Why do older RPGs seem to have so, so much more content written for them than new ones? It feels like TTRPGs used to just shovel crap out the door constantly. Now D&D 5e puts out like one book a year, Exalted 3e still hasn't gotten to Sidereals after 10 years, etc. It's not like the quality has vastly improved, and the industry/audience has only gotten larger, so what's going on?
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Games used to be written by people who played them. Now they are designed by committee and have sensitivity readers. What should have been a simple organic process is now slowed down to a parasitically infested slog. Answer your question?
You presumably make more money if you sell more books [citation needed] and the only thing the people in charge of D&D actually care about is making money, so this doesn't really seem like that great of an explanation.
Even if we accept it as an explanation, it can explain Wizards' failures, but there are other gaming companies that have undergone the same thing.
It cost money back in the 3e days too! Heck, now a dev can just do POD/pdf sales and the only up-front cost is paying artists to scribble all over your book.
>You presumably make more money if you sell more books [citation needed] and the only thing the people in charge of D&D actually care about is making money, so this doesn't really seem like that great of an explanation.
TSR and WotC both discovered that while you do make more money from selling more books, making books that sell to people beyond just the DM is hard to do.
WotC tried with what a few of their writers admitted was copying the mtg format, by making it so each book would have mostly shit options scattered among powerful tools, because the idea was that for a player to make the strongest PC they would want to 'collect' a few features from each book.
Turns out most people don't actually want to do that.
They tried again with 4th edition but this time having a digital model with a subscription service so that everyone could just subscribe and have access to useful tools and not have to worry about buying loads of books.
Unfortunately the digital subscription model was several years too early, and their promised tech failed because they tried to get it done with 1 dude who knew everything (and was a psychologically unstable mess) and a bunch of lesser workers who had no idea what they were doing so they were just a burden on the already unstable guy.
According to WotC insiders this is pretty normal for them as a company.
5th edition has decided the best way to sell books is to make each one a bit of an event to soijack over instead of books made to actually improve the game or make it interesting for the DMs and Players out there to actually do interesting things.
As a result
and
are right.
risk, risk, risk, and more risk
WOTC has NOTHING to gain from risking new products new novels and have absolutely everything to lose if they frick up, so why rock the boat? it is better to very slowly and carefully publish one adventure (often already tried and tested old adventures) instead of making a giant sourcebook for FR, or a new campagin setting.
the ivory tower mtgesque design is a bit misunderstood. Cook iirc stated that some feats were suitable for one shots while some were for long campaigns, there were no "junk feats" per se but that was a bit misinterpreted, 3rd edition did had some bloat issues though.
However WOTC was far more conservative even in 3rd edition compared to TSR. They mostly used established campaign settings, toned down novel publication a bit and but kept writing more sourcebooks more adventures, 5e wotc is very conservative.
Use waybackmachine.
Cook originally wrote about how it was something they tried from mtg.
Then years later he took down his old blog and wrote that they very much didn't try to do that because he was trying to explain why actually he's a genius designer and it was others fricking it up.
> 5e wotc is very conservative.
On the other hand it feels like there’s been more modules released for 5e than there ever was for 3e or 4e. Off the top of my head the only WotC campaigns I can think of are like three or four “Expedition to…” campaigns and Red Hand of Doom. The latter is great - I’d argue it’s up there with any of the TSR classics - but the former were…less so.
It feels that way but it's completely untrue. 5E has something like twenty-ish modules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_adventures
3rd edition had like 30+ adventures in books and way more as pdfs.
4th had like 50.
They put a heavy emphasis on self-contained campaign adventures, up front, but not so much on modules, which are generally smaller adventures that can slot into a larger on-going campaign.
>WotC tried with what a few of their writers admitted was copying the mtg format, by making it so each book would have mostly shit options scattered among powerful tools,
Absolutely false. The writer in question specifically said that ISN'T the lesson they took from MtG. Instead, they took things like efficient keywords.
He literally goes out of his way to say "we wouldn't do what MtG does with how it handles power", and we still have trolls taking what he said and trying to spin it in the opposite direction.
It's legitimately what happened and 3.5's entire publication history backs up the claim, but we've had this conversation before and you're too eager to rider WotC and Cook's dick to accept that they would purposefully do something so moronic that would permanently damage the RPG hobby, exactly the way it did.
Shut the frick up, you lying troll.
Go and look at what you tried to spin, actually read it this time, and realize just how full of shit you are, and how you will gladly take anything, even something that contradicts your entire world view, and try to use it to support your campaign of spewing lies.
And for what? So you can pretend you're a cyberpunk taking down the big corpo? But spamming pure bullshit everyone can see through, on an image board where anyone interested would just pirate the books anyway?
You're pure fricking cancer, and you actually think you can justify it to yourself. Stop spreading lies just because you know the truth doesn't back your extremist idealogy.
It's a game. Mediocre, maybe; overrated, surely; but it's not the Devil you imagine it to be and you really need to quit with your shitspamming obsession over it.
Dumb homosexual.
>Shut the frick up, you lying troll.
Lmao it's you again.
How does it feel to be a lying wienersucking gaygaloon, anon?
Work on your reading comprehension, idiot.
>it says what I want it to say!
