The Gaming Den

How would I resurrect the D&D brand? I'd use a 25 000 gp diamond. Mearls is using a 25 gp onyx and the result isn't good.

rasmuswagner wrote:F
4. Get at least one competent rules guy. Seriously, Paizo's allround level of rules quality went *down* when Sean K. fucking Reynolds left.

Oh, that reminds me. No double-secret unpublished rules bible, or DM's only sections.

The rules and their logic need to be apparent to everyone. And straightforward (no twisted Gygaxian doublespeak, or 4 paragraphs to describe prone, like Privateer Press)

rasmuswagner wrote:For the TTRPG rules, two things:
1. Everyone should reasonably be able to participate in every minigame.
2. VAH *must* be a reasonable lifestyle choice.
3. There must be plenty of between-sessions game (shopping, crawling the website for that perfect spell or sword technique your character wants).
4. Get at least one competent rules guy. Seriously, Paizo's allround level of rules quality went *down* when Sean K. fucking Reynolds left.

I'd say 2 is a corollary of 1; everyone should be able to play the same game as the rest of the group. 3 seems like it could be expanded to "give everyone something to want with/besides advancement."

At the risk of turning this into another Fighter thread, I'll go ahead and point out that offering fabulous prizes to the people willing to select super powers has never ended well for the VAH players.

Voss wrote:Oh, that reminds me. No double-secret unpublished rules bible, or DM's only sections.

This is totally wrong. The game has to be designed before it is written. The first form the rules exist in should be a jargon heavy set of electronic documents that the team can access. Actually writing the rules in English comes later. If you don't have a secret rules bible, you don't have a game. At least, not one that multiple people can contribute to.

rasmuswagner wrote:2. VAH *must* be a reasonable lifestyle choice.

VAH must be a reasonable lifestyle choice at first level. If the game's power level extends sufficiently, VAH will by definition eventually not keep up.

Between Prestige Classes, Name Levels, Immortals Series, Paragon Classes, and Epic Classes/Destinies, it is absolutely clear that the public will accept arbitrary points where your character's concept levels up. This is not up for debate, people accept that. So setting a point where VAHs become super heroes explicitly is absolutely fine. Not doing that is a failure of design that there is no excuse for and has been no excuse for for a decade or more.

-Username17

A 3.6e of sorts as the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" line with a tie in to Magic: The Gathering planes. The books feature the full art version of various MtG cards. Have fluffy articles about how there's many ways to play DnD and how 5e caters to grognards while AD&D3e caters to rules lawyers.

Use MtG classes like "soldier, warrior" instead of "Fighter", also gets people in the mindset to accept that a warrior starts off doing VAH stuff but levels up to channel the storm and magma and so on.

Zendikar is your core setting, it's "points of light" because fighting the Eldrazi made everything explode. You get your core classes.

Soldier: Warblade style tactical/combat genius
Warrior: Stamina/Rage guy, basically the barbarian
Knight: At-will guy that gets more holy/demonic with further levels, like the Soulborn
Scout: Positional surprise buttstab guy with option of a pet
Rogue/Assassin: Observes and executes, swordsage style to represent "spend a round observing to..."
Cleric:
Wizard:
-Illusionist:
Shaman:
Druid:
Artificer:

I buy RIFTS worldbooks entirely for leisurely reading but I figure planar/block books are similar in format. You get a book that tells you about the plane and has new/variant classes and abilities for PC's to dig through. For the GM side of things there's new monsters and adventure hooks. Also release adventure modules in that plane.

The planes that have been returned to are the most popular and tend to focus on certain genres/gameplay modes that could be elaborated on like...

Innistrad focus on horror and mystery, mad science
-Shadows over Innistrad for eldritch horror
Khans of Tarkir with kingdom management and leading armies
-Dragons of Tarkir for otherkin
Ravnica with political intrigue and guild management
-Ravnica is such a big popular plane so another book
Mirrodin to fuck with artifacts
-and the 2nd book to get fucked by Phyrexians
Dominaria is ignored.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Voss wrote:Oh, that reminds me. No double-secret unpublished rules bible, or DM's only sections.

This is totally wrong. The game has to be designed before it is written. The first form the rules exist in should be a jargon heavy set of electronic documents that the team can access. Actually writing the rules in English comes later. If you don't have a secret rules bible, you don't have a game. At least, not one that multiple people can contribute to.

