[TOME] Lets complete, playtest, market and sell it.

[DrPraetor]

I do not understand where you come from stranger, but where ever it is, you are going to need a dimensional portal to get back.

Considering how completely plastered I was, I think it came out... remarkably lucid.

The overall point I was making - history aside - is that Frank, K & I have started to assemble the various Tome material into a PHB-like document on at least five different occasions, and it's always bogged down.

This is largely motivated by a few simple facts:
[*] With various hotfixes and patches, D&D 3rd edition is still playable.
[*] WoD was never playable, nWoD was worse - hence After Sundown.
[*] Shadowrun is in a sorry state, and needs to be revamped. Near future science fiction needs this kind of refresher more than other settings do; the original Shadowrun timeline has to go.

So Frank & K aren't going to do a competing version of the PHB; and I was never much use past initial design documents for any of this stuff. A book for a gaming system is really long and writing the entire thing is a tremendous amount of work. In order to crowdsource such a doc you need both to have a bunch of people on board, and to have everyone recognize a single authority (which would have to be Frank but he's got other things he'd rather do). A flat command structure just doesn't cut it.

That said, if you guys can nominate Kaelik as dictator and write a "Arduin, 3rd Edition" or whatever, more power to you.

[MGuy]

Kaelik is too combative with "everybody" to be an effective leader. If K were doing it I'd feel better (Not that I'd be a part of the hypothetical project anyway).

[Kaelik]

Kaelik also wouldn't call it Arduin, and would refuse to be dictator, because in the real world, Kaelik is actually really fucking busy and doesn't have time to work on this shit, but since unlike Frank, no one ever asks him to, he doesn't have to say that.

[Finkin]

The big problem with this approach is that the vast majority of your customer base is...well, already here.

I say this mostly because other people will not respond well to the lot of you saying "Here, this is fucking good, trust us, the math all works and it is balanced across most any level range. Fucking eat it and like it, you dumb cocksuckers."

You are going to have to make compromises and give people a little of what they like even when you know it throats donkey cock, and while you are doing that you might get the chance to convince them that they will like the stuff that you fixed so that it doesn't completely shit balls.

You are completely wrong. No one is going to not buy a 3.5 revision because it doesn't have Paladins in the main fucking book. No one is going to through a shit fit and refuse to buy something just because it asks them to call their character a Samurai instead of a Fighter. Those are not things that are make or break.

If someone wants to play 3.5 with no changes, they can do that. If they want to play it with almost no changes because they are wedded to that shit, they can play pathfinder.

Making the Tomes have a class called Paladin in the main book that has 9th level spellcasting, full BAB, and a shit load of class features isn't going to bring in even a single person who wouldn't have bought the book otherwise.

Now, yes, one of the reasons this whole project is stupid is that most of our customer base is here. But that's not because we do or don't put the paladin and fighter in the main fucking book or a supplement. That's because most people have at least heard of the Tomes, and they mostly heard about it from someone on some other forum who likes that forum precisely because they are the type of person who hates this one.

Most people hate the Tomes with a blind passion that is genuinely blind, because all they heard is that it's shit because someone told them it was full of OPed stuff or that Frank's a jerk.

But whether or not they change their mind and buy the Tomes has literally nothing to do with whether or not we have the word Paladin attached to a class that has fuck all nothing to do with any version of Paladin that has ever existed in any D&D game ever.

Nowhere in my post was I specifically referencing putting the Paladin in the main book. I do think that you will have problems trying to convince people to call their Fighter a Samurai, because the Eastern stuff always receives a lot of pushback, but that is also an unrelated subject. I also think you are severely overestimating the percentage of your potential audience that passionately follow forums/message boards, and this goes hand-in-hand with what I believe is a massive overestimation of Frank/K/The Den/Tomes infamy.

My main point was that in order to make this sort of project a success on any scale, whoever does it is going to have to make compromises, something Denizens are not exactly known for at all. The vast majority of the audience is going to want some things that TGD pretty much deem to be idiotic, and they will not thank you for pointing out to them that they have acquired a taste for shit sandwiches.

On top of that is the PR work that will need to be put into the project as a whole, and I just don't see that happening.

[Kaelik]

Nowhere in my post was I specifically referencing putting the Paladin in the main book.

Yes you were. You told me my approach was wrong for a bunch of reasons, but literally the only thing that my approach was was not putting the Paladin and fighter in the main book.

So you were specifically and directly criticizing not putting the Paladin in the main book.

My main point was that in order to make this sort of project a success on any scale, whoever does it is going to have to make compromises, something Denizens are not exactly known for at all. The vast majority of the audience is going to want some things that TGD pretty much deem to be idiotic, and they will not thank you for pointing out to them that they have acquired a taste for shit sandwiches.

And my main point is that you are changing the project from what was suggested.

If this thread were about selling RISK, I would make the exact same complaint about someone saying "Well, you can sell more copies of RISK if you just stop selling RISK and start selling Monopoly."

Yes, I agree we could sell more copies of "Not Tomes" than we could of "Tomes." That is in no way shape or form relevant to a goal of "Selling the Tomes."