TRPG General Chat

1:46 AM

@Emrakul See also: The Constant Groundskeeper.

3:08 AM

Aw, no. No, no, no, no. Arrow, what have you done? You do not go from C. C. H. Pounder to Cynthia Addai-Robinson for Amanda Waller.

doppelgreener

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2

BESW

(Also, Arrow? You could get Summer Glau and Alex Kingston but not C. C. H. Pounder?)

@JonathanHobbs Ninja'd.

Magician

3:30 AM

@BESW Hah. That would enable Warehouse 13 crossovers a bit too much.

BESW

@Magician They've already got Dr. Janet Fraiser back from the dead and practicing law instead of medicine, and Harry Dresden is a cop. Wild crossovers already firmly in place.

Magician

(also, I'm somewhat proud I knew who you'd want her to play, without actually seeing the casting news).

BESW

@Magician Heheh.

Waller crops up in a surprising number of places, albeit rarely for very long.

Magician

She's a government spook with personality and questionable morals. Kinda like a less hands-on Nick Fury.

BESW

And what I wouldn't give to see Jackson's Fury vs Pounder's Waller.

Magician

3:46 AM

@BESW Well... Take any conspiracy thriller. In the end, add a scene where Fury and Waller meet, gaze at each other, shake hands and walk away into darkness. It was all a game they played. One of them won.

BESW

I like it.

So, which of them has the Impossible Missions Taskforce? Or do they take turns?

Magician

Considering they both have off-the-books teams (Secret Warriors/Suicide Squad), they probably operate concurrently.

While nominally working for the good ol' US

BESW

I think Fury's international now.

Magician

He's in the wind. Happens occasionally.

Considering they're going to have Flash and now Hourman spin-offs of Arrow, they're going to have to introduce meta-humans eventually. I'm surprised they haven't done so with Black Canary.

Also, apparently not using colors in code names makes them sound less ridiculous.

BESW

I don't get the impression Arrow has any idea what it's doing.

They saw that Nolan's Batman trilogy was more acceptable to the mainstream because it stripped all the major science fiction and fantasy elements from the setting, and so they're doing the same for Arrow.

But they missed that the Nolan trilogy still worked because it remained mythic.

Arrow is not mythic.

Magician

3:55 AM

True.

No powers is fine, but instead of doing a Birds of Prey spin-off, they're doing a Flash spin-off. That doesn't compute.

BESW

Arrow lacks self-awareness. It's petty, hypocritical, and poorly written.

They've got no understanding of the basic techniques for getting an audience to like a character. Queen is the hero, so what he does is forgivable--but when someone we aren't supposed to like does the same things, they deserve death.

They try to be about gritty grey morality, but it's just inconsistent. Innocent guards of evil rich men get killed, but the rich men get their money taken away or sent to jail.

Magician

He stopped killing people. And they do deal with that, somewhat. Besides, I think it's implied most of the people he shoots don't die.

BESW

They spent a whole season where the only people who complained about his death count were the ones we weren't supposed to sympathize with.

Magician

I liked that they let the status quo get shaken up significantly by the resolution of the first season. It would have been easy to just resolve it all away, like nothing has happened.

BESW

The camera and the script did nothing to tell us that Queen's murder was bad--the imapct of each death was minimized and glossed over, and nobody we were supposed to like said much about it.

I do appreciate their shaking up the status quo, and in more competent hands the progression of Queen's character from vigilante to hero would be compelling.

But instead the second season emphasis on "killing bad" feels like they're trying to walk back a bad choice, rather than it being a planned character arc.

(And I still don't care about any of the characters as people except for Blackthorn's cop, and that's only because he's such a good actor he can breath life into a walking cliché.)

Magician

4:05 AM

@BESW Mmm. You're probably right. Though the casualness of killing guards in the first season is appropriate, because it's not a big deal to him. They're bad guys, he shoots them and moves on.

BESW

@Magician There's a difference between Queen being casual about it, and the storyteller being casual.

A competent production team differentiates between what the show thinks, and what the characters on the show think.

And everything about season one said that the show itself didn't care if Queen killed guys. Other people who killed were bad and deserved to die, but Queen got a pass because... he's the main character. It's D&D morality.

Magician

Very true. It could be treated like a (most likely unintentional) play on our attitudes as well, though. We're used to seeing heroes kill bad guys, so we as viewers don't care. We emphasize with Queen through storyteller not telling us to care. Now that Oliver is trying to change, we're confronted with the casualness of our attitude that mirrors his.

BESW

Oh, and the implication that he didn't kill most of the people he shot? I did some math.

Magician

They do mention something like 20 people dead.

BESW

The reason we think most of the people he shot survived is that the show's presentation of the attacks was low-key.

@Magician That was, like, the first time they mentioned his kill count.

I paid attention for a couple episodes, and his reported kill count was sometimes climbing faster than the number of people he shot on-screen.

BESW

5:10 AM

@Magician By the way, I think the most recent Tweet to Campaign By was never seen in chat.

(At least, not as a T2CB.)

user61230

@KyleSykes [wave]

Kyle Sykes

@Emrakul Hello! Same to you @BESW and @Magician

BESW

[wave] What's new?

Magician

Hi!

Kyle Sykes

Not much. Just doing school work at the moment

user61230

5:13 AM

Aiyup. Pretty much the same. (Y'know, "studying.")

Magician

@BESW Does look new. TtCB is in my RSS reader. It's quite nice to get new ones regularly.

BESW

@Magician I may have to drop them to 1/day or fewer, as I'm burning through my queue pretty fast.

Kyle Sykes

Out of curiosity, if you use physical tokens for Fate points, what does your group use?

BESW

It's sort of a feast/famine thing.

user61230

@Kyle I use poker chips from a holdem set. I color code them so that it's easy to keep track of just-earned Fate points.

BESW

5:15 AM

@KyleSykes Same: cheap poker chips I picked up at a grocery store.

Kyle Sykes

Does it matter if they are freshly earned or not?

BESW

@KyleSykes FP earned through invokes don't become usable until the start of the following scene.

FP from compels are available immediately.

user61230

If I remember correctly, you can't use Fate points you earn during a---yup that.

Kyle Sykes

Ahh

Gotcha. We just cleaned out our fish bowl, and replaced his rocks with another type

user61230

It's easy to keep track of it. It's just, "You can't spend the green fate points until next scene."

Kyle Sykes

5:17 AM

And so I have those cheap glassy gems in clear and blue.

user61230

That does work. That depends on the surface you're playing on, though, and the size of the stones.

user61230

I say give it a shot, and if you have problems with it, it's pretty easy to look for something better!

Kyle Sykes

They are these. I think they'll work just fine, and look cool to boot.

user61230

SHINY.

BESW

Yeah, those should do fine.

user61230

5:20 AM

I feel like making a clan of Fate-players.

BESW

Go stones, cowrie shells, pogs, congies, playing cards...

user61230

"One does not fool with the Fated."

Kyle Sykes

Some authentic Go stones would actually be amazing for this.

BESW

Checkers.

user61230

OOOOH GO STONES. THAT'S A GREAT IDEA.

Kyle Sykes

5:21 AM

If I ever get a nice Go set, I'll probably put the stones to dual use then.

BESW

Tweets to Campaign By found a redneck vampire.

Probably one of the things I thought I'd never see.. A deer running from a flying squirrel on our trail camera http://t.co/gxeE6u6L6K

Tweeted by HaileyLehrer on November 14, 2013 at 4:00 AM

Kyle Sykes

lol

user61230

TERRIFYING.

BESW

#nature #undead #chase

user61230

Dire deer.

BESW

5:26 AM

How would people feel if I reduced the T2CB post rate from 2/day to 1/day?

(On the tumblr; Tweets to Campaign By are posted here almost as soon as I find them.)

user61230

It might improve their overall quality, actually. Running jokes are better when they come at unexpected times.

user61230

Leave 'em wanting more.

BESW

Here at Tweets to Campaign By we like unusual mashups, and we like profession-based game premises, so we'll be playing this at our next session.

Illuminati Baggage Claim #AddaWordRuinaMovie

Tweeted by BigData4Less on November 15, 2013 at 3:08 AM

#professions #conspiracy

And I can't really justify this as a T2CB, but:

Terminator 3: Rise of the Vending Machines #AddaWordRuinaMovie

Tweeted by Gennie_Mcgee on November 15, 2013 at 3:12 AM

user61230

7:21 AM

what-would-i-say.com

user61230

"Try drinking the paradox tea, is good."

Joshua Aslan Smith

1:26 PM

hello all

looks like I missed out on answering some 4e questions overnight/this morning

Trajan

hi

Joshua Aslan Smith

oh man the comments on this answer, had to resist jumping in

10

A: Thri-Kreen 4-arm Combo?

The purpose of the rule for Thri-Kreen having strong upper arms and weak middle arms is so that you don't have any sort of advantage over other characters in wielding weapons, so that's an in setting reason for a game mechanic restriction. Telekinetic grasp wouldn't let you get around it anymore ...

Trajan

you disagree ? (disclaimer : I never played 4e, but it seems consistent with what I heard here)

Joshua Aslan Smith

I do, but its ultimately subjective as well

wax eagle

wow that's just headdesk

Joshua Aslan Smith

1:34 PM

freedom and creativity can be extremely loaded terms

BESW

I have a hard time reading those without bursting into song.

Joshua Aslan Smith

4e probably has the most flexible and creative RAW combat system without handwaving or DM fiat

2

but what the commentator is referencing is 4e's anti-homebrew/handwave nature

you start houseruling 4e rules to let a thrikreen get extra actions because of their arms and its all downhill

BESW

For someone with an earlier-edition mindset, it's easy to conflate flexibility with houseruling.

Aaron

I am torn between these two answers

How do I copy answers links?

BESW

The "share" button gives you a compressed link to the answer.

I flagged the edition war.

Aaron

1:41 PM

2

A: What is the fastest way to earn money with crafting skills?

To quote Harry Potter and the Natural 20: He'd owled Hermione, who had gone back to live with her parents until September, to ask how the Muggles managed to make so much stuff. She'd asked her mother, and sent back what amounted to a short essay detailing mining, machinery, smelting, and, the...

1

A: What is the fastest way to earn money with crafting skills?

The obvious answer here is crafting. Your character and the underlings can earn a simple amount of money every week. Note that you don't actually need to roll anything. Everyone can simply "take 10" and you get a static number for "gold per week". But if you want to make big bucks in the Pathf...

BESW

(I know it's old, but it's cluttering up the site.)

We've had cases before where old behavior left unchecked is used to justify new instances of it.

Trajan

@BESW what's the edition war ?

BESW

@Trajan "I thought D&D promoted freedom and intelligence, rather than sticking to the rules." "I wanted freedom, I should play 3.5" "even 3.5 isn't that good for it. 2e or earlier for freedom"

Trajan

@BESW ah ok, war between same franchise editions

BESW

It'd be a system war if it were between different systems.

Edition wars are within the same franchise.

Joshua Aslan Smith

1:49 PM

@besw good I wasnt sure How to respond properly

BESW

I may get the flag declined because it's old, but I hope not.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@trajan theres a huge internet flame war between 3.0/3.5/3.pf and 4e and then usually 2nd and 1st edition are together, but less vocal/aggressive

wax eagle

@BESW they're pretty welcoming of deleting old comments

BESW

My jaw dropped the first time I met someone who thought "drastically different from both 3.5 and 4e" meant "Pathfinder."

wax eagle

wut

Trajan

1:53 PM

@JoshuaAslanSmith I heard of that, although I never met a pro-4e IRL

BESW

@Trajan Yeah, My players seem to be the only ones on the whole island who ever gave 4e a chance.