I suspect we're talking about entirely different things. I'm referring specifically to Paizo's tendency of asspulling contradictions to what the published rules say, and backing it up with 'it has always been this way' or 'this is consistent with what is in our secret rules that we've never published and what the published text says is wrong.' Examples would be things like monks not being able to two-weapon fight and flurry, or crossbows vs. water balloons and the other shit they've pulled.

A shared design doc is obviously a thing you want. Jargon heavy is debatable, as you've mentioned in the MERP OSSR- there wasn't any reason for that to be primarily couched in/ heavily influenced by D&D specific jargon. And there have been way too many games where individual designers say 'fuck that shit' and do their own special snowflake book with shitloads of contradictions anyway. If you're advocating multiple channels and stuff actually produced by random asshats, you're going to get a fucking mess if you make it too intensive for them.


@Ogrebattle- that is all kinds of nuts. MtG edition, Grognard edition and Rules Lawyer edition just turns the whole thing into bitter acrimony and factionalism and the whole cake fails.

You guys realize that the big push during the void years post 4e and pre-5e was reprinting pretty much all the previous editions, right? That did jack shit.

Voss wrote:
You guys realize that the big push during the void years post 4e and pre-5e was reprinting pretty much all the previous editions, right? That did jack shit.

Can you cite what you mean?
I don't remember any 3.5 material printed by WotC pre-5E during 4th.

Unless you mean 5E converted stuff from 2E (when they redid caves of chaos).

They reprinted 'foil' versions of the 3.5 PHB, DMG, MM1, Spell Compendium, and Magic Item Compendium. They did the same for a pile of 1e and 2e material. The books were shiny and cost $50 each, and at least in my store, they did not sell very well.

Voss wrote: @Ogrebattle- that is all kinds of nuts. MtG edition, Grognard edition and Rules Lawyer edition just turns the whole thing into bitter acrimony and factionalism and the whole cake fails.

Yeah, the whole bit where developers claim that a product is for Player Type X but not Player Type Y is hilariously self-defeating behavior, especially when the definition of player types is built on bullshit like GNS theory and popular pejorative stereotypes rather than actual fucking market research. FFS, the only reason MTG gets away with any of their Timmy, Spike and Johnny bullshit is because the game was popular before Maro articles were even a thing and because they continuously claim to design their product with all those stereotypes in mind rather than imply that people who build theme decks should go fuck themselves. The only time you should be admitting that a product might not be the right fit is when people are whining about being bored of Greyhawk or Faerun and you've got a new campaign setting coming out next quarter.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:They reprinted 'foil' versions of the 3.5 PHB, DMG, MM1, Spell Compendium, and Magic Item Compendium. They did the same for a pile of 1e and 2e material. The books were shiny and cost $50 each, and at least in my store, they did not sell very well.

I've never seen those books outside of a store, but I know about them, because I've seen them at the local game store and Barnes and Noble. The problem is that they're a $50 premium product for people who already own the basic product. No one* is going to buy the more expensive shiny version of the basic book for the new game they're learning, especially when they can get the basic book for $17 on amazon. What WotC should have done is produce budget versions of the core books with art stripped out and matte pages in a smaller format for $15-20. It's a step between using the free srd and the standard $30 book. There's totally a market for shiny foil books, they look super cool, but I have a fucking PHB, I don't need to drop $50 for another one. I could see a premium exchange sort of thing, where people trade their basic book to get the premium at cost or some kind of discount, then WotC turns those sent in books around and sells them for a reduced Used cost.

*not actually no one, I'm sure some small fucking fraction of people did


Looking at twitter while sitting in the bathroom earlier, I saw Mearls responding to someone asking about the change in gnolls from apparently a playable option in 4e(?) to "mutant demon hyena men" in 5e by basically saying "we've got to decide how to use our space, nothing is stopping you from having playable gnolls in your game'' and this raises an interesting question.

Mearls is technically right, books have limited space, and nothing prevents a gm from saying "you guys can play gnolls, if you want." But contrary to Hermes Conrad's beliefs, technically correct is the worst kind of correct. The thing that keeps people from having playable gnolls in their games is that a lot of gms are actually terrible game designers. Not only can't they create a playable gnoll that's objectively balanced, they can't make a playable gnoll that's subjectively balanced with the rest of the unbalanced stuff they make.

So it seems to me that the solution is to embrace social media. Hell, look at this board, someone asks for a playable gnoll and on a mid-productivity day, they can come back after a few hours to a couple versions and an entertaining exchange about a balanced gnoll. When you're running a game company there is literally no reason to not integrate your social media with your designers and run something like Blogatog but with game mechanics. "Hey, I want to have playable gnolls. What would those look like?" "Here's 500 words on gnoll society and a racial write up."

