, this book details either the coming of an apocalypse or the revival of society from a near-apocalypse. I don't mean shit like the Roman Empire collapsing; those aren't apocalypses because even though a lot of knowledge was lost and people ended up worse off, it's not like civilization went away. No, I'm talking shit like fantasy global warming or the zombie apocalypse gets out of hand. One part of the book will have a Grimdark tone to it which is pretty much your heroes determined to go down fighting or save their small sector of civilization. The second part of the book will be recovering from one of the aforementioned apocalypses; it's all Points of Darkness now and civilization is being to recover and make contact with pockets of survivors.
Awakening the Earth: So, everyone loves the Underdark. It's so goddamn popular that they made at least three D&D games which more-or-less featured the Underdark. But Underdark is a Forgotten Realms-ish concept. Whatever, we just won't refer to it. We WILL have a book that's all about the kinds of heinous shit that you can see underground like dorf fortresses and drow S&M pits and worse.
Heavenscape: People just LOVE ruins and temples that are decked out with golden fountains and ivory pillars and cherubic statues that piss out eggnog that never goes back. So we should have these. But how do you justify these things in a world where Steve the Crap-Covered Farmer gets called a ponce by his peers for bathing and changing his clothes too often? Simple, you put them in unreachable spots most people can't get to. Most of these things will be taking place on the heavenly planes (hey, blatant tie-in to Manual of the Planes), but there's no reason why you can't have these things in Dreamland, the Astral Plane, or even the frickin' CLOUDS.
Nightmare Necropolis: I know you want a book all about zombies and ghouls and ghosts and shit. Undead rock my billy socks and they're also really easy to write about, too. So they have the distinction of getting a A-tier book all to themselves when no other race does. Suck on that, dragons. Hey, remember earlier when I talked about not having an American West desert for the Silent Desert? Copypaste it here. You can have shit like skeleton coyotes and zombified purple worms and Indian Graveyards (retrofitted as not to offend fantasy sensibilities of course) and all that shit. Righteous.
Adventurer's Guild Log: Okay, have you been paying attention to your product for the past 5-6 years? You fucking better have, otherwise you need a new job. But regardless, THIS book compiles all of the most popular adventures and modules undertaken over the lifespan of this edition into a 'Greatest Hits'. This means that the most popular/contest-winning adventures at conventions goes in here. This means that this book will have a fucking Tomb of Horrors and a Red Hand of Doom adventure in it (one will focus on massively unfair Trial and Error Gameplay, the other on min-maxxing and rules mastery).
Oriental Adventures: Pretty much just like it was in 3E, too.
Epic-Level Handbook: Obviously the mechanics of the book will be much changed. And a greater emphasis will be made on coming up with suitably-epic adventures for the PCs (there will have to be TWO adventures, one for starting epic characters and another for epic + 3-5 levels). The NPC list was a fine idea, but a little less wanking would be nice.
Book of Vile Darkness: Also pretty much the same. However, there should be less of an emphasis on gross-out and more of an emphasis on grimdark. Less Drakengard, more Vampire.
Arms and Equipment Guide: Obviously, there will still be some magical items and mounts and combat equipment and all that to slake the thirst of powergamers. However, there will also be a lot of stuff in the book about just generic items in GENERAL. Stuff like ships, the price of blocks of salt, plenty of information on traps, and obscure-but-fun items to have in it like the spyglass and sextant.
Enemies and Allies: I made a thread stating the changes that would have to be made, but definitely have one of these books out.
Stronghold Builder's Guide: The iteration of this book for 5th Edition should be a lot like the 3E version. However, there needs to be more of an emphasis made on strongholds or buildings accessible to low-level heroes. There's no reason why a 4th level (out of 20) hero shouldn't have a nice wooden fortress armed with competent guards if they really care about such a thing.
Unearthed Arcana: This book obviously needs to come near the end of 5E's lifecycle. Basically this book is a compilation of houserules and playtest feedback accumulated throughout the edition.
Deities and Demigods: Less wanking to invincible supergods, more wrestling Amon to the ground and giving him a shot in the pills. Awww yeah boy.
Cityscape: Sort of like the 3E book, but completely different. You can read in this very thread the fail of this sourcebook and the suggestions for what it should be.