Trajan

@BESW A friend of mine offered me PF books telling me it was "what 4e should have been"

Hence the 3.PF I guess

BESW

We were very skeptical, but wound up loving it--probably largely because we were so skeptical that we waited until we were sick of 3.5 and 4e had a lot of "not 3.5" in its favor.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@besw there some solid pathfinder propaganda and agitprop on the boards and internet, you'd think that Pathfinder was the glamourous revolutionary fighting for freedom and love (read: sex) against the overbearing, bald headed bureaucratic tyrants that are WOTC

BESW

@Trajan [twitch] At best, PF is "what 3.5 should have been," but it's not dissimilar enough for me to say even that.

Joshua Aslan Smith

1:56 PM

@trajan I agree with BESW Pathfinder runs on the same OGL as WOTC 3.5, it can't be that inherently different

Trajan

I didn't play enough of either those system to have a strong opinion.

BESW

Pathfinder is just 3.5 with a bit of re-jiggering to try fixing some of the most glaring complaints. The fundamental strengths and flaws of 3.5 are still there in Pathfinder, as evidenced by the fact that so many people use the two systems' content as if they were one single system.

They're almost as similar as 4e and 4e Essentials.

And they're at least as compatible as 3.0 and 3.5.

Joshua Aslan Smith

love me some essentials

I feel that editions should have drastic changes, but that WOTC should also at this point (which theyve done) keep older editions in print with on demand printing or at least drive-thru rpg

BESW

3.5 was a very wise choice for Wiz, I think.

wax eagle

@JoshuaAslanSmith they've (thankfully) finally realized this and are working on it

BESW

2:02 PM

And so was Essentials.

But they can't make the money they need to on minor edition modifications, and keeping old stuff in print won't every widen their audience base.

Joshua Aslan Smith

yes true

BESW

The reason people moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder wasn't that Pathfinder was a superior product.

wax eagle

yeah they have to continue making new editions.

BESW

They moved to Pathfinder because it was a living product.

Joshua Aslan Smith

but for example, I would have not gotten into D&D had 3.5 been my introduction (which if I was playing in highschool it wouldve been)_

wax eagle

2:03 PM

or at least new, interesting paid content

BESW

You can collect everything in 2e, or 3.5, and then you're done.

wax eagle

I feel like if the encounters/La stuff was generally available instead of a store product, it would be a boon to the brand :(

Joshua Aslan Smith

true

thats a lot of books for 3.5

BESW

No new official content will come out for 3.5 ever again.

wax eagle

@BESW no, where they can win is if they make that content worth using again in Next. but that has to be balanced against their need to sell you more books

Joshua Aslan Smith

2:05 PM

true

BESW

@waxeagle That does seem to be the Platonic ideal of Next, from a marketing viewpoint.

Joshua Aslan Smith

the first D&Dnext friendly encounters season that just happened didn't win any friends at my game shop though

BESW

They've doomed to disappointment, of course.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@besw they've got to sublimate the desires!

I just checked out dungeonworld and desperately want to play it now, it seems to be like what NEXT might have been going for but wasn't willing to go all the way for. Like if 13th age and next had a baby

wax eagle

@BESW they've made one of the oldest business mistakes: aiming to please everyone. It never ever works

BESW

2:06 PM

@JoshuaAslanSmith They don't have the creativity, the talent, or the PR department to pull off what they want to do. It's a grand and noble goal, but they've shown no capacity to learn from their experience or present their concepts in a way that won't alienate most of their audience.

....suddenly I am filled with the desire to go through the entire site and upvote every single instance of this:

Don't argue in comments. — Brian Ballsun-Stanton 5 mins ago

Joshua Aslan Smith

yay

doppelgreener

[celebrates Brian day]

3

[most days are Brian day]

Kethryweryn

Damn. I missed the edition war conversation.

Still, I didn't understand why 4e received such a bad press.

Joshua Aslan Smith

Everything I've read and heard seems they bungled the launch in the same way they are bungling Next's launch right now

BESW

@Kethryweryn Several reasons.