D&D 3.5 is a colossal monument to purposefully bad game design. Caster supremacy would not be permanently burned into the minds of everyone who played through 3.5's era if they hadn't engaged in Ivory Tower game design and flimsy attempts at evoking "system mastery" which required pages of excuses and edge-case examples for how highly specific situations could justify them making so many classes objectively underpowered and suboptimal on purpose.
>cancerous shitposting troll, when caught in a lie after posting something that outright contradicted what he was pretending it said, goes off on a moronic tangent which is so utterly wrong it's basically what would happen if you mashed up a dozen troll shitposts, threw them in a blender, and were stupid enough to still think it qualified as a coherent thought.
You're worse than an AI bot. The bot at least has the "I".
What a perfect description of your own behavior.
He read it right.
It would be such an easy fix to do.
>divide books into three categories
>Handbooks containing classes and items
>Adventures containing adventures (and classes and items that can be reprinted later)
>Monster Manuals containing monsters
WotC already kind of do this, but don't follow any proper labeling, so you just sorta have to know if something is worth buying or not.
Nta but i would love something like this:
1. Instead of the PHB a starter set with the 4 iconic classes (fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric), no demihumans, no feats, a curated list of spells (reminiscent of the b/x spell lists), a rich section of bgs, skills section, baseline equipment, effects and conditions summary, tactical combat section, a group oriented chargen process, an analytical index comprehensive of a short summary for each keyword (kinda like PF2);
2. A DMg that contains, other that the baseline expected stuff (how to set games guidelines, regulating the table expectations, playstyles, in-depth worldbuildig tables and guidelines, etc) a frickload of tables (AD&D style), feats (as optional rule), skill rules, exotic spells with unique spell designing rules, the iconic demiumans (elf, dwarf, halfling, half-elf, half-orc) as optional, exotic equipment (magic/alchemical items and weird stuff like katanas, firearms, bombs, etc...) comprehensive of crafting rules, effects and conditions section, detailed hazards and traps section, downtime rules, social standing rules, dominion rules, mass combat rules (telescoping in-out from squad skirmish rules to army management rules), hirelings rules comprehensive of generous list of statted npcs, npcs rules (unique classes as for 3.x), bestiary (mundane creatures), character advancement rules (training, costs, time, etc..) comprehensive of experience rules and options (gold to xp, exploration to xp, etc...);
3. Thematic splatbooks containing lore, lots of maps, unique rules and variations, unique character options (races, classes, feats, spells, bgs, equipment, etc...) specifically dedicated to the setting/theme of the splat, unique npcs, lots of creatures unique to the setting/theme.
Of course this is the right way to do it except spells beyond 1st level must be in the DMG.
That's called pathfinder
Also Wotc discovered that by putting all three categories into one book it incentivizes all player groups to but the product even if it makes each product worse.
>It cost money back in the 3e days too!
Take an economics class, bro.
Profitability is irrelevant. The capital investors are ultra-zionist israelites who care about promoting loxist, anti-white messaging more than the scant millions in sales that RPGs might achieve.
>Games used to be written by people who played them. Now they are designed by committee and have sensitivity readers.
The only people who complain about "sensitivity readers" are edgelord scum bitter that it isn't 1994 anymore. Grow up and write the word "Black" in the margins of your books to self soothe your chapped anus.
To address your only non-spurious point, however, 2nd Edition AD&D, ten years of the most prolific creation in the history of D&D which saw the creation of gamelines still being milked today, had exactly ZERO playtesting because Lorraine Williams didn't want employees "playing games on company time." This meant historically that people were writing 2nd edition content with 1st edition rulebooks as references, and getting entirely away with it.
The true reason for such prolific output was simple - they threw as much content out there as they thought might sell, only taking customer surveys maybe twice in the entire history of 2nd edition. 5th edition lives entirely on feedback in real time - it makes axing projects so much faster when they "underperform".
>The only people who complain about "sensitivity readers" are edgelord scum bitter that it isn't 1994 anymore. Grow up and write the word "Black" in the margins of your books to self soothe your chapped anus.
Nta but, no, people complain vocally ONLINE in the only places that allows for (eg: this place) and only between closed circles of friends and the likes but, you may be damn sure, they do complain. It doesn't go beyond "not this shit again" tier of discourse and rapidly archived (because having the same discussion ad libidum is exhausting). Also complaining about this asinie shit shoved everywhere is perfectly fine and reasonable. Black person.
Then don't play it, and stop being a poncy anti-fan... Cracker. Find something you enjoy instead of wasting your life being a bitter, whiny c**t complaining about the same six buzzwords to a bunch of other, slightly older, bitter, whiny c**ts.
Stop projecting mate, i precisely stated you the exact magnitude of the complaints. Also YOU should frick off, WE didn't have and didn't need any of that stuff in almost half a century inside, and i won't stress enough the notion, fricking hobbies and related nerdoms interests, for god's sake, and we were doing just fine. Wtf do you even need "sensitivity" guidelines in a closed circle, private, activity? It's performative, it's wasteful, it's useless, patronising, sanctimonious and, above all, annoying.
>Wtf do you even need "sensitivity" guidelines in a closed circle, private, activity? It's performative, it's wