Let's talk about corporate frickups in the tabletop industry. I'll start: Lorraine Williams driving out Weis, Hickman, and Elmore.
Let's talk about corporate frickups in the tabletop industry.
Let's talk about corporate frickups in the tabletop industry. I'll start: Lorraine Williams driving out Weis, Hickman, and Elmore.
How about White Wolf getting shut down after causing an international incident? You know, when they released a book claiming there were gay Holocaust camps in Chechyna?
QRD?
Try this one:
>https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/68130/paradox-puts-the-leash-on-white-wolf-following-vampire-the-masquerades-crude-and-disrespectful-prose/
>In the handbook, White Wolf explains that the Russian republic of Chechnya is run by a secret vampire group. The real-world atrocity of gay men being kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and killed by the State is downplayed, framed as a deliberate distraction by the supernatural shadow-government.
>Jorjani continued: “The World of Darkness has always been about horror, and horror is about exploring the darkest parts of our society, our culture, and ourselves. Horror should not be afraid to explore difficult or sensitive topics, but it should never do so without understanding who those topics are about and what it means to them.”
>“Real evil does exist in the world, and we can’t ever excuse its real perpetrators or cheapen the suffering of its real victims.”
>A spokesperson for Chechnyan Head of the Republic Ramzan Kadyrov also chimed in against White Wolf, albeit with a political slant that likened White Wolf’s cheapening of the purges to those who initially accused the state of performing them.
>According to Crime Russia, the official stated: “This is a continuation of the campaign to slander Russia and Chechnya. I am sure that the same organization that claimed about the persecution of sexual minorities stands behind it.”
I mean, its so obviously false.
The chechens dont lets any gay people live long enough to get transported to a camp.
Or when CGL put out a sourcebook for Shadowrun where players got to dungeoncrawl for one of Mengele's scalpels that he used on israeli prisoners. And they get to battle israeli ghosts to boot.
Honestly that sounds like fun.
fun is one thing, but lore around Shadowrun spirits would not have made them israeli ghosts since the lore states that spirits are not ghosts. the most that should have shown up was twisted ancestor spirits at most; maybe blood spirits.
I mean, you're right, but none of that really makes it any better.
Bit tacky.
Should have emailed Mengeles descendants to get his ok first lol
Lol, I've followed Battletech for decades and didn't know about this. Lol, frick CGL and frick Loren in particular.
>Chummers, are we the baddies?
>We're Shadowrunners, so yes; we are the baddies.
>Yeah but-
>Herr Johnson is going to betray us anyway, relax omae.
There are no gays in Chechnya, praise Hashut. Please delete your post
I love that they did that kind of shit all the time back in the 90s, and nobody gave a single damn.
Still not sure if the whiny backlash about that book was because-
1)Internet is more connected now, so easier for 3rd world frickwits to get annoyed
2)White Wolf being so old created a critical mass of mentally unstable former employers who think getting fired was a personal slight, and not their fault for being chronically bad writers who never turn things in on time, so they made sure to raise the biggest stink possible at the drop of a hat.
So what did they say the Amernian Genocide actually was back in the 90's when this kind of shit was happening all the time?
You mean the Armenian genocide from around WW1? I don't think they touched on it because the WW writers were all a bunch of middle-class white guys who "fought the power" by joining drum circles, calling themselves Wiccans, and wearing black clothes. If it wasn't part of mainstream news cycles, it didn't get mentioned.
They did however do a whole book on the Holocaust, and how you could go fight statted up ghosts in the concentration camps for no clearly defined reasons. It was one of the first examples of an RPG proclaiming they were hiring a sensitivity specialist, without actually using that term. This was the same company that release another book with fanged veganas on the back cover while asking "is it art?"
I miss the 90s.
There was nothing like an Armenian genocide in the 90's. On the contrary, there was an Azeri mini-genocide when Armenians offered the local Azeri to frick off to Azerbaijan or get shot. The reverse happened last year.
They were both chimping out at and pogromoing each other starting in the 1980s. Unironically it's only the Russians that can keep the peace in that region.
Just so everyone knows, this is the same poster named Lawtpiat on somethingawful. There was no international incident of note, the chech government did have gay holocaust camps and their response to the game was to say "we dont have camps because if kids turn out to be gay the parents correctly murder them on the spot"
The only reason lawtpiat cares about this, is because he hates a mediocre artist named Zak Smith (a rapist) for winning a twitter slapfight against him in 2013.
Was it ever determined if Zak Smith actually was a rapist or not? I'd like to hear what actually happened
Not quite, but "rapey" is still a good word for that guy. Note that his one and only victory in pic related hangs on a technicality -- in legal terms, he "coerced" her into moving in with him, not "forced" her, because while they're the same thing in everyday conversation, in a courtroom there's a difference. So even his "victory" here makes him look like an abusive butthole.
>rapey
Go find the interviews with all his detractors admitting they made it up. Posting links to it gets b& here for amusing reasons.
The article writer is off the deep end but its straight up recorded interviews with a variety of osr celebrities admitting they made it up as a mob.
t. ZIDF
Guy's a dickbat, but being a dickbat isn't illegal and the tone police mob is revolting. Go listen to the interviews.
ok zak
The mob mentality is real. Look at yourselves.
Frick off, Zak
lmao I was the one who found him ctrl-cing /osrg/ and called it so he deleted his post with nazi arrows in it and pretended it never happened. Guy's a moron.
Tone policing on the internet with cancel culture is also moronic.
Someone can dislike more than one thing at once while not supporting one of them.
You're just so rabidly possessed you can't see it and have to double down.
NTA
If you can't parse that you don't belong here.
>Nazi arrows
What the hell are those
You point them at the enemy, laugh devilishly and then watch in horror as they fly back in your face, a kind of Bowmerang.
>you just used one
Old joke, I forget if an actual twiiter leftist used the term for
>
or if it was a mockery of accusations that all Ganker users are nazis.
none of them said they made up the accusations they said they just believed them regardless of whatever because they hated zak
only a zak nuthugger would defend him this hard
>We all knew that Zak hadn’t done anything, really, except he made the mistake of shining a light on goons [Something Awful’s slang for its own members] being immature...none of them believed what they said. We were flabbergasted when this stuff that was obviously made up on the board went viral and people who weren’t goons started repeating it.
Ah yes, an unsourced SA quote, there's no better proof that Zak dindu nuffin
>present them with clear evidence and sources
>THaT's NoT GoOd ENoUGh
There are more in the article. Go listen.
Who am I kidding, you won't ever be able to admit you fricked up. Doesn't matter if the truth walked up and bit you in the ass you'd still pretend it never happened that way. Which is ironic given all the malignant narcissism accusations levelled at Zak. He's that too. Its more and more like a slap fight between different cliches of social predators over marks rather than anything resembling good community.
I don't give a shit about the "article," I'm mocking you for your pea-brained simulacra of logic wherein if some guys on a moron forum made stuff up, then all claims everywhere are therefore also made up and Zak is a poor innocent who dindu nuffin.
Give it a rest, Zak will not suck your dick. because you want him to, and he can't get off if you consent
>I don't give a shit about reading or listening to anything or thinking I just want to keep feeling good about myself based on what I already believe!
I know.
Zak is based and you're a homosexual
Knowing who makes any of your games in le Tweet era is a spiritual error.
This honestly.
There's no reason to care about what any game maker's political ideology is. Its like caring if the librarian drinks pepsi or coke.
I literally don't care about Gav Thorpe's troony children or Alsssio Cavatore's appreciation of K Pop. Stay behind the emerald curtain and make magic homie
>political ideology
Since when is being an abusive boyfriend and a massive c**t that nobody but James Raggi can stand a "political ideology?"
Probably around the same time having puritan witch hunts where you can foam up a mob because you don't like someone's tone and it be publicly lauded.
I need to know for context; is Coke running death squads again?
We never stopped.
Most of the librarians I know drink coffee(50%), Tea(30%), Pepsi(4%), Water(7%) and Ginger Beer(4%).
The remaining librarians I work with I've not taken notes on their preferred drinks.
Give sample size otherwise the percentage is meaningless.
The funniest thing is that Chechnya didnt actually do anything other than send a not so strongly worded letter. Like, they are a small peripheric autonomous region in Russia, they couldnt do anything to WW even if they wanted.
>they couldnt do anything to WW even if they wanted
Kadyrov sent assassins after his enemies abroad multiple times.He is also easy to insult and notoriously vindictive.
They had Chechen political exiles mauled with hammers and axes.
>You know, when they released a book claiming there were gay Holocaust camps in Chechyna?
It’s even more funny considering Ukraine was vilified for having more homophobic hate crimes than Russia before the invasion.