First, it was the first time WotC had released a new edition to replace one of their own.

Kethryweryn

2:15 PM

The published adventures aren't really good roleplaywise, but the gameplay mechanic is very interesting (in a Ludus point of view). Seems to me it accomplished what D&D 3 had started, a good mix of tactical strategic game and roleplaying.

(Ok I'll shut up and read now. ;))

BESW

A lot of people teethed on 3.5, and got attached to it. Same reason the Eleventh Doctor got a lot of flak: many people had been watching the series because they liked the Tenth Doctor.

They Changed It, Now It Sucks.

Second, this was during the advent of the MMO Expansion Into The Main Stream.

4e can, at first glance, be mistaken for an MMO/TCG combo that's very unlike traditional RPGs. It's not, but it can be mistaken for that.

Joshua Aslan Smith

all the mmo/TCG flame Ive seen

BESW

Part of this is because it almost was: WotC had been bought by Hasbro, and Hasbro has some policies.

Joshua Aslan Smith

You could fill money pits with it

BESW

Among Hasbro's policies, are that any franchise they own which isn't raking in a certain amount of cash gets canned.

3.5 wasn't.

In order to keep the D&D franchise from the trash heap, WotC pitched a combination tabletop RPG/MMO/online tabletop concept.

doppelgreener

2:19 PM

(A fertile ground for innovation Hasbro's policies do not create)

BESW

@JonathanHobbs To Hasbro's credit, they usually leave you almost totally alone so long as you're meeting their cash quotas.

Joshua Aslan Smith

Sink or swim encourages new products when old ones fail to live up to it

in the end its a for profit company, not a charity drive

BESW

As you can see, the MMO and Online Tabletop visions of 4e never materialized.

doppelgreener

@JoshuaAslanSmith Understandable, and it's not a fertile ground for innovation.

BESW

The D&D Insider services were closest they ever came.

doppelgreener

2:20 PM

It could be but the policy has a crushing effect on smaller stuff.

BESW

But the online parts of the pitch are part of the reason D&D didn't get junked, and some remnants of the plans to go MMO/online app are still visible in 4e's structure.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs difference of opinion, yes certain valuable properties/franchisees stay around ( negative innovation) but in the search for more and new profits you also churn out a lot of new stuff until something sticks to the wall (positive innovation)

doppelgreener

I consider that a bad thing for it and for us. I also understand it has to make money, it just picked a way to do it that also had that effect. But that's up to them.

BESW

For people who were proud that tabletop RPGs weren't like MMOs, anything that even vaguely smelled like an MMO was anathema.

Kethryweryn

I see.

BESW

2:22 PM

Now, that alone would've created some friction in the community and made the people who were attached to 3.5 even balkier.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@Kethryweryn the I'm this kind of nerd/geek, but not THAT kind of nerd/geek that has pervaded all of nerd/geekdom for all time

BESW

But Wizards' D&D department has never been very good at PR, so their introduction of 4e was mishandled similarly to the D&D Next fiascoes.

Kethryweryn

@JoshuaAslanSmith You could remove the nerd/geek and replace by human. :D

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs when capitalism and art meet something's gotta give. The trade-off though is that the art in question will reach a much more massive audience.

wax eagle

@BESW and people were pretty heavily invested in 3.5 with wizards stuff + 3rd party stuff. And making all of that irrelevant certainly didn't help their PR

doppelgreener

2:24 PM

@JoshuaAslanSmith I am not trying to call them out as idiots or for doing the wrong thing

BESW

For example, they released Keep on the Shadowfell as a rules-complete adventure module before they released the books. It was full of typos, inconsistent rule applications, and had some very poor encounter designs. It was also uninventive, repetitive, and predictable.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs ah, so you are an Idealist, I can respect that and I will let this drop

doppelgreener

I think it is a bad idea because I value the creativity in smaller things. That is my value. It is not their value, and it is not my choice to make.