So the interesting question is- do RPGs, at least the 18000 lb juggernauts like D&D, really even need books anymore? I mean, hell, when I make a character, I'm crawling through pdfs and google, not physical books. When I'm writing an adventure, it's much the same. So what if the primary product was something like E Tools (but, you know, not vapor/abandonware) with high quality pdfs and an aggregator for daily design digests that accumulate whatever races and classes and such that your designers made that day, all tagged and sorted and, most importantly, updated when it is found that the just-above-off-the-cuff design has a problem.

I'd also go with more of an app distribution/monetization model, where maybe you get the basic rules for free/cheap with the application, which also gets you the daily design digests, and then you do supplements for maybe $5 or whatever you figure will pay your writers, and maybe take an idea from Magic Puzzle Quest and their card bundles, selling, say, Feat Bundles that get you "all the feats from supplements X, Y and Z" if you just want more feats, or a "Class Bundle" or "Dragon Bundle" or whatever.

I mean, I love books, and they do come in handy, but with a good pdf reader, two screens, and google proficiency... eh.

I'm not even sure if they need physical books at all. I own no actual physical gaming books. PDF's are way cheaper and efficient.

Slade wrote:

Voss wrote:
You guys realize that the big push during the void years post 4e and pre-5e was reprinting pretty much all the previous editions, right? That did jack shit.

Can you cite what you mean?
I don't remember any 3.5 material printed by WotC pre-5E during 4th.

Unless you mean 5E converted stuff from 2E (when they redid caves of chaos).

Well, to fold into the PDF discussion:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/175 ... _9735&it=1

On the right side, you can see they got it last year, along with the others for the same edition, and first. So apparently the pdfs are newer than I thought... just competing with the vaporware.

On the book side, I guess I was referring to the 'premium' reprints, though I wasn't aware they were premium at all. I just saw a shitload of 2e-4e materials (mostly core books, but I'm surprised at how wide the premium net got cast, while browsing through whats on Amazon) sharing shelf space simultaneously.

But that is the thing with old editions- to go back to the other conversation- you don't need to tell fans how great or shitty old editions are, they'll either stick to the old shit or rabidly adopt the new shit based on their group dynamics. Much better for the developers to stay the fuck out of it and not alienate people.

The need for physical books is an artifact, but there is still a want for physical books. There are people who just like having a physical copy of something, and you shouldn't miss out on that revenue stream as long as you can afford it.

Mask_De_H wrote:The need for physical books is an artifact, but there is still a want for physical books. There are people who just like having a physical copy of something, and you shouldn't miss out on that revenue stream as long as you can afford it.

Quoted for truth. I have PDFs of the 3.5 PH, MM and DMG, but I always use the physical copies at the game table simply because I like doing so.

I know it's tempting but it's still a mistake to assume everyone owns a tablet or laptop. Smartphones are far more ubiquitous but also mildly shitty for dealing with multiple documents or showing pictures to groups. I love searchable pdfs as much as the next guy and virtually never touch my books when I'm alone but when it comes time to actually MC I still get a fair bit of use from my hard copies.

Physical books are useful for core material that is likely to see play at the majority of tables. The vast array of fluff material, crunchy expansion options, setting expansions, obscure monsters, and even NPC write-ups aren't likely to see use at most tables and certainly not likely to see use more than once.

For D&D you need physical books containing the core rules for a start: which is basically everything covered by the PHB plus the treasure, magic item, experience, encounter, and other important tables in the DMG, and the most common monsters, which allows for a MM. Pathfinder, by producing a Core that integrated essential DMG material, actually did the right thing in going from 3 books to 2.

You probably also need physical books for any major rules expansions - psionics comes to mind as the obvious one - that are going to be referenced all the time at tables that choose to use them. Major setting books in the style of the 3e FR book are also useful, since at high levels characters can move about extremely rapidly, so having that sort of reference is a life-saver.

Everything else should probably be PDF or web-based first. Though, in order to please the grognards (and you do need to please the grognards, they spend a lot of money) print-on-demand should absolutely be available.

Monsters are great for books whether you see them frequently or not. The fact that you can open the book and show the other players the picture is really cool. Also it's good for a DM to be able to physically hold open the reference point. Even searchable pdfs don't come up as fast as page markers in physical books.