Wasn't the guy who wrote that book/section literally a gay who fled Chechnya? They don't tell you that part of the story
I'm kind of hoping there WERE death camps.
>Weis, Hickman
Those two were cancer. Everything they touched turned to railroad bullshit.
Is there more to the Don Kaye villainy than Murlynd?
He died, which forced Gygax to bring in the Blumes, who took the company away from him while he was out of town negotiating cartoon and movie rights, and that eventually led to Lorraine Williams coming in and trying to fix the shitshow that TSR had become.
Basically if Don Kaye didn't die, TSR would have been far better off.
Lorraine Williams is the hero of the TSR story.
Hey pal she was a weirdly horny Mormon but you're pissing on my origin story. Let me have my piece of wholesome pre internet pie
>weirdly horny Mormon
Why'd you say Mormon twice?
I mean, look at any Don Bluth drawing of a fertile woman. Or listen to Cam Clark about getting AIDS. Mormons are arguably more horny than normal because they're taught to suppress it.
The suits and beancounters are just a symptom of the disease of normie fans. Rich dipshits with MBAs will automatically show up to take over any company that gets too much attention, it can't be helped. Games need to stay as outsider art and you can't do without gatekeeping the normoids.
Normies eat away at any scene like a cancer. Consider all the memes and social media posts saying you're not allowed to gatekeep or even talk shop about someone's band t-shirt or whatever. How can you have a subculture under those circumstances?
>outsider art
That's not what 'outsider art' means you troglodyte. Outsider art is the art made by someone without any idea of the normal conventions of a genre - they don't have a sense of anything except the most basic rules. Most outsider art tends to be total fricking hot trash because those conventions are established for a reason and breaking them should be done only when you understand why they're there. Outsider Art CAN be really cool to people inside of the culture because it provides a fresh take, but it's in the same way deliberately subversive art or movies can be really good to pretentious cinephiles and total horseshit to everyone else.
Not a frick up as its on purpose, but everything happening in the major hobby board game publishers under Asmodee.
None of this is traditional games.
Well, b***hing about the mishandling of TSR is pretty traditional, but yeah, it already looks like this is gonna be just another thinly-veiled excuse to shovel unrelated political shit into /tg/.
When politics were inserted into games, all games became political. You can't bring up Fruti Rudi the black gay Muslim Gangrel Anarch without the context in which he exists and why the character was even created.
He's not even the only one, a lot of V5 does this and it feels almost like malicious compliance.
I ripped half of Fall of London for a game a while back and the "Islamic Feminist" character from that is obnoxious in a way that feels really deliberate, and that was coming from my group of players who are pretty left wing. Like it's not just caricature it's almost constantly highlighting that she holds incompatible values, even beyond 'Islamic Feminist' being an oxymoron. She's part of the House of Carna - a SEX CULT - while dressing how Islam dictates and crap. She's so condescending to characters who, specifically as per the book, absolutely should not be treated that way by her own metrics.
Or there's a trans nosferatu who takes women's skin and the literal first line of her bio talks about how dressing up as a woman turns her on. I don't think you could come up with a better stereotype of what trans people are without having her literally sexually assault people in bathrooms.
Then there's the 'anarchist' gang that are run on strict heirarchy and even draws attention to that fact and the obedience of it, and how you'll be violently punished for disobeying it even slightly.
It HAS to be deliberate. There's no way that anybody who actually thought that way would miss it. They got a mandate for stuff like that and went "Oh, we'll give you a bunch of rainbow progressives..."
If I had any more faith in the people who make that game, I'd say it was a deliberate choice to highlight the inherent contradiction in vampires, with how they portray themselves as a refined aristocracy but are in reality undead parasites.
But that would require subtlety and good writing, which I doubt they understand much.
>It HAS to be deliberate. There's no way that anybody who actually thought that way would miss it.
I tought the same a few years ago, but people are literal morons than can and will enforce moronic contradictions and will willfully ignore the cognitive disonance as long as they ingroup does.
Basically this
Its a group of followers raised to tear down anything in their homeland and they think any enemy of their enemy is their friend. Muslims hate the western world like you? Must be your friend and like people in your group they act exactly like you do. Evidence to the contrary must be propaganda by the all powerful right wing that controls all media slandering through FAUX NEWS (except the good news you consume). I mean believing otherwise would imply your beliefs arent universeal and that everyone wouldnt follow them and that maybe other people might different ideas and the society they want doesnt work that way
Schroedinger's Leftoid.
I mean it could just be Poe's Law. If you rub shoulders with the authors of this or their sphere you will find that they are really this fricking insane. You didn't think these annoying /misc/ack types came to be as they are out of the blue, did you?
Have you seen the Barbie movie? Ideologues have no self awareness.
>born extraordinary
>is trapped in a fricked up paralell dimension
>wants to be ordinary
What difference the touch of a creeper can make.
The Barbie movie was a straight laced dramatization of the procession of simulacra. It wasn't subtle about it and even referenced the matrix reloaded to hit you over the head with it. Everything else, I assume, was accretion of Hollywood slop required to make a movie these days.
> practicing Islam
> cannot drink blood
At least he's fasting during the day - 12 months of Ramadan per year.
Then when it directly calls out that being vehemently queer and vehemently Muslim is inherently contradictory, it doesn't address how he deals with that or if it causes any dissonance, it's just "and he'll beat you up if you bring it up to his face".
Why even bring it up if you literally don't have an answer unless the dissonance is the point?
In a bizarre turn, Islam does make allowances for among other things, drinking blood if it's a matter of life and death.
Now, he had been a Jehovah's Witness, it'd be a different matter entirely.
Okay but a vampire is a mobile corpse. Matters of life and death have already fled. It's matters of death and motion now. He arguably doesn't even have a soul to be concerned with anymore.
He can observe and reason, so as far as Muslims mindsets go, he has a soul. Though that's going more by the Aristotlean/Islamic Golden Age Philosophy definition rather than the Christian and Socratic definitions of the word and Vampire generally goes with the latter.
I always enjoy getting to post the screencap evicerating Rudi, showing the hollow and brainless attempt to virtue signal that he is.
That entire take is based as frick and I love seeing people who know their shit talk about Islam.
That being said the Ashirra have existed for... ages, so should we all be equally mad at the Banu Haqim for existing? Especially the one/s who met Muhammed and survived the True Faith?
Basically every capital city in Europe will have substantial minority populations. Add to that that Vampires generally draw from those on the fringes of society - hence why so many end up sexual or racial minorities - it's pretty typical Vampire fare.
Though it makes you wonder if maybe the Get are onto something. "Y'know all the vampires keep being gays, trannies and non-whites, and we know the Wyrm encourages all kinds of excess, so maybe trying to clamp down on degeneracy would stop the leeches having the pick of the fricking litter while staying hidden? Nothing wrong with BEING those things, just the lifestyle."
Honestly, the character of Rudi *could* be interesting in a modern setting. The newly turned vampire is going to have all sorts of issues with his new being, very standard Vampire fare. That conflict of selves and how his old acquaintances react to him is a whole story to play around with.
And it does seem a plausible scenario in a modern setting, where many young people have these contradictory mindsets in their regular life. I could totally see characters wanting to stand up for their human causes and having to come to terms with how they're no longer necessarily part of the cause in any way that matters. Say in life, the character was fighting for, idk, rape victims. Now you're a vamp, with severely rapey overtones in your very sustenance. How the hell does he deal with that?
But not like this where he's just "accepted" back in though. It's really missing the point to just be a paragon of "virtue" like that. If that state is ever achievable, it should be the finale of a long arduous journey, ie, the campaign.
That or your vamp who volunteers at the woman's shelter becomes a hardcore consensualist and therefore a walking Masquerade violation. As their other moral barriers start to crumble under the weight of their new life, how long before that one does? Or does it remain a source of drama that you have a few mortals who know about your new life?
There's a ton of stuff like that in new Vampire, where the way it's presented is blitheringly moronic but the actual core concept is solid enough. There's a dumb as shit segment where a bunch of vampire parents talk on a forum about how they enjoy feeding off their kids, but the actual NOTION of being a Vampire parent and how you deal with that and whether or not you can control your need for blood to not take them from, say, your spouse? That's a kickass idea, I'd never have thought of playing a vampire parent. Hell, even the concept of a big city having a kind of 'vampire parent support group', while a bit silly, is something that makes sense within the setting. Yeah, of course if you're in that situation you'd find the 10 other poor frickers in the same situation you can talk to once a week just to be open about that part of yourself and exchange tips on dealing with it.
yeah the vampire parents feeding off kids is majorly fricked up and perfect for a hook. Like holy frick, how do you even begin to deal with that as another character? What the frick?
But no, it's portrayed as a good and joyful thing, which is just so fricking dumb.
Is the vampire parent thing in the V5 core book or in a supplement? I'd like to read it.
It's in V5 Anarch, and it's absolutely a work of parody. Like, everything in V5 is big V1/V2 vibes, not V3/V5. It's absolutely parody. There's personal horror here, sure, but the 'wink wink nudge nudge' of everything is elbowing you in the chest. Highlights from this include "cleaver is offensive", vampire karen here eating the lady who comes to her house, and theobellfanboy saying some shit directly after that would have theo bell shoot him.
Like, especially if you know Vampire and it's history: yeah, it's absolutely deliberate, and it's hilarious. Who could've guessed these thoroughly monstrous creatures are so fricked that the books talking from their perspective give you a fricked view of things?
If you're shooting for a more V3/V20 feel at your table and want to use these to have the horror be the text instead of the subtext, go for it. Just remember that everything in V5 has a tongue planted so firmly in cheek that it's practically burrowing through. For something like Rudi, read it like Rudi wrote his own loresheet; once you do you realise that it's probably the authors making fun of such people. For someone like Ayse, that Islamic Feminist, it's absolutely making fun of her; bashing people like that was par for the course in some 2010's leftist circles, you can probably still find videos on it.
Yeah, I think you're right about reading it that way. Absolutely delusional posts by absolutely delusional people. It kind of works as well to throw you into their mindset, for your own game use.
No fricking way. V5 is not all tongue in cheek it clearly takes a lot of it’s Libby virtue signaling very seriously, more so than White Wolf ever did in the past. The idea that Rudi’s sheet wasn’t written in earnestness is cope. I’ve seen the way the writing staff tweets and blogs and who in the community they choose to collaborate with, it’s all woke-scoldey libs and drama queens. They even have Phil “cheapest pen in the west” Brucatto kicking around for god’s sake. Sure, every once in a while some decent writing like the vampire parents thing sneaks its way into a book, but these are exceptions to the rule
But that's really the crux of it, isn't it? If the contradiction was acknowledged, it could be used as inspiration for all sorts of interesting stories that are kind of the essence of World of Darkness. But these seem to ignore all that and just be a progressive fantasy character, which is sad and boring.
An interesting take but he's missing the discussions about appropriate consumption if it allows you to live which is part of general islamic jurisprudence - they need blood to live, therefore it isn't going against the dietary requirements.
There's a few more bits of this but essentially the Lancea Sanctum of Requiem has a bunch of talk about how religion and vampires work, especially those that consume blood - they include the israeli and Islamic takes on their philosophy and how they integrate with the general Christian aligned main covenant and how the real unifying thing among all of them is Theban Sorcery. There's more about Rudy that people tend to miss which is that he's likely a tool of the Followers of Set in Copenhagen that they're using as a distraction and against their camarilla enemies.
honestly I was most irritated by PrinceS...yes not just one Prince, but multiple Vampire Princes...fearing this guy.
A baby anarch who even comes to the attention of a Prince, let alone inconveniencing that Price, would either end up as a greasy spot or utterly brain-rangered into being yet another pawn in the long game.
>multiple Vampire Princes...fearing this guy.
>either end up as a greasy spot or utterly brain-rangered into being yet another pawn in the long game.
It's easy to focus on the socjus bullshit, but this is really what makes Rudy a stupid character. He's somehow a big enough deal for multiple princes to pay attention to him and he blatantly violates the Masquerade, yet somehow he doesn't get his shit pushed in by said princes or by a group of hunters who would have no trouble finding him at all. The only thing keeping him alive is plot armour.
Someone gotta stop letting corporate white women write black characters
My black player said this literally verbatim last week. He said it’s even more frustrating when you’re actually a black guy, because half the time you’re getting shit on for the progressive shit and other half you’ve got rainbow hairs who expect them to be like this in real life.
>He said it’s even more frustrating when you’re actually a black guy, because half the time you’re getting shit on for the progressive shit and other half you’ve got rainbow hairs who expect them to be like this in real life.
Worse are when you get the gross white women fetishizing how much he stank.
See: Mass Effect Andromeda for that one.
I know frick all about Andromeda because I pretend it didn’t happen. Care to elaborate?
This scene has not aged a day
Holy kek
Movie so bad the character creator had his name removed from it and had the character killed hoping people would forget he was involved.
It was the second movie that made R. Crumb flip his shit. He wasn't super happy with how the first one turned out, but it was successful and the studio wanted a sequel and they made one without R. Crumb's involvement.
So basically since forever in America, then.
America has always been about getting away from whoever is going to frown at your weird sex cult.
Bakshi remains serially underrated. Motherfricker refused to miss.
Absolutely.
Coonskin was fricking amazing, but never got a chance to get the attention it deserved, for reasons both false and legitimate.
52 years later and it feels like absolutely nothing has changed.
Obligatory screenshot.
I don't think "unrealistic" is the problem, I can easily imagine many people like that.
The Mary Sue part is like what
says, it's how he's portrayed as being able to make waves in vamp society in very unlikely fashion while straddling mortal/vampire concerns.
Man, this writer doesn't even get the point of the criticism, does he?
yeah man inserting someone you know from real life and making them super badass and super morally correct and actually everybody is so scared of him and he leads my favourite faction and no one can tell him he's wrong cause they're soooooo scared and also he saves orphans and puppies is definitely not lame at all and it's good writing
Maybe he could have had a character who tried to be all those things and struggled with it and it would be interesting but people just want to tick a box, the whole dynamic of the pull between family and tradition and the familiar with trying to be true to your feelings or even acknowledge them, trying to locate himself in either environment and realising neither is perfect etc but it was just frick God, here is BBC lol
The actual conflict would be too complex and adult to explore properly so what other reason is he mentioned except author upcummies
>friend
>not a vampire, but not far off
That's not something you should be saying about a friend. Saying a guy is very similar to an undead parasite, something no better than a tapeworm or tick, isn't something you should do to a friend.
I believe it's supposed to be one of those humorous things, a joke if I'm not mistaken.
I'll make a few generic 40k threads to compensate.
>le false dichotomy face
How about not making shitty threads?
Have you been on /tg/ in the last few years? Kicking off questgays killed this board.
Just use your mod powers to delete the thread, moron.
D&D 4E. Not a statement on the system, but the reason it exists is corporate shittery of the highest order.
CGL embezzlement that was never punished because Mormonism that ended up destroying Shadowrun.
>D&D 4E. Not a statement on the system, but the reason it exists is corporate shittery of the highest order.
Go on, as I was under the impression that 4e was the result of common complaints and feedback about 3.x as a whole.
That's why the system is mechanically the way it is, not the reason it was made. The reason it was made is because Hasbro started counting every WotC property separately for finances rather than letting WotC do what it wanted. Under those restrictions, D&D couldn't exist in the form it used to, so the D&D team had to argue for its own existence with insane expectations D&D had never met before or get the property mothballed.
I don't know how you projected something that happened two years ago back to a time 15 years ago but you should probably have a doctor help you with your brain damage.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/
Does that look like 2 years ago to you, moron?
Hasbto restructuring franchises into "core" and "non-core" is well documented, previously WOTC could print money with Magic the Gathering and be left alone, but then they suddenly had to only use D&D money for D&D and couldn't justify themselves with MTG because they were being treated as separate franchises. That's why they tried pushing Gleemax and D&D Insider so hard and the VTT getting kaboomed by a literal murder-suicide fricked them so hard.
https://dmdavid.com/tag/why-fourth-edition-seemed-like-the-savior-dungeons-dragons-needed/
4e was the result of 3e reaching the point of diminishing returns on splatbook sales. The same reason most games make a new edition.
Around the same time, there was also WotC shuttering Dragon Magazine, which not only threw away a lynchpin of the fandom since the TSR days but also lead to the foundation of Paizo. While we're at it, lets throw in the GSL; WotC's absolutely dogshit replacement of the OGL that was much more restrictive and much less attractive, had it not been created and 4E been put in the damn OGL, Pathfinder would just be a 3rd Party 4th Edition game and /tg/ and the internet in general would've been spared much of the edition warring that plagued the early 2010s.
>which not only threw away a lynchpin of the fandom since the TSR days but also lead to the foundation of Paizo.
Paizo had existed as the second party publisher of the Dragon and Dungeon magazines for nearly 5 years before Dragon and Dungeon were cancelled in '07. It pretty much existed as a Freelancer employment company with an office in the same building as the main WotC offices.
>Pathfinder would just be a 3rd Party 4th Edition game and /tg/ and the internet in general would've been spared much of the edition warring that plagued the early 2010s.
If it wasn't for the initial GSL, Pathfinder would have just been a 3rd party magazine publishing 3.5 and 4e adventures with their own setting. The GSL forcing them to choose between publishing 3.5 and 4e stuff is what created 3.PF.
Nah, would've been splitting resources for minute gains. There could only be one.
When the GSL was announced, the head of Paizo said that they would have dual stated their adventures if the GSL didn't have a "no dual stating publications nor publishing 3e and 4e versions of the same thing" clause. Paizo wasn't willing to risk not publishing anything for the 6+ months till 4e launched so opted to stick with 3.5. This combined with the amount of outcry caused by 4e abysmal and outright insulting initial advertising campaign lead them to write and publish 3.PF.
You're all a bit right.
So 4e had three things going into it that made it into what it is.
First was sales. 3.5ed D&D was pretty long in the tooth at this point, and sales were dropping off. This isn't a new thing. People will at some point go "nah I'm good on supplemental books."
Second was design. 3.5 had kind of run out of road in terms of design space. All that existed was remixing what was already there, or grafting on new systems - neither of which are appealing. Also, 3.5 had received a lot of feedback over the years and criticisms for its designs. People at WoTC did want to make the game better, and wanted to take these well known issues and resolve them (if they succeeded or not is another story for another day)
And third was Hasbro restructuring how it handled funding and branding. To make some boring corporate stuff streamlined - Hasbro changed how it was acting towards its brand, and WoTC was heavily effected. "Wizards of the Coast" was no longer considered one brand. Magic The Gathering was a brand, and Dungeons and Dragons was a brand. This disrupted a process that WoTC had been doing for awhile - magic funded a lot of 3.5 D&D. That was done with this new structure. D&D now had to stand alone as a brand.
And D&D was not profitable enough to meet the mark Hasbro set for it to act independently. But someone at WoTC, with some decent forethought, realized the future of D&D was online. They had the right idea, but they didn't have the technological know how to make it happen.
'
Genuinely, think about the plan for 4e. An edition with an integrated online tabletop that came with a suite of online tools that were tied to a monthly subscription.
The problem being, of course, they fumbled the execution.
>People will at some point go "nah I'm good on supplemental books."
And this was not helped by the OGL, which made supplement sales drop for several reasons. That's why it was jettisoned for 4E.
Catalyst Games' Porch Gate and their handling of demo teams. And recent conversion bans.
Basically everything kevin sembida does, especially the robotech kick starter.
Whatever the deal was with D&Done/OGLv2.
All the indi osr darlings getting recorded admitting to lynching zack smith with no evidence.
Privateer Press' Warmahords mk3 and 4 releases.
Whoever is about to frick up the halo skirmish game license.
Netrunner getting shitcanned for being too good a game.
X-Wing's transfer to the MCP team.
GW's relaunch of Blood Bowl and Epic.
Critical Role taking too long to get their DnD ripoff out and running before all the clamour fell out of the 5 minute news cycle.
Whatever Hasbro's financial is up to for the last few years.
That time WotC accidentally sent a bunch of cards to an influencer and then sent actual pinkertons to retrieve them.
The two dudes who stole a buuuuuunch of mtg cards from a convention while wearing their own company's shirts.
>Catalyst Games' Porch Gate and their handling of demo teams. And recent conversion bans.
What's this about demo teams and conversion bans? Conversions for Battletech?
as far as I can tell it's the same pussies that tried to hide behind a queer on reddit because a gay magazine that CGL was cool with scared them.
The catalyst games demo teams got saced a while ago for internal political reasons that were never clear to me but seemed moronic personal issues/drama. They had recently been getting better but the company is selling a lot of official models now, so they are banning non-official models from games. For a game that was played with bottle caps, chits and shotgun shells.
>What's this about demo teams and conversion bans? Conversions for Battletech?
There is a set of miniature painting guidelines for the Catalyst demo team, which basically boil down to "if you run official games - which are advertising events for the game - don't use unofficial miniatures and don't use bits in conversions which are really obviously from another game". Those rules were never intended to apply to anybody but the demo team guys, and then only when the demo guys were running official events. If demo guys wanted to run a game that wasn't official, those rules didn't apply.
Then a couple of things happened.
1) the new leadership for the demo team decided that demo team members were "on the clock" 100% of the time. Because if CDT agent #2 takes a photo at a home game (where the rules don't apply) and posts it on social media, onlookers will assume it's from an official game because it's an agent posting it. Which means that the rules apply to the demo guys 100% of the time. Which is shit and not what they signed up for.
2) A couple of 40K refugees in Milwaukee got onto the demo team, and got upset that people could play battletech with conversions and standees and shotgun shells. So they copy-pasted the rules that were supposed to be for the demo team into their "Alpha Strike 350" event rules, so now those rules applied to players in their AS350 events. And in the absence of any OTHER competing painting guidelines, the AS350 miniatures guidelines have been spreading through the BT community and are swiftly becoming the default standard of play, because the 40K refugees who are coming into BT look around and think "shouldn't there be rules limiting what bits you can use to convert models?" because they have Stockholm Syndrome from GW policies. So the AS350 rules are fricking everywhere now and players just *expect* to see GW style conversion rules because that's what they're comfortable with.
As usual, 40Kgays spoil everything for everyone.
Ughhhh too many control vectors in this hobby
I guess captain Sukh Mah'deek of Kuritas finest will ride again
Imagine getting BTFO'd by 40k refugees. KWAB on the BT community. Then again, what's one more slap in the face for CGL's beaten wives.
lol you and your shitty hobby get mogged
Weird comment
While 40kgays are idiots and frick up everything they touch, you're glossing over the part where CGL strongly approves of this standardization because they're making money selling models now. This is corporate and newbies in concert doing their best to totally frick up a thing. That's without even getting into the perdo stuff.
CGL have to ban 3D prints from official games because the licence holder, topps, have stated they'd pull the rights otherwise. CGL don't give a frick what people do in unofficial games.
It's a bunch of idiots who don't get the creative origins of tabletop wargaming who are spreading the official models only rules, even banning iron wind metals and ral partha models, who CGL still allow and even advertise
> iron wind metals
This is what holds my Butte. Literally official. Legal fact: If some trashfugee tries to refuse your batchall due to having officially licensed models, you are well within your rights to Trial of Butte Annihilation them.
This a million times. If the line is drawn, hold the line, but if anyone tries to push past it, destroy them.
If they're official models they're official fricking models.
If they aren't made by the game company then they aren't official. It's that simple. Forge world isn't official for unrestricted use in 40k, and ironwind metals isn't official for Battletech. Only the models produced by CGL are official. That's what official means. Stop sabotaging the IP with your fanon unofficial shit.
I'm sorry I'm not required to entertain your schizophrenic moronation any further than anyone else here. IWM are legal and 40k is just fricking stupid in that there's over a dozen fricking plastic kits that aren't legal now, but they either are or they aren't
If you won't play with legal models, that's your fricking hang up and if you don't want to play go find some other brain damaged moron to play with who subscribes to your same insane notion of quasi legality.
>you can't use your Forgeworld resin Contemptor Dreadnought as a Contemptor Dreadnought in 40k, only the Games Workshop plastic Contemptor Dreadnought.
>ignore they have the same scale, same frame, and are owned by the same company
Amazing logic moron.
>and are owned by the same company
It always amazes me how many morons don't seem to realise that Forge World was/is basically just a brand name for GW's resin miniatures team. I bet it would blow their tiny little minds if you told them that Forge World is a building on GW's main Nottingham site and is also currently responsible for managing specialist games - including plastic releases.
IWM holds the license for the official metal miniatures. They have it because of the IP frickery from way back that split the rights akin to Marvel's shenanigans. Wizkids bought FASA, which owned Ral Partha US, in bankruptcy incest. Spun off Ral Partha US as IWM with the rights to make metal minis intact. Now IWM and Ral Partha Europe both have the license. Topps buys Wizkids which had the plastic mini license for clixtech and now CGL has that plastic mini license through Topps, and only the plastic mini license because the IP split off the official metal minis decades ago to Ral Partha and then flowed it into IWM. Just like MS has the video game rights and Sony? has TV/movie rights.
Shit and just thinking about CGL has a fricking 20% off coupon for IWM in the fricking beginner box or AGoAC and a coupon for themselves in the other.
These are all recent.
What about that time WotC sent the FBI to that guys house who spoiled the entire Invasion expansion on Ebay?
>spoiled the entire Invasion expansion on Ebay?
Neat, I missed that one, wonder if there's connections to switching to pinkertons for the more recent mtg frickup.
Soda Pop Miniatures / Ninja Division (their whole business model)
Privateer Press (Warmachine mk3)
Illuminati first (and last) world championship.
>Netrunner getting shitcanned for being too good a game.
It's well documented that FFG operates on pump-and-dump model, they've done it with multiple licenses they leased and never intended to extend (40k RPG system, L5R, ANR, and so on). Blaming it on WotC's "fear of competition" is lie, but it's a lie people wanted to hear and were read to believe.
Netrunner got canned because Wizards demanded a fricking ridiculous amount of money for FFG to keep the licence because 2077 was supposedly just around the corner. FFG had literally just put out a new starter set and gotten started on rotating out older cycles when it happened. They very clearly had long term plans for the game that and had sunk real money into it recently.
It was not done in the pattern they normally use when dumping a game.
How does 2077 factor into negotioations about ANR license?
I think that guy's high on internet memes.
>How does 2077 factor into negotioations about ANR license
In theory, a couple of ways
1) Demand / rising tide lifts all boats - in theory 2077 boosts demand for all cyberpunk media of any kind (if it wasn't a buggy mess it might have)
2) Netrunner specifically is a Cyberpunk (the game) word, it's not generic - with the Cyberpunk IP being used, there might be considerations
3) Potentially, Wizards could also have made a new netrunner had 2077 taken off, as they have the name, and ONR was literally in the Cyberpunk world. Practically, this would have been expensive and annoying to do from scratch, and would come with no guarantee of capturing any of the FFG netrunner playerbase, but as an option it existed
I doubt any but the 1st came to influence the negotiations, but even then it could just as easily been Asmodee capping FFG's efforts as it might have been WotC/Hasbro jacking up prices - we'll never know, especially with how Asmodee carved up FFG later (itself a contender for this thread)
Hmm, that does make some amount of sense, but also juggles with whole bunch of hypotheticals.
Don't forget, Wizards don't have to have any serious intention of making their own game to use it as justification for jacking up the prices of renewing the licence for the Netrunner Card Game IP. Plus, we're assuming the call to pull, or at least play hardball with the licence came from WotC, but it could have easily come from RTal further up the chain, who also have ownership of the Netrunner IP.
It's honestly such a confusing mess that it might be why the licence got pulled.
What isn't hypothetical is that FFG had every intention of continuing with Netrunner at the point that they had to discontinue it. FFG cancelling game (their 40k RPG's for instance) usually follows a long period of news and release blackouts. Here, we went from them talking about upcoming tournaments and cycles to... an article saying the whole IP was getting canned.
As for if it was Asmodee being the collossal fricktards they have subsequently more than proved to be? It could also be that, but it seems a little early for it. Asmodee didn't really start fricking with FFG until late 2019, when it looked for all the world as if they were gearing up to sell FFG to someone else. But then something went wrong during the chaos that was 2020.
I think the story is that GW wouldn't allow FFG to re-up the Warhams license because FFG was getting more into the miniatures market.
>Soda Pop Miniatures
Their issues started with their pin-up models being on the level of AI anime slop at a price point above Heavy Gear. And they tried to get into the market while a lot of skirmish games were available and that Dark Soulslike board game kickstarter was pushing out a lot of actual high quality pinups.
They had nothing.
>Dark Soulslike board game kickstarter was pushing out a lot of actual high quality pinups.
Do you mean Kingdom Death? Because funnily enough they did a crossover with that and they actually managed to release a model for them while Soda Pop just declared bankruptcy.
Ironically with how bad KD:M is run, I see them eventually pulling the bankruptcy trigger as well.
FFG lost the Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader rpg licenses because Games Workshop was threatened by X-Wing sales and wanted to spite the competition, it's got nothing to do with pump and dump or whatever meme argument you're making. Of course X-wing later self destructed and so now we have no competitor to GW's monopoly AND no good 40k RPG. shit sucks
Not to mention that they still have L5R, kind of. It seems like every single thing anon mentioned was wrong.
are the Cubicle 7 40k RPGs that bad then?
>GW's relaunch of Blood Bowl and Epic.
What's wrong with bringing back epic?
They set it in the heresy
Have you seen the marine models? They're worse than the originals and somehow have tactical rocks and raised stands on bases that don't have recesses. Its patently moronic. I'm not even a scalegay and its still moronic.
The counters for the game were wrong and incomplete too.
Its standard GW nuspecalist pump and dump. Not to mention there were already preexisting communities for at least 2 different rulesets, 3 if you count the upsidedownland HH one that is much better.
The rules are a shittier version of both the old epic and the community build netepic gold.
It genuinely gets my blood boiling thinking about how badly they are fricking up a tabletop Halo game.
Like, their two options are:
>Halo war game with two armies minimum, potentially up to five and sub factions for different eras/leaders. Lots of different units that they can go the War Hammer route with pricing and minis per unit, TONS of potential sales due to the sheer variety of units, vehicles, and leaders.
OR
>Some moronic 5v5 or 10v10 hero shooter-esque game with only Spartans, and no covenant, that will not succeed because it’s a niche within a niche.
It’s so frustrating seeing 343 absolutely bungle what should be the simplest fricking decision ever.
>It’s so frustrating seeing 343 absolutely bungle what should be the simplest fricking decision ever.
Why, are you not familiar with 343i?
It's for Halo fans, in 2024, who play tabletop, who only like Spartans, and who like 343i armor designs.
It's sex niche, dead on arrival. At least its more tangentially related than the fricking cookbook and all the other trash 343i prostituted the IP out to.
Elites are confirmed and they’re being pretty open that more is to come. You’re butthurt little hater who couldn’t make it to Onyx.
I'm not even a Halo player, my younger brother was and I would consider to just to expand my pool of sci fi figures and have something to play with him (he also likes historicals).
There are Elites and they look fantastic, so if nothing else I'm going to pick those up. I might also get the core box and paint half the Spartans Red and the other half Blue just as God intended.
This is nothing new to any Halo fan who's watched the franchise burn to the ground since 2012. I've transcended beyond pain over the decades watching all my favourite IPs dissolve in the hands of incompetent hacks.
At least this time it's actually got Spartans in it. Remember how Spartan Games decided the best use of that license was to make a Ship to Ship combat game?
And nothing else for years? Oh, and in said game, they straight up forgot to do the Halcyon class at any point? The original hero ship? The first UNSC ship we see in the entire franchise? That one? But they still find the time to make three or four completely brand new ship classes instead?
I can understand Elmore getting too expensive, but Weis and Hickman made money.
Whatever they did to HER.
>YWN raise a pack of autistic Scottish tomboys with Louise
Life is pain.
Her womb will produce the Mua'dib provided it's not another Youtuber.
Was she the one that tried to make Female Skaven X male virgin human rape/romance fan fiction canon in Warhammer lore to justify human slave hybrids? Also /tg/ what will become canon first in Warhammer Skaven human rape babies or Skavens in 40K?
>Also /tg/ what will become canon first in Warhammer Skaven human rape babies or Skavens in 40K?
With zero irony. skaven breeding humans. Breastmen already produced by rape.
Damn! Girl Skavens look like that?
>Was she the one that tried to make Female Skaven X male virgin human rape/romance fan fiction canon in Warhammer lore
I'm gonna need source on that claim, it's so completely, absurdly, fricking based that I cannot believe such a thing happened.
Warmachine completely bungling their chance to become the main Warhammer alternative and fading into obscurity.
And then the same happening to X-Wing.
I HAVE BALLS YOU LACK BALLS BALLS BALLS TESTICLES AND BALLS
Checked
My contribution: WotC sending the Pinkertons after some guy to whom they sent some MtG cards to by accident
Checked.
Also, Hickman and Weis were godawful and their modules were shit. They had some decent ideas for settings, but that's as far as that goes.
Aesthetics is one thing, but Dragonlance was a proven money-maker. People ate that shit up.
And she broke that.
A person came in, insisted that they knew how to run a business because she knew about business, not just games, and then proceeded to be shit at running the games as a business.
A more recent example - even if you hate MtG, you can acknowledge that it was a way, for years, for WotC to just print money, until Hasbro squeezed them too hard and fricking broke it for no good reason.
>until Hasbro squeezed them too hard and fricking broke it for no good reason
Hasbro has a very good reason for squeezing too hard and getting desperate. They're fricking broke, all of their other divisions are bleeding money like a 14 year old at a NIN mosh pit and they're clinging to WotC like it's the only life-belt left on the Titanic because D&D and MtG are the only properties they own whose gross income is down less than 10%.
Not, as in, they are making money. They aren't. They just aren't losing it anywhere near as badly as everything else Hasbro have right now.
They will collapse as a brand the moment someone on Wallstreet realises just how much he will make shorting their stocks, and that could happen at literally any moment now.
idk, maybe they shouldn't have spent a quarter million on a bomb like the D&D movie
That was probably a Producers style dodge. Look at how much they bought Entertainment ONE for and then had to sell off less than five years later for around 10% of what they paid for it, that's the real kicker. Plus at least one hedgefund has already tried to buy them out.
The D&D movie was great though. And I don't even like D&D
It looks like fun tbh
Like something you would watch with a non dnder and have a hoot
Not everything has to be Merchant Ivory but there's a lotta garbage out there
It was a serviceable adventure movie with fantasy elements from Current Year with a couple interesting camera gimmicks but I don't particularly like any of those things. I like time travel stories and low budget french schlock where people get their full bush out.
Yes, but it was probably way too expensive, even as a loss leader to get people to buy 5e.
Jeremy Irons was great, the rest of it not so much.
The D&D movie was a strategic move to try and prove that Wizards was more profitable under them than it would be as a spun off company due to the increased amount of resources at their disposal.
>PRINT
>MORE
>CARDS
>BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
I hate this IP shit and it is what permanently turned me off from MtG. It had been going downhill for years, but this is such a vile, craven move that deeply dilutes the heart of the game.
I didn't mind the Godzilla one, since that at least tied in to the Kaiju themed set they were doing at the time. But yeah, after that it just got nonsensical.
Plus Mecha-Godzilla was fricking hilarious if you got lucky.
>A person came in, insisted that they knew how to run a business because she knew about business, not just games, and then proceeded to be shit at running the games as a business.
She was better than Gygax, and WotC, with the exception of Eberron, has spent the last 25 years coasting on IP she introduced to the D&D brand.
>coasting on IP she introduced to the D&D brand
Bro, Forgotten Realms was around before she showed up, and people care more about that than anything else.
And she definitely ain't gonna suck your dick.
>Bro, Forgotten Realms was around before she showed up
Gygax had been gone from TSR for years by that point. The box set, all the adventures, novels, and splatbooks that defined what people like about the setting were Lorraine's call, and more widely circulated than Greenwood's Dragon articles.
Nor can Gary the Cokehead replace your absent father. All he could do was run his one-hit wonder of a company into the dirt, and fail laughably in his subsequent ventures.
My brother in christ. D&D was making so much money before Lorraine came in that the Blumes brothers were able to raise A SUNK 18TH CENTURY TEA CLIPPER FROM THE ATLANTIC with all the money they were able to embezzle from TSR. It was literally the only game in town at that point, and it was dead within 5 years of Lorraine taking over.
And they did the exact same shit as lorraine with TSR and D&D branded crap that didn't sell. Almost every criticism of Lorraine applies to an even greater extent to Gary and the Blumes.
>A SUNK 18TH CENTURY TEA CLIPPER FROM THE ATLANTIC
First off, that wasn't embezzlement, that was 100% signed off by Gary, who at this time was also employing his own kids. There's like, way more obvious examples of Blume embezzlement, and here's one to take forward.
Blume 1: We need an MBA to help run the company
Blume 2: How about our niece?
Blume 1: Okay, let's 1: pay all her tuition. 2: pay all her room and board. 3: give her a stipend of 2500/month(this is a lot in 1980s money) and 4: GIVE her access to a company car which we pay all of the fuel and repairs and insurance for
Blume 2: Damn, are you sure that's enough
Blume 1: It's not like sales will ever flatten out and the company will go into serious debt! Let's go burn bridges with that CYOA DnD book lady for some reason although it's our best selling non-DnD actual book product
Blume 2: I love you kevin...
Blume 1: I love you kyle...
>Let's go burn bridges with that CYOA DnD book lady for some reason although it's our best selling non-DnD actual book product
Pour one out, those books were kino. Fricking Blumes.
She was expressly told, by the Blumes Brothers, to crash the company after getting all it was worth out of it after they gave her both of their shares. Which she did so, because she notoriously hated D&D, and was only even on the board as CFO because she wanted the extra pocket money this "nerd shit" brought in for her.
At one point it is on record that she would berate and belittle staff for playtesting at the office, and had a strict "No D&D whilst at work" rule in place.
We know this. These are facts that anyone with access to google can discover.
Mtg is a disaster in the making
can someone explain to me what this controversy is all about?
Also checked
>can someone explain to me what this controversy is all about?
She forced Gary Gygax out of TSR and the quality of their products dropped immediately because she didn't allow anyone to playtest their games.
Mind, the playtesting was often sidetracked into wholly recreational play with out-of-company friend groups.
>Nooo you can't have fun here this is a GAME COMPANY
The issue is that it was literally playing their home games on company time. You can have a fun playtest campaign, but it still needs to focus on the mechanics being tested with a lot more note-taking than "normal" play.
Why does it have to focus on the mechanics, why can't they have fun and let ideas naturally come to them? Ravenloft was invented when they played D&D and ran into a vampire in a dungeon, and not because they were taking notes about mechanics, and I promise you Ravenloft alone made more than enough money to compensate for the work hours "lost".
Because publishing has deadlines.
> Ravenloft was invented when they played D&D and ran into a vampire in a dungeon
If inspiration can strike Hickman while playing his home game after his 9-5, it can strike other designers.
It's one thing to play Vampire or Shadowrun on company time to see what they do right and wrong, and look for systems to poach. That's actually less objectionable than something like playing your home FR campaign in the office when you're ostensibly trying to get a Dark Sun book out.
>COMPANY TIME
I hate business worshipers so much. The company has no time, it's a fricking legal idea of how certain people can collaborate to make money, there are no fricking rules that dictate or even logically presume that working more means higher profitability. I wish I could skin all corporate executives and HR people alive and then dunk them in a salty acid bath.
Better yet, start your own business and make hires and run it your way.
Malifaux: I'm not even sure what happened with this game. Like it had so many different things that were catnip to late 00's/early 10's nerds like Steampunk, Japanese stuff, zombies, goblins, etc all crammed into one setting.
Bolt Action/Warlord games: This was THE game for aging Millennials who couldn't keep up with 40K and were getting big into history. They used their profits on a bunch of pump-and-dump licensed games(Dr Who, Strontium Dog, etc) and passion projects(Cruel Seas) instead of finishing their ranges and jumping into other 20th century conflicts like Vietnam.
Warmachine: sending their molds to some sketchy Chinese company and having them stolen. Then jumping over to 3D printing and sending out dangerous uncured resin or figures with huge print lines to their customers.
>Malifaux: I'm not even sure what happened with this game.
It looks so attractive but it's a liiiiitle hard to tell where to start in 2024 or wtf is going on. Are some of these guys ronin waiters? I feel old
>Like it had so many different things that were catnip to late 00's/early 10's nerds like Steampunk, Japanese stuff, zombies, goblins, etc all crammed into one setting.
That's true. What's catnip for the current nerds? I feel like I'm out of touch.
A shame, I wanted a Victorian robo butler and Chinese Tong limo driver, but with Trolls. Same with WarMachine... arghhhh am I a gaming also ran? My timing is shit lol
Nothing that Lorraine Williams did was anything but deliberate.
The frick-up that killed TSR was Gary believing the Blumes Brothers when they told him that going to Hollywood to option a D&D film himself was a good idea.
They then proceeded to embezzle millions, if not possibly billons off the company profits and were so fricking brazen about that Gary instantly found out about it the moment he got back.
It was at this point that the corporate shitshow that would kill TSR began.
Bandai completely ruined digimon tcg with power creep. Now every deck plays free cards and gains memory repeatedly. Soon we will have cards saying gain 10 memory when you play this card and play a free tamer. its ridiculously broken ans not in the fun way.
>Let's talk about corporate frickups in the tabletop industry
ALL corporate things in the gaming industry are frickups. There is no such thing as a gaming corporation that isn't a complete and total frickup. EVERY SINGLE COMPANY is shit.
Nothing about her tenure at TSR was exceptionally bad. She was a competent businesswoman who was handed a company at a bad time. Anyone accusing her of wrongdoing is usually also pretty biased
Basically true. On the one hand, the Blumes were crooks who basically robbed the till until the company started to go under, then on the other, LW was handed control over this train wreck and managed to turn it into something that at least didn't implode, and, although it didn't become a success, it at least got close enough that Hasbro was willing to buy it, so people didn't end up penniless with a company that folded.
Was she kind of a b***h? Yes, that goes with being business person, man or woman, you gotta be a jerk sometimes or people will take advantage. But she's not the villain in that story.
Don't samegay
Lorraine had her downsides, like retaining talent like DiTierlizzi, the publishing pyramid scheme, and turning TSR into more of a mass-market fantasy novel publisher, and the Buck Rogers stuff, and a lack of market research (killing Basic D&D, even though it outsold Advanced).
That's rarely what she gets criticized for. She's basically criticized for expecting people to actually work on company time; and greenlighting projects that didn't sell. She's disliked for forcing out Gygax, who had a lot of friends in the industry, but was on the whole, an incompetent that did coke with Hollywood prostitutes as the Blumes (who he put in charge) killed the golden egg. I think you can give Lorraine the mitigating factor that splatbook diminishing returns was a novel phenomenon (and one that was also biting White Wolf in the ass in the same period TSR was going bankrupt).
she enacted a hostile takeover from the company's founder who hired her
then sued the frick out of him when he took his talent elsewhere
then diverted resources away from actually testing their main products
said resources were diverted towards an IP her family owns so she could pay herself extra via IP licensing
>she enacted a hostile takeover from the company's founder who hired her
Because Gary was an incompetent and obviously unfit for the job.
>then sued the frick out of him when he took his talent elsewhere
Fair
>then diverted resources away from actually testing their main products
I don't actually believe the people saying "she wouldn't let us playtest" are being honest. I think it's more likely that they were just running their home games on company time, instead of actually playtesting or their others hats of getting projects published on time. I'm sorry, I think a bunch of slacker Xoomers who already had an axe to grind against Lorraine were in fact slacking off and lying about it.
>said resources were diverted towards an IP her family owns so she could pay herself extra via IP licensing
Buck Rogers was a failure, but so were Gary's vanity projects in Hollywood.
>I don't actually believe the people saying "she wouldn't let us playtest" are being honest
That's your belief. I'll take the first-party reports from the mid level TSR guys who said that LW banned playtesting on company time over your opinion.
>who said that LW banned playtesting on company time over your opinion
That's not in dispute. If people are just playing their home games and calling it playtesting, and employees refuse to actually do their jobs, I think banning playtesting is fair.
And given that abominations like the 3.x Druid made it through playtesting, I'm not sure how much value it actually has.
3.x druid is just fine. As long as the core assumptions behind the game remain the same as during the dungeon crawling days of 2e. It's like the Cleric; as long as you assume the Cleric is intended as a healer and only a healer, then the 3.x Cleric is just fine. The Clericzilla stuff only started when people broke out of that assumption.
If you ever get into playtesting, you will find that it operates on core assumptions about how the end user will actually interact with the product, and you really only playtest based on those assumptions. You might be able to use a physics engine in Halo to do aerodynamic research, but that's not an intended use, and so they aren't going to playtest for that. Likewise, the assumption for D&D 3e was that the fighter fights and stands in a doorway to block the enemy, the wizard throws mostly explody spells for direct damage, the cleric heals people, the thief finds and disarms traps and backstabs people, and the druid can be a backup to the fighter or a backup to the cleric as needed. That's all they tested for, and all of the classes basically work fine in that role.
If you don't engage with the product in its intended way, then that's a problem with you, not the product.
When the natural flow of the game and the intended flow of the game are at odds the problem is with the designers.
When the end user refuses to take the product on its own terms, then the problem is with the end user. A product is designed to do a thing, and the end users can frick themselves with a rake if they think they can hold the designer responsible for not controlling for an unforeseen usage case. Take your entitlement complex and frick off.
Playing a game as written is not an unforeseen usage case.
Hell no, in open ended games like rpgs the dedigner cannot take in account all the posible takes of the game without limiting it.
This is not an excuse for not taking some of the easiest takes imaginable. If you playtest a theoretical ARMA 5 and it ends with players bunny hopping at 200 MPH come release, that is gross negligence on the designers' part.
Correct, but your comparison is stupid. End users playing CoDzilla instead of 2e-style healer/backup fighter types is more akin to making a ARMA 5 game, and then players find a bug that allows them to do voxel basebuilding instead of milsim ops...and then getting mad at the company for not balancing the voxel building.
If you don't want to play the game the designers intended, that's fine. Go play another game. Don't shit on designers for doing a bad job of designing a playstyle they weren't intending to write in the first place.
No, because for CoDzilla to exist the developers must have put the parts for them to exist in the game in the first place. The developers also never communicated the intended playstyle.
It's not the developers fault if you are moronic and think that theoretical optimization in an internet board is an actual flaw.
>CoDzilla is theoretical charop
It's right there, in the PHB. Takes no effort at all to realize you can buff yourself with some of the dozens of Personal buff spells.
That's not CoDzilla moron
Yes it is. Just because they're not fricking the game in the ass with DMM Persist specifically does not mean they're not CoDzilla.
When have I ever defended Lorraine Williams of all people?
Or cherry picking from a dozen different splats.
Anyways he knows theoretical optimización was a fun mental game not actual play.
>2e-style healer/backup fighter
2e already had Draw Upon Holy Might, which alone made cleric both tankier and harder hitting than figher (albeit with worse attacks per round).
2E also had Fighter/Cleric multiclasses, dual classing, and broken specialty priests that were literally better than Fighters at fighting.
Of course those are broken. Those weren't playtested, because, guess what, LW banned playtesting. So we're right back to it. Everything is LW's fault. Even the core assumptions baked into 3e.
Multiclassing and dual classing predate 2E.
>The Lorraine Williams Defense Force is stronger than we thought
Lorry did exactly what should have been expected of her.
One could blame Gygax for putting her in charge, but her was too coked-out care.
It was her or the Blumes, and the Blumes were outright crooks. Gary wasn't really given a choice as he was being ousted.
Gary... didn't? He actively tried to prevent that from happening, but she got a controlling interest in the company when the Blumes gave her their shares because Gary could only get enough evidence to freeze the accounts of one of them not both of them in time to prevent that.
Whether the Blumes out and out told Lorraine to crash the company remains to be seen, but it's entirely plausible, given her very well documented disdain for D&D and nerds in general (something she'd probably had to deal with all her life due to how her family owned the rights to Buck Rogers) that they rightly assumed it would happened organically anyway.
Which is did. Lorraine stopped all playtesting at the offices. Over-invested in those ridiculous Dragon-Dice and flooded the market with reprints of old D&D novels to such an extent that it bankrupted the company.
Allegedly they had multiple warhouses just filled with paperbacks that were never going to sell by the end.
>Over-invested in those ridiculous Dragon-Dice and flooded the market
Any one ever play it? I see em around from time to time and I have a dice problem.
To be fair he is right saying that TSR was fricked before she took control. She doesn't helped though.
Your comparison is no different from his. If devs/playtesters leave game breaking exploits in a game the fault lies with them.
Bro druid being stupidly strong isn't a """"bug"""", having a goddamn tiger as your animal companion that has claw/claw/bite/rake/rake with pounce is simply playing as intended. Using the druid spells that LITERALLY ONLY WORK WHEN USED TO BUFF YOUR ANIMAL COMPANION to buff your tiger or wolf or dire badger or whatever is not a bug. Wildshaping into an earth elemental and earth gliding past enemies is not a bug, and the Natural Spell feat allowing you to cast in wildshape is not a bug, it's in the fricking player's handbook.
Same thing with the idea "cleric is a healer, if you stop healing you break the game!" Black person then why is Summon Monster 1-9 on their spell list? Why is Animate Dead, Divine Favor, and Divine power?
No, core only druid outpaces everyone else, and it's not even close.
>If you ever get into playtesting, you will find that it operates on core assumptions about how the end user will actually interact with the product, and you really only playtest based on those assumptions.
You test for a lot of things exactly because of that, there is no one perfect profile of an end user. Some are moronic so you've got to try to act like a moron, some are children so you have to think of what a kid might try, some are the sort of homosexual who will try to break things purposefully, and a handful will robotically just do things as they are described, divisions of time for testing those use cases can typically be handled by taking a best educated guess as to which types will be most common. The issues that multiple editions of Dungeons & Dragons have had when it comes to classes would likely have been caught if they had appropriate time dedicated to the moron and purposefully breaking shit homosexuals.
With video games things are much easier, since it's a much more locked down game. With any tabletop roleplaying game you really can't say doing things outside the mindless soulless robot following some prewritten behavior for interaction with the game is a problem with the players, because there is an inherent implication that creativity and thinking outside the box are important to the game. So things like messing around with combinations of abilities within a class and playing with them in ways that aren't straightforward should be expected and tested for.
Whether or not the team doing the direct development choose to follow thru on the findings of the playtests is another thing entirely of course, I've worked vidya related projects where they had some parts of their games they wouldn't fix no matter how broken their newer stuff was.
At least that's what I've learned from doing professional paid playtesting for video games and from working my way up to being in the role of planning the playtesting for them as well.
>If you don't engage with the product in its intended way, then that's a problem with you, not the product.
It tells you that your efforts to communicate your expectations were likely insufficient. You give me laser vision or a pet bear, and I'm going to assume they're not for show.
>I think banning playtesting is fair.
It's a business. Business aren't supposed to be fun. If you aren't making money for the company and you're on company time, then that's theft and should be treated accordingly. Playtesting never should have been allowed in the first place.