BESW

So: people had spent seven years and hundreds if not thousands of dollars on 3.5. They'd dedicated massive effort to learning its systems and quirks.

4e looked superficially like something they didn't want their tabletop games to be associated with.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@Kethryweryn yeah any of those shots where people show their shelves of pen and paper books and you see the one shelf full of 3.5 related materials

BESW

2:26 PM

Wizards presented their new product poorly.

doppelgreener

@BESW And the very first (or second?) adventure had you approach a Kobold ambush from the wrong direction

BESW

@JonathanHobbs First.

Kethryweryn

First. I've read the H1 Keep of the Shadowfell.

That's quite unimaginative.

But that's also a level 1 adventure.

BESW

4e was not going to be made available for third-party content through OGL or any similar license.

And in the meantime, a third-party company that had developed a good reputation for making 3.5-compatible materials came out with its own "3.5+" system which was aggressively marketed as the alternative to 4e for people who liked 3.5.

wax eagle

@BESW I think in some ways the sell job contributed to the it's a MMO mentality.

Kethryweryn

2:28 PM

Yes, Paizo's coup was very well played.

wax eagle

they thought they could generate mass appeal with that kind of messaging and in turn it seeded ill will with their core fanbase

doppelgreener

@waxeagle was it the "play 4e on your PC!" advertisements in the back of the books that helped?

BESW

And the DDI was taken very poorly, partly because of Wizards' awful PR job which led people to believe the anti-4e propaganda that they'd have to pay a monthly subscription to play a tabletop game.

wax eagle

@JonathanHobbs a bit, add in the whole roles breakdown and they way that's presented in the PHB (I'll note I joined up after the red box came out, so I can only look back)

BESW

@Kethryweryn It's a level 1 to 3 adventure, and was the very first exposure the general public had to 4e. The updated version is a bit better, but the original was awful in terms of production values. It clearly needed another pass or two through editing and playtesting.

Joshua Aslan Smith

2:30 PM

I really hope/wish some officials tools come out, but I think because of the 4e backlash they wont

honestly the best parts about 4e is the DDI stuff, and the beta tabletop thign they had going with character imports and monster imports was almost there

BESW

Oh, and naturally when 4e first came out it didn't have the massive number of options that 3.5 had spent 7 years accumulating.

Kethryweryn

The offline character builder for 4e is one of the best I've ever seen.

Joshua Aslan Smith

the online version is even better

BESW

So even if a player was willing to give it a shot after the botched PR, the Paizo propaganda, the awful introductory adventure, and the sunk costs fallacy.... it felt constricting and narrow for someone who was used to 3.5's option spread.

doppelgreener

Also 4e suddenly had nothing for social stuff. Or almost nothing by comparison. And no crafting.

Joshua Aslan Smith

2:33 PM

@JonathanHobbs which were features, misconstrued as bugs

BESW

In reality, the 4e PHB1 had more options and customizability built into it than the 3.5 PHB1, but we were comparing it to seven years of splat.

@JonathanHobbs Because, again, Wizards is absolute pants at conveying design goals in non-insulting ways.

wax eagle

@JoshuaAslanSmith I would put a great deal of money on wizards having a Next subscription service of some kind.

BESW

@waxeagle Yeah.

Kethryweryn

Was it so hard for them to say : "We managed to fix the linear/quadratic problem." "Everyone is useful at every level". "Build your party together to achieve greatness" ? 4e has some very interesting design choices and strong selling points.

wax eagle

@Kethryweryn yes it does.

BESW

2:35 PM

The backlash on the subscription thing may have hurt them at first, but the bulk of their revenue over time came from subscriptions.

Alex P

@BESW I think it's their D&D people. Their Magic people do a good job actually making all the "psychographics" sound not-stupid.

BESW

@AlexP Yes, which baffles me.

Alex P

Except "Griefer Timmy."