Monsters and spells are the two things that players find most useful to have physical copies of at tables. The Spell Compendium and various Monster books were the things that were best to take to games in 3.5.

-Username17

So maybe do the 3E Players Handbook thing, where you buy the core rules in physical form and you get the etools with them. After that point, everything is digital first, with PoD options, and periodic Monster Compendiums and spellbooks, maybe called... fuck, you could actually just outright use the name since it's all D&D- "Pages From the Mages." If you wanted.

Setting books should get a treatment between D&D Campaign Setting book and Magic Plane art book, since the crunch is given in digital form first, and one the big benefits of a setting book is the art.

Mechalich wrote: For D&D you need physical books containing the core rules for a start: which is basically everything covered by the PHB plus the treasure, magic item, experience, encounter, and other important tables in the DMG, and the most common monsters, which allows for a MM. Pathfinder, by producing a Core that integrated essential DMG material, actually did the right thing in going from 3 books to 2.
.

More they did the obvious common sense thing, and followed in the wake of d20 products as a whole. The DMG hadn't been relevant since... ever. Its primary function in 1e was to obscure the fact that the games rules were a giant pile of useless shit and contradiction by encouraging most players not to buy it.

That 5e went back to that model to hide the 'real skill rules,' magic items and encounter rules is a mark of one its bigger problems.

Using physical books as crunch/art books, especially for settings and monsters, is definitely something worth doing.

One of my personal favorite things is looking at the art associated with the games. Especially these days with the high production values.
Along with that I tended to love the FR and Eberron books for reading material. Just to lose myself in a world for a little while.

So I was talking with a friend about this the other day - that's not quite right. We were talking about comic books really, and the (actually not so) recent bitterness of X-Men fans towards Marvel. That discussion got us thinking about this sort of topic. What makes money for Marvel isn't the comic books, the comic books are a pathetically anemic cash stream. What makes money is merchandising. Toys, movies (well...maybe not for Marvel, they get like 5% of box or some shit), that sort of thing. Doing everything online is a big step, getting people to pay for inconvenienced electrons rather than hard product that you actually have to print and ship is great. Now how do you get them watching a D&D-themed cartoon, buying action figures, all that sort of thing?

I think that the revival of D&D is going to be less about content, although better content would sure as shit help, and a lot more about marketing and revenue streams. It has to show that it's a contender that can make real money, even if only for certain relative values of such, before Hasbro will be willing to put money into it.

Additional:
1) Apologies for the six-day necro.
2) I also think any future massive success will have an OGL as permissive as 3rd edition's. That's what it'll take to get a giant chunk of the industry and its 'talent' writing for the edition, and hopefully get the game a lot more exposure. WotC might not get every bit of the D&D pie, but proportionally, D&D's pie was huge compared to all the other shitty little pies back in the day. And yeah, that's kind of a bad comparison, but I think you get what I mean.

I agree. The last two D&D movies were okay, not great, but okay. And there are several stories you could tell through media. I've always wondered what setting would work best for a D&D cartoon today (My favorite is planescape, though I don't think it would work well as a show.)

D&D does have a book line with various settings like dragonlance and forgotten realms (or at least did. I'd have to check up on that).

Also, nobody cares if you necro threads here.

Now how do you get them watching a D&D-themed cartoon, buying action figures, all that sort of thing?

All those things existed at various points. Given who owns their asses, I'd be immensely surprised if the topic hasn't come up for review.

And they've got a huge back catalog that they could turn into any of those things. As much as the drizzit is hackneyed and sad (partially because it is hackneyed and sad), his above ground adventures could easily be cartoonified and packaged like a fucking sentai team (the thin one, the fat one, the bruiser, the little guy and the girl).

But D&D could easily do any sort of TV cartoon standards- whether its the Serious Story Arc, or the Monster of the Week and We Learned Something Today (which is more what the original did). They'd just need an interesting adventuring party (and avoid a focus-group snore fest of blandly inoffensive characters).

They could even do an enemy with a plethora of undead minions to avoid have the 'heroes' spilling oceans of blood as they wander around (which is probably the biggest 'problem' for a D&D show. Murderhobo doesn't really lend itself to Discovery Family)

the ninja turtles run around the tuck in pointy weapons all the time, and their new cartoon is a lot of fun.

Also there is Adventure Time. That literally riffs off of D&D all the time and is immensely popular.

So it's actually a little disappointing that Dungeons & Dragons actually doesn't have a series in the current television ecosystem.