Maltheopia: This book will be the 'evil' counterpart to Cityscape. This book will have a bunch of stuff on living and surviving in evil cities (especially as a good character). There will be lots of suggestions for antagonists and organizations one might expect in Killfuck Soulshitterville. There will also be a lot of evil-city threats such as urban wendigos.
Wildlands: For our terrain books, writing compellingly about grasslands and wastelands is probably the hardest. So instead of wanking to the terrain, this is the book where we build and describe a fictional empire. In this thread I talked about creating an evil barbarian empire. This book will be primarily highlighting whatever we come up with here and will take great pains to detail about how savage and exotic the culture is.
Silent Desert: Like Sandstorm, but a little less ass. Like Wildlands, there is only inherently so much you can do to make the Saharan desert interesting so this book will mostly focus on the cool shit you can find in deserts and the organizations rather than the desert itself. I know you can talk about other deserts like the American West but we're saving that for another book.
Frozen Frontier: Like Frostburn, but a little less ass. You can do significantly more with the terrain in this setting than the other two because you also have shit like forests and mountains and underground ice palaces to talk about.
Field of Blades: This book should focus on fantasy warfare. Remember that blurb at the back of Complete Warrior that deconstructs typical European medieval-fighting with D&D mechanics? Like this; the book should give the whole Bronze/Iron Age wars the old D&D once-over. I'm talking artwork of goblins-on-worgs shooting down a fleeing troupe of halflings who had their line busted while gnomes prepare an alchemy ambush. In the very likely event that we don't get a good mass-combat minigame working in the basic rulebooks, it should go in here.
Forever Forest: Our (duh) forest book. This should be the easiest book to write because when you think of standard fantasy terrain, you think of fucking forests. Also you can have some swamps all up in here, too.
New Horizons: In this book we introduce some Steampunky Gaslamp Fantasy elements to the game. It's a new era and shit, airships are being built, people experiment with democracy seriously, and horror of horrors we actually have GUNS and shit! Oh, the humanity! But basically this book is supposed to be the setting which highlights a fictional transition from the Late Medieval Europe to Late Reinassance Europe. The theme of the book is almost completely exterminating the points of darkness still remaining in the world what with science and population growth and all and the focus on exploring the last frontiers.
Apocalypto: Blatant thumb in the eye to Mel Gibson aside, this book details either the coming of an apocalypse or the revival of society from a near-apocalypse. I don't mean shit like the Roman Empire collapsing; those aren't apocalypses because even though a lot of knowledge was lost and people ended up worse off, it's not like civilization went away. No, I'm talking shit like fantasy global warming or the zombie apocalypse gets out of hand. One part of the book will have a Grimdark tone to it which is pretty much your heroes determined to go down fighting or save their small sector of civilization. The second part of the book will be recovering from one of the aforementioned apocalypses; it's all Points of Darkness now and civilization is being to recover and make contact with pockets of survivors.
Awakening the Earth: So, everyone loves the Underdark. It's so goddamn popular that they made at least three D&D games which more-or-less featured the Underdark. But Underdark is a Forgotten Realms-ish concept. Whatever, we just won't refer to it. We WILL have a book that's all about the kinds of heinous shit that you can see underground like dorf fortresses and drow S&M pits and worse.
Heavenscape: People just LOVE ruins and temples that are decked out with golden fountains and ivory pillars and cherubic statues that piss out eggnog that never goes back. So we should have these. But how do you justify these things in a world where Steve the Crap-Covered Farmer gets called a ponce by his peers for bathing and changing his clothes too often? Simple, you put them in unreachable spots most people can't get to. Most of these things will be taking place on the heavenly planes (hey, blatant tie-in to Manual of the Planes), but there's no reason why you can't have these things in Dreamland, the Astral Plane, or even the frickin' CLOUDS.
Nightmare Necropolis: I know you want a book all about zombies and ghouls and ghosts and shit. Undead rock my billy socks and they're also really easy to write about, too. So they have the distinction of getting a A-tier book all to themselves when no other race does. Suck on that, dragons. Hey, remember earlier when I talked about not having an American West desert for the Silent Desert? Copypaste it here. You can have shit like skeleton coyotes and zombified purple worms and Indian Graveyards (retrofitted as not to offend fantasy sensibilities of course) and all that shit. Righteous.
Adventurer's Guild Log: Okay, have you been paying attention to your product for the past 5-6 years? You fucking better have, otherwise you need a new job. But regardless, THIS book compiles all of the most popular adventures and modules undertaken over the lifespan of this edition into a 'Greatest Hits'. This means that the most popular/contest-winning adventures at conventions goes in here. This means that this book will have a fucking Tomb of Horrors and a Red Hand of Doom adventure in it (one will focus on massively unfair Trial and Error Gameplay, the other on min-maxxing and rules mastery).
Manual of the Planes: Planescape
Oriental Adventures: Rokugan / Legend of the Five Rings
Silent Desert: Al Qadim
Apocalypto: Dark Sun
Field of Blades: Dragonlance, though obviously we'll write it so that the book obfuscates the crap elements of the setting and hypes up the awesome/passable elements.
New Horizons: Eberron
Awakening the Earth: Underdark
Nightmare Necropolis: Ravenloft
Maltheopia: Relics and Rituals / Kingdoms of Kalamar
Cityscape and Forgotten Forests: Forgotten Realms
I'm intentionally leaving out Greyhawk, because Greyhawk sucks and will be replaced with whatever new fantasy setting that we come up with for 5E. The other settings at least have SOME independent interest in them and it doesn't hurt to devote a dozen or so pages towards some sidebar detailing crap about some company's fantasy heartbreaker setting.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Jacob_Orlove
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Zinegata wrote:The game is subtitled Duel of the Planewalkers after all.
Last edited by Jacob_Orlove on Fri May 21, 2010 5:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Dragonlance, Kalamar, Golrantha, and whatever the fuck else are basically just not even worth porting over. Each one is basically the Forgotten Realms with some country names changed to protect IP. Yes, there are people in the world who will purchase both Forgotten Realms and Krynn. Hell, there are people who hold out for Krynn alone. But as far as new players are concerned, they might as well be the same place. It's a Lodoss/Tolkien world where there are humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings and they go off to fight orcs and dragons. The fact that Minotaurs don't just talk in Krynn, but have an actual kingdom somewhere is not different enough for anyone to give a fuck. You could set an entire movie in a dungeon in Krynn or Faerun and no one would fucking know which one it was.
Now as far as Rokugan goes, I seriously don't know if Wizards has the rights to it any more. Certainly they don't have the right to keep AEG from printing stuff in it, so that's pretty much that. They have the kinds of money to use it if they want, but really they should just grab a world they own outright: Kamigawa. They hit all the important notes: samurai, bushi, Nezumi Ninja. Honestly, if you bring up the magnifying glass too closely on Rokugan, it's full of stupid. What it brings to the table is a battery of awesome art and some cool clans. Kamigawa brings that to the table as well.
-Username17
Now as far as Rokugan goes, I seriously don't know if Wizards has the rights to it any more. Certainly they don't have the right to keep AEG from printing stuff in it, so that's pretty much that. They have the kinds of money to use it if they want, but really they should just grab a world they own outright: Kamigawa. They hit all the important notes: samurai, bushi, Nezumi Ninja. Honestly, if you bring up the magnifying glass too closely on Rokugan, it's full of stupid. What it brings to the table is a battery of awesome art and some cool clans. Kamigawa brings that to the table as well.
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Lago PARANOIA
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I don't mean seriously supporting the settings, that's stupid. I mean giving the settings a shout-out in the sourcebook to make the fanboys squee and shut them up for awhile.FrankTrollman wrote: Dragonlance, Kalamar, Golrantha, and whatever the fuck else are basically just not even worth porting over.
I still firmly maintain that D&D 5E should release the campaign setting books of Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft and skim off the top.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Plus the whole "Humans vs Spirits" war thing.FrankTrollman wrote:Now as far as Rokugan goes, I seriously don't know if Wizards has the rights to it any more. Certainly they don't have the right to keep AEG from printing stuff in it, so that's pretty much that. They have the kinds of money to use it if they want, but really they should just grab a world they own outright: Kamigawa. They hit all the important notes: samurai, bushi, Nezumi Ninja. Honestly, if you bring up the magnifying glass too closely on Rokugan, it's full of stupid. What it brings to the table is a battery of awesome art and some cool clans. Kamigawa brings that to the table as well.
-Username17
Though, personally, Alara and Ravnica are really the most deserving of its own RPG campaign setting.
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Username17
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In that case, I provisionally agree. In keeping with the whole "Planeswalker" deal, players should be regaled with boxed text about all kinds of crazy settings in every book. And yeah, sure, throw Kenzer and Company a bone by letting them write a 200 word piece about some thing or another in their Kalamar world in most books. Why the fuck not? But your "Core setting" is going to be a Magic World.Lago PARANOIA wrote:I don't mean seriously supporting the settings, that's stupid. I mean giving the settings a shout-out in the sourcebook to make the fanboys squee and shut them up for awhile.FrankTrollman wrote: Dragonlance, Kalamar, Golrantha, and whatever the fuck else are basically just not even worth porting over.
I still firmly maintain that D&D 5E should release the campaign setting books of Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft and skim off the top.
So when you do Bane Mires which is all about Swamp Adventures and Undead and stuff, you release it during the Mirrodin block. And most of the world bits you reference are in Mirrodin. But you let the Kenzer boys write a bit about the Alubelok Swamp in there, and you throw in a bit about some Ravenloft place, and you throw in a bit about Moil, and so on and so forth. But a good half the book is going to talk about the stuff from the perspective of Mirrodin adventuring.
But the next year when you're revisiting Ravnica, you have books like Cityscape, and you throw bones out to places like Planescape and Forgotten Realms and shit when you talk about their big cities. But most of the book that has a definable location element (rather than being things like expanded trading and diplomancy rules) is written from the standpoint of Ravnica.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Frank, or anyone, can you think of possible ideas for grade 'A' or 'B' sourcebooks? I think that for the next edition of D&D the game designers should design a product line several years in advance, to the point of deciding when their edition should end--if all goes well--eight years in advance.
I totally overlooked the possibility of Swamp Adventures, so I'm probably overlooking other goldmines for sourcebook material.
Oh, yeah, a Stormwrack book. Only it'll be focused on pirates (because people fucken love pirates), brown-water navies, and off-shore aquatic kingdoms. How did I miss that?
I totally overlooked the possibility of Swamp Adventures, so I'm probably overlooking other goldmines for sourcebook material.
Oh, yeah, a Stormwrack book. Only it'll be focused on pirates (because people fucken love pirates), brown-water navies, and off-shore aquatic kingdoms. How did I miss that?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Username17
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Here's the thing: you can make almost anything into A or at least B material. Just throw in a 30k word section on new player options, and you have less than a third of the book spoken for but it's already a must have. Write that stuff too fast and you drive people out of the hobby. But seriously, the Complete Adventurer concept where there are three new classes and some spells and feats and shit and the rest of the book is just a rambling tirade about who gives a crap? That works. The rest of the book could be focused on the intricacies of Kobold lace techniques - it almost doesn't matter.
So here's what you do: you have a series of "blocks" that you want written. These are like chapters in a Tome book, and can pretty much hang on their own. The idea is to make all the material look like something that you wrote on purpose so that the audience doesn't think you are fucking with them. Don't actually write a section on Goliath Arts and Crafts (page 59, Races of Short), but as long as you make sure it looks lke you aren't actively fucking with the audience, you'll be OK. That is, you figure out your A material, your B material, and your C material. You dump all your D material, no one wants to read that shit. But you definitely mix it up. The Complete Mage is supposed to be almost all A material cover to cover, and it's a shit book that no one liked. Mostly because most of the options are lame, but also because the book is dry as toast because it's all PC options and treasures except for a 3k word essay on some adventure seeds. If you don't wander from topic to topic, people will feel like their book didn't give them any value. In a very real way, a book like Complete Mage is getting the same points for having "player options" for devoting 120k words to that as Races of Short gets for devoting 30k words to the same thing. And Races of Short gets props for some of their Dwarf fluff or something.
So what's your A material? Your A material is everything you're making power cards out of, every new class, every playable race, and so on. You got a lot of that to work with, and you'd like to playtest each of it at least a little bit before they get published. Which means releasing it a dribble at a time in every book is actually a better solution than releasing a PHB every year. You can even call attention to that. Fucking tell the populace that you're releasing the Pirate, the Martial, and the Siren as playing classes a month later in Storm Wrack because you need some time to playtest and finalize them.
Your B material is campaign stuff. Discussions of adventure seeds, world rules and so on and so on. You want every book to have some of this so that people feel that they have an incentive to bring the book into the game world. So you got your discussions of adventuring in the desert and rules for heat cramps in Sandstorm.
Your C material is highly specific stuff that people will never use without personalizing it. These are your city write ups, your NPCs, your maps of specific tombs. This stuff is vital, but only if your system i modular enough that people can adjust these parameters on the fly. 3rd edition D&D suffers from the fact that there is so much point juggling that the sample Dread Necromancer in Heroes of Horror is pretty much wasted space. That shit should be important.
So then you mix and match.
Now here's a concept that I think needs to be embraced: A+ and A- material. Some player material will only be used if it is relevant to some min/max interest. No one was clamoring to play a Goliath before they were given oversized weapons and a big strength bonus, no one plays Dragon Shamans at all. That material should probably be thought of as A-, stuff people will use and even buy because it's player option material, but which ultimately no one cares about. But there's other stuff that strikes a cord with a certain kind of fan and people will play it even if it sucks. Ninjas, Minotaurs, and all kinds of stuff will have players jumping at the bit to play it no matter how good or shit it is in game. That is A+ material. Stuff that you can sell preorders of to people who don't buy everything just by promising that content.
So it's important to put a piece of A+ material in every book.
-Username17
So here's what you do: you have a series of "blocks" that you want written. These are like chapters in a Tome book, and can pretty much hang on their own. The idea is to make all the material look like something that you wrote on purpose so that the audience doesn't think you are fucking with them. Don't actually write a section on Goliath Arts and Crafts (page 59, Races of Short), but as long as you make sure it looks lke you aren't actively fucking with the audience, you'll be OK. That is, you figure out your A material, your B material, and your C material. You dump all your D material, no one wants to read that shit. But you definitely mix it up. The Complete Mage is supposed to be almost all A material cover to cover, and it's a shit book that no one liked. Mostly because most of the options are lame, but also because the book is dry as toast because it's all PC options and treasures except for a 3k word essay on some adventure seeds. If you don't wander from topic to topic, people will feel like their book didn't give them any value. In a very real way, a book like Complete Mage is getting the same points for having "player options" for devoting 120k words to that as Races of Short gets for devoting 30k words to the same thing. And Races of Short gets props for some of their Dwarf fluff or something.
So what's your A material? Your A material is everything you're making power cards out of, every new class, every playable race, and so on. You got a lot of that to work with, and you'd like to playtest each of it at least a little bit before they get published. Which means releasing it a dribble at a time in every book is actually a better solution than releasing a PHB every year. You can even call attention to that. Fucking tell the populace that you're releasing the Pirate, the Martial, and the Siren as playing classes a month later in Storm Wrack because you need some time to playtest and finalize them.
Your B material is campaign stuff. Discussions of adventure seeds, world rules and so on and so on. You want every book to have some of this so that people feel that they have an incentive to bring the book into the game world. So you got your discussions of adventuring in the desert and rules for heat cramps in Sandstorm.
Your C material is highly specific stuff that people will never use without personalizing it. These are your city write ups, your NPCs, your maps of specific tombs. This stuff is vital, but only if your system i modular enough that people can adjust these parameters on the fly. 3rd edition D&D suffers from the fact that there is so much point juggling that the sample Dread Necromancer in Heroes of Horror is pretty much wasted space. That shit should be important.
So then you mix and match.
Now here's a concept that I think needs to be embraced: A+ and A- material. Some player material will only be used if it is relevant to some min/max interest. No one was clamoring to play a Goliath before they were given oversized weapons and a big strength bonus, no one plays Dragon Shamans at all. That material should probably be thought of as A-, stuff people will use and even buy because it's player option material, but which ultimately no one cares about. But there's other stuff that strikes a cord with a certain kind of fan and people will play it even if it sucks. Ninjas, Minotaurs, and all kinds of stuff will have players jumping at the bit to play it no matter how good or shit it is in game. That is A+ material. Stuff that you can sell preorders of to people who don't buy everything just by promising that content.
So it's important to put a piece of A+ material in every book.
-Username17
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Lago PARANOIA
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
Coming up with 'A' material that people will want to use is actually pretty easy as long as you pace yourself and don't get too patronizing with your classes. I think that unless you have an extremely specific character advancement system, like Dragon Age: The RPG, these should actually be pretty rare. The idea of releasing a Bane Warden class alongside a Sohei class 5 years into the life of your new edition is kind of insulting.
But more importantly than that, no one picked up the new classes in 3.5E, not just because they sucked, but because by that point in the lifecycle people were pretty much locked into their character builds. No one except for min-maxxers cared that they had Spellthieves and Ninjas because they were already doing these concepts many levels earlier. Only completely paradigm-redefining shit like the Chameleon and the Warblade get attention after that point. That includes, I'm sad to say, the Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler.
But no, what I'm more interested in is coming up with 'B' material. I think that's the hardest. I think anyone can write compelling 'A' or 'C' material, but writing two chapters on how cool and awesome this canyon is is pretty damn hard.
But more importantly than that, no one picked up the new classes in 3.5E, not just because they sucked, but because by that point in the lifecycle people were pretty much locked into their character builds. No one except for min-maxxers cared that they had Spellthieves and Ninjas because they were already doing these concepts many levels earlier. Only completely paradigm-redefining shit like the Chameleon and the Warblade get attention after that point. That includes, I'm sad to say, the Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler.
But no, what I'm more interested in is coming up with 'B' material. I think that's the hardest. I think anyone can write compelling 'A' or 'C' material, but writing two chapters on how cool and awesome this canyon is is pretty damn hard.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Goddamit Frank. Your proposal is gonna end up making RPG books to have good and bad stuff ala how booster packs have good and bad cardsFrankTrollman wrote:So here's what you do: you have a series of "blocks" that you want written. These are like chapters in a Tome book, and can pretty much hang on their own. The idea is to make all the material look like something that you wrote on purpose so that the audience doesn't think you are fucking with them. Don't actually write a section on Goliath Arts and Crafts (page 59, Races of Short), but as long as you make sure it looks lke you aren't actively fucking with the audience, you'll be OK. That is, you figure out your A material, your B material, and your C material. You dump all your D material, no one wants to read that shit. But you definitely mix it up. The Complete Mage is supposed to be almost all A material cover to cover, and it's a shit book that no one liked. .
.Books do have good and bad stuff. There's stuff some people like, and stuff other people like.
The flat reason is that crunch sells, but fluff advertises. Without enough fluff, crunch is worthless to some. Without enough crunch, books don't sell and you can't write more books if last books didn't sell.
Fluff makes dreamers. Dreamers make games. Crunch makes games good, but does nada for the dreamers who make the games happen.
-Crissa
The flat reason is that crunch sells, but fluff advertises. Without enough fluff, crunch is worthless to some. Without enough crunch, books don't sell and you can't write more books if last books didn't sell.
Fluff makes dreamers. Dreamers make games. Crunch makes games good, but does nada for the dreamers who make the games happen.
-Crissa
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Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Pretty much this.Crissa wrote:Books do have good and bad stuff. There's stuff some people like, and stuff other people like.
The flat reason is that crunch sells, but fluff advertises. Without enough fluff, crunch is worthless to some. Without enough crunch, books don't sell and you can't write more books if last books didn't sell.
Fluff makes dreamers. Dreamers make games. Crunch makes games good, but does nada for the dreamers who make the games happen.
-Crissa
There was nothing in Complete Mage that would make me want to start a campaign. Because it's basically all crunch (shockingly low density and rambling crunch, but crunch nonetheless).
The ideal expansion book is probably FrostBurn. It's not spectacularly balanced and the prose could be tightened up a lot. But it covered everything you need an expansion book to cover. It had a good mix of A, B, and C material. It made you want to read the book, it made you want to start a new campaign, it provided stuff the DM could plug and play, and it made you want to select some options for your character or even make a new character. Every book should be so lucky.
I disagree vehemently. I've seen more Dread Necromancers and Warlocks than monks or bards at this point. A fair number of classes really grabbed people and became big deals. A lo of people played Ninjas and Scouts. A lot of people fielded Beguilers and Dread Necromancers. A fuck tonne of people fielded Warlocks for some reason. Warblades basically replaced the Fighter upon being printed. Anything that was game changing or had a cool concept that was even vaguely passable got used all up to hell and gone. If the Hexblade had been even nearly as good as a Rogue, it would have been the most popular class right after it was printed.Lago wrote:But more importantly than that, no one picked up the new classes in 3.5E, not just because they sucked, but because by that point in the lifecycle people were pretty much locked into their character builds. No one except for min-maxxers cared that they had Spellthieves and Ninjas because they were already doing these concepts many levels earlier. Only completely paradigm-redefining shit like the Chameleon and the Warblade get attention after that point. That includes, I'm sad to say, the Dread Necromancer and the Beguiler.
So anyway, you're going to throw in some A material in every book. But some of that A material is going to sell it. Yeah, if you make a Sorcerer that's just crazy fucking awesome or you come up with a really cool mechanic for the Seeker, then those classes will end up being a big deal that people like. And then people will go back and buy more of that book, and the class will be taken super seriously. But no one will buy a book ahead of time just because it contains a Seeker class. But people will buy a book because it has a fucking Ninja class in it. And that's the A material you advertise and plan on including when designing the edition.
| Title | A Material | B Material | C Material |
| Law of the Jungle | Minotaur PCs Special Mounts | Jungles Bestfolk | Jungle Temple |
| Frostburn | Scout Berserker | Tundra Adventures Magic Ice Materials | Frost Giants Snow Queen |
| Sandstorm | Psychic Warrior | Desert Adventures Arabian Nights Stuff | Mummy Temple Dark Sun Dragon King |
| Bane Mire | Speaker for the Dead Death Knight | Undead Swamps | The Bane Mires Necropolis |
| Stormwrack | Corsair Siren | Naval Adventure Aquatic Stuff | Pirate King Pirate Ship |
| Arbitrage! | Beguiler Thief | Merchant Adventures Economics | Bandits Merchant Caravan |
| Vistas of the Titans | Playable Giants | Cloud Cities Dragons | Cloud Castle Dragon Lair |
| Might of Empires | Knight Assassin | Government Strongholds | Empire Castle |
| Depths Unknown | Poisons Swashbuckler | Underdark Drow! | Menzowhatever Rival Adventuring Party |
| Oriental Adventures | Samurai Ninja | Japanese Stuff Chinese Stuff | Imperial Palace Evil Eunuch Sorcerer |
| Hellscape | Conduit Playable Fiends! | High Adventure / Lower Planes | City of Brass Demon Lords |
| Lords of Madness | Soulknife Chaos Mage | Star Spawn (Ilithid) Other less cool Cthulhu Monsters | Ready to use Chaos Spawn |
| Far From Home | Gadgeteer | Spelljamming New Planets | Space Ships |
| Renaissance | Alchemist Firearms! | Technological Advancement Art | Duelist Bustling City |
And yeah, you could throw in a book about Forests, a book or three about other planes of existence, a book about war, a book about plains nomads, a book about farmers, a book about labyrinths, and so on. And you could write A, B, and C material in each that would be good. But I can't think of how you'd make people say "I need this" with just the Index for those ones off the top of my head.
I mean sure, you have a book about farming that talks about different kinds of food and some stuff about Halfling culture, and you do a whole thing about outriders and small people weaponry. And you stat up basic militia, and you do a whole thing about protecting villages vs. being a drain on the resources of those villages. And you have a couple of character classes including the White Mage I guess. And that sounds pretty fun to read and potentially useful at the table. But again, I can't think off the top of my head how to get people to not go "Farming? WTF?" when they read its entry in the "coming products" section. Maybe call it "Peasant Heroes?" I don't know.
Anyway, you bring one of those out every two months or so on average while you do your basic three books for each M:tG Block each year. And of course, you do your monster books, adventures, and C-levels like Hammerfast (a location plus a couple of sample adventures), and novels and whatever else.
-Username17