>playtesting should never be allowed in the first place
I am glad to have witnessed the natural evolution of
>fun is a buzzword
>Because Gary was an incompetent and obviously unfit for the job.
>Buck Rogers was a failure, but so were Gary's vanity projects in Hollywood.
yeah clearly everyone else is biased and you're objective
Hey, hey. Watch out that mysoginy.
Lol. Ruins the company, gets a pussy pass.
Take your own medicine, samegay. And if you think LW "ruiined" the company you're ignorant, it was already very obviously tanking before she was put in charge.
Out of the thread Lorraine
In total truth, Lorraine Williams was the only actually good, competent, professional person who ever headed TSR. It's a business, not a hobby, and should have been run like a business from Day 1. If she'd been in charge from the beginning instead of a bunch of useless drug addled boomers, TSR never would have gone under. She gave up her time and effort and fortune trying to save that company, and ungrateful misogynists have attacked her for it ever since because they can't stand seeing a woman running a business better than the men who came before her.
The Blumes were the actual diabolical villains of the story. Lorraine's problem was a little different. She started as incompetent (which, in all seriousness, does not make her a villain), but fell to the dark side with the Buck Rogers fiasco, which is essentially embezzlement with extra steps. Trying to make sure that employees are working while deadlines are approaching is not evil. Towards the end, however, she started simultaneously trying to steal and inflict damage on the brand, which is unforgivable. Also cocaine is great and you people need to stop being homosexuals (this doesn't make Gary any less of a fricking moron at business).
Didn't she basically just run TSR on endlessly rolling debt? Because I'm like...pretty sure they just rolled debt for nine years then folded. Wow. Clap Clap. Amazing work.
TSR was pretty much always ran that way, their logistics was a fricked up shell game. The moment they stopped hitting easy growth milestones they were teeing up to hemorrhage literally all of their money.
Yeah, but that's what Gary and the Blumes were doing too.
Lol. Lmao even
>sue Gary so he can't release his product, buy product and shelve it for eternity (literally spite wasted money)
>get an advance from game stores at a discount, take this advance to the banks and get loans, losing money on both ends for short term cash on hand while also rendering the company inflexible to changing market conditions for an entire year
>pump out not one but two MTG competitors, both of which flop
>publish 12 hardcover books in the time span they normally published 2, company folds when books get returned by publisher
Spite suing just to buy out and permanently shelve a former colleague's work is pretty fricking moronic, but doubly so when the company is actively struggling to make ends meet. Cry misogyny all you want, but Lorraine Williams has numerous identifiable frick ups during her tenure at TSR beyond being a fat b***h.
AT-43 and Confrontation
You know what, I've got a good one: Spartan Games getting the HALO license.
Like...everything about that. The whole thing.
Oh my fricking god that was so so dumb. Like, 343 clearly did no due dilligence at all when they handed out that license.
It was like they handed a loaded shotgun to an autistic child.
Gary Gygax did literally nothing wrong. İ won't stand for slander.
I had a friend in university who was the inverse of this, in that she was more liberal than she was muslim (by my estimate). Apparently her parents were rather strict and when she finally moved out and could do what she wanted, she spiralled rather hard, drank A LOT, smoked a lot of weed and did a lot of XTC. She spiralled for a few semesters, hit rock bottom and had to flunk out and move back in with her parents.
Another friend of a friend, who did most of the above with some moderation and did quite well for himself after graduation ended up renouncing his faith in Islam as he could no longer reconcile it with his lifestyle. His family did not take it well.
Of course, for these two examples, there are also dozens Muslims that simply do as they please and then go to the mosque and shrug at any inconsistencies.
Besides all this, which is a cool and scholarly take, I was wondering if there is even a substantial black and/or muslim population in Copenhagen. Wouldn't he stand out like a sore thumb?
I've never been to Copenhagen but I'd be surprised if any Western European city that size had so few blacks and/or muslims that one would stand out like a sore thumb.
>Wouldn't he stand out like a sore thumb?
30 years ago, maybe. He would fit right in nowadays.
>scholarly take
yeah. No.
As much as I hate Rudi, it isn't scholarly at all as it doesn't understand nuance
This one gets it. If one needs to consume something forbidden in order to live, it becomes permissible.
This is why learning about Islam on Ganker and random books written by Imam Ahmed Al-Jenerik is derpery and circlejerking
>there are also dozens Muslims that simply do as they please and then go to the mosque and shrug at any inconsistencies
That was my experience with many in Afghanistan and the Moro region of the Philippines.
How about Wizkids speed run?
Mage Knight fricked so hard they didn't even print the apocalypse dragon correctly.
Heroclix used to prop up horrorclix
The worst version of battletech.
Styrene model games that never panned out.
Remember that time when the Maid RPG translator translated another big JRPG only to let women handle the printing? They ordered it all from some unknown publisher who went under like a few weeks after. They had already blown the rest of the money. Only digital copies were ever sent to backers, and even those were very difficult to read.
Now I'm curious, what was this particular TRPG that translator was working on?
$25 for a PDF. They're still trying to recoup losses imo.
https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/240304/Kamigakari-God-Hunters
ok, THAT makes sense now.
biggest one in recent history: Hasbro buying wotc
That would've happened with any owner of WotC. You are barking up the wrong tree, blame the government for refusing to regulate the AI.
In his defense, they'd probably feed him to whatever they use to dispose of managers if he didn't express optimism about a technology that allows them to cut back on cost.
Also they do have a captive, quasi-monopoly market already, they can only grow by cutting cost or through poaching on US Yugi-oh players through their Hop-tet line of products.
Will Hasbro at least apologize for throwing that AI artist that worked on glory of the giants under the bus?
two big ones in tabletop gaming
>Spartan games having a gorillion games, resulting in them collapsing after they fumble their OG dystopian wars game AND their license for HALO TABLETOP WAR GAMES at the hight of halomania
>Dave completely fumbling the Kickstarter for drop fleet such that it's success somehow forced him to sell to corpo vampires who killed the game in a few short years
Some of the most compelling interesting and favorite people all throughout history have been scumbags.
Your perspective does not alter others'
True, but it's also true that they're much more interesting when they're dead, or otherwise far away from bothering you and anyone you care about. Up close and personal, that mystique goes away fast.
>This is like
you being moronic
So you admit to just being a moronic reddit gay
>Weis, Hickman
If you've ever met them you'd hate them too
>This is like a hookah circle a Gary Gygax’s place
I would filter most Americans, and anyone called Zak with that haircut over 25, all of a sudden the Big Dumb and Much Sex Pest goes away
>my anime avatartgayging anonymity has found XYZ to be whatever I can make up on this hyperfinnish runefishing board
lmao even
Interesting to see the jannies protecting Zak in this tread from the actual things he's done.
If a couple of SomethingAwful goons memed about my client, you must acquit!
What has he done?
He has pulled out of contracts after he got paid but before providing the work. He does not return the money.
FTR, he, himself, posted the proof of this on at least one public forum.
>smug anime b***h gets deleted for avatar gayging
>the jannies are protecting Zak!
Most of them do not give a single shit about gay off brand dnd slapfights.
That seems hilarious though, guys just the right kind of narcissistic to owngoal because he doesn't think anyone will notice but then have to scramble to cover it up. Anyone get screenshots of it?
Just look for ZakS posts on therpgsite. The threads are still up.
Jannies can just pull any image they don't like. Pulling the post means they didn't like what was said in the text. (Or that they are idiots and don't know how to use their own dashboard, also very likely.) Given the amount of avatar posting I see left up and the level of very offensive images that don't get pulled, it leads me to believe that they are protecting Zak from his own bullshit.
>have to log into purple rainbow to see
No thanks.
>jannies protecting zak
Big doubt seeing as I got b& for posting the links to the interviews before. Its just arbitrary and we tend to attribute patterns to things that already play into our bias. There's an article that noted the site issues 4-5k bans a day, they're barely reading there's such a flood of crap.
You don't need to log in to read the threads or search for posts. Also, it is RPGPundit's forum so no purple rainbows.
So... If they thought I was avatar posting, why didn't I get a ban? Also, is it really avatar posting if I just used the image once in 13 months and I don't use any similar images. I just used it because I thought it was the right combination of insulting and funny as a response to a bullshit post. (Maybe the post I responded to was Zak and he was mad and reported the post. That would be funny.)
Ah, that site. My bad, thought you meant rpgdotnet I'll give it a look.
Beats me man, its so arbitrary and sometimes connected to a thing maybe and sometimes not. Sometimes it seems like there's background stuff happening related to it but it easily could be overclocked pattern recognition or a few proactive bias in the moderation.
Personally I'm hopeful its because smug anime b***h face is prevalent enough its spam at this point.