Joshua Aslan Smith

hahaha

BESW

@Kethryweryn Yeah... they somehow botched that. [shrug]

Alex P

2:36 PM

Griefer Timmy is just that guy who wants to play D&D to start fights with party members, though, so I don't really care if they hate him.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@waxeagle I hope so, because if I and my friends like it I'd like 4e level of online support, but even more Im not interested in buying books

THIS IS THE NEW MILLENNIUM etc.

obligatory cyberpunk reference

Alex P

@BESW I think the difference is that their Magic people actually represent a range of players themselves. Whereas their D&D design team usually doesn't.

BESW

True.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@alexp agreed, Timmy is as equally valued a customer as a johnny and spike

BESW

To all appearances, the D&D design team doesn't seem to be aware that there's no such thing as D&D.

4

Alex P

2:38 PM

@JoshuaAslanSmith Moreover, MaRo is Timmy.

wax eagle

@JoshuaAslanSmith I've got a hope, but I don't know how founded it is. My hope is that they allow you to generate your own rules set

@BESW so tempted to tweet that link at mearls...

but it's too late for it to mean anything

doppelgreener

@Kethryweryn Yes. Apparently. Somehow sometimes people are actually just really bad at... just... stating what's good. Take, for instance: Microsoft. The Surface was almost exclusively advertised by breakdancing - tell me anything that has told you about the product that makes it even slightly worth a dollar. Or anything at all about the Xbox One. Despite the fact it could bring you much cheaper games and a lot of other things, they just completely avoided talking about anything about it.

BESW

Heh.

RedRiderX

@BESW So "nothing is D&D, everything is D&D"?

BESW

@RedRiderX Not quite.

RedRiderX

2:40 PM

Oh.

I'll read it through sometime then.

BESW

D&D isn't everything, but it means so many different things to so many different people that it's almost impossible to say what it is with any assurance.

RedRiderX

Oh.

Kethryweryn

@BESW Very interesting article. Quite true.

BESW

For a number of reasons, every group (and often every player in a group) thinks "D&D" is something slightly different.

Alex P

I mean, there is a giant persistent conversation to figure out exactly what "old-school D&D" is.

Specifically among people who play it.

BESW

2:41 PM

3.5 was so massively successful because it deliberately tried not to commit itself to any one vision of D&D.

It thinks it can accommodate any kind of D&D anyone might ever want to play--in fact, it even thinks it can accommodate any kind of RPG experience anyone might want to play.

doppelgreener

@Kethryweryn An analogy is this: "Imagine if you sat down with your friends to play “Cards”… one of you is playing Poker, another is playing Hearts, and the last person is playing Go Fish. You're all playing cards, right?"

That would go... very badly. But that's how people play D&D.

Without realising it.

Kethryweryn

Exactly.

BESW

4e, by contrast, is very deliberate about what it is and what it can do: it's a tactical combat engine. It's an awesome tactical combat engine. But if you don't want a combat engine, 4e can't help you.

doppelgreener

One person's playing a game about exploration, another about social exploits, another about killing as much stuff as humanly possible whilst still maintaining a good alignment and a usable weapon.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@RedRiderX its like the semantics arguments that occur in this very chat and on questions

BESW

2:44 PM

@Kethryweryn It's by our own @Magician. His blog articles helped me run 4e games.

doppelgreener

(Actually I take that 'good alignment' part back: whoever that is, they're probably neutral just so they can kill anyone and justify it)

Kethryweryn

After reading the 4e rules, I'm still wondering why there isn't any video game out there with turn by turn combat based on it. It would be SO GOOD.

RedRiderX

@JoshuaAslanSmith Hah quite.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@Kethryweryn I have asked myself this SOOO MANY TIMES

doppelgreener

@Kethryweryn There are plenty.

Final Fantasy Tactics. Disgaea. A few others.

BESW

2:45 PM

@JonathanHobbs Chaotic neutral, surely.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs I think he means a direct port

rather than similar games like fire emblem

Kethryweryn

@JoshuaAslanSmith Yup I meant a direct port.

doppelgreener

@Kethryweryn Of the 4e rules?

Joshua Aslan Smith

yes

as in you do the whole mmo make a character

and then you play it as if it was 4e digital

doppelgreener

Oh. Here's why: why would you do that when you could make your own turn-based system and not pay prohibitive royalties and surrender independence and control of your own project in an incredibly financially risky industry

2

And your own one would be better because you made it yourself for your own game and it's fun and you understand it and have full control over it

Kethryweryn

2:47 PM

I know, but still. Let us have our dreams ! :D

doppelgreener

Your dreams have been realised in better form than a 4e to PC port could provide: Disgaea, FFT, and others

Because they provide that in a format that works for PC.

BESW

@Kethryweryn It's been discussed in the chat before, for sure. Not for maybe six months that I've noticed, though.

doppelgreener

(where "PC" is "a video game platform")

wax eagle

I think more importantly 4e is closer to an RPG port of those games

BESW

@waxeagle Amusingly true.

It's a fascinating hybrid of tabletop RPG and MMO sensibilities and techniques.

Kethryweryn

2:51 PM

@JonathanHobbs I haven't tried Disgaea, will take a look. I haved played some others.

doppelgreener

Well that's pretty much because it is

They brought video game rules to the tabletop, like you said earlier

so that it could also be a video game

BESW

Aye, it was designed to be both concurrently.

Kethryweryn

@waxeagle Yes, that's what made it such an interesting experiment with the genre.

wax eagle

problem: wizards is not a software house and doesn't really know what it's doing when it comes to making software

see: failed virtual table top, false start with downloadable char builder, less than stellar character builder.

BESW

Their regular inability to just keep the online Builders functional.

wax eagle

2:53 PM

(the online builder was a bad technology choice, that's most of my issue with it)

doppelgreener

@waxeagle being silverlight?

wax eagle

@JonathanHobbs yep

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs all those negatives are outweighed by brand marketability

BESW

I think Silverlight was probably the best choice available, but certainly not objectively stellar.

Kethryweryn

They used silverlight ? I'm loling.

wax eagle

2:54 PM

@Kethryweryn oh yes.

BESW

Well, Flash was out: it has to front-load all its content while Silverlight allowed them to only load databases on demand.

Joshua Aslan Smith

yes at the time silverlight was the thing that was what they needed

Kethryweryn

And HTML5 was probably too "new" at the time ?

doppelgreener

@waxeagle to be fair: at the time silverlight was looking pretty awesome (and flash was not)

wax eagle

@BESW yeah, they probably thought the 3 options were silverlight, flash and java. None of them are a good choice

Joshua Aslan Smith

2:55 PM

now in hindsight with html5 its a joke

doppelgreener

@Kethryweryn HTML5 was theoretical at the time

yep

yeah

we were on 4.01

Haha ok.

2:55 PM

And every time Silverlight updates, the Builder crashes.

Joshua Aslan Smith

in fact I still learned 4.01 2 years ago for a webdev class because html5 wasn't fully standardized at that point

wax eagle

they probably could have gotten away with just writing it in Asp.net with a heavy dose of javascript/ajax. The problem is that it wouldn't have been as pretty

RedRiderX

@BESW Well MS has now abandoned Silverlight, so that shouldn't be a problem now. :P

doppelgreener

@JoshuaAslanSmith that... hugely depends. Maybe it's more the fault of WotC or someone else, but I don't see a video game port of D&D 4e anywhere. Except for the NWN game, which is still not quite a 4e port.

Joshua Aslan Smith

yeah it has 4e sensibilities but is for all intents and purposes a branded wowclone

doppelgreener

2:57 PM

(in other words, the proof is in the nonexistent pudding in this case)

Joshua Aslan Smith

@JonathanHobbs I fully see that as being WOTC's fault versus a lack of profit to be had

doppelgreener

@JoshuaAslanSmith Probably that was a part of it. But probably also anyone wanting to make a turn based RPG... was better off making their own thing "heavily inspired" by an RPG ruleset of their choosing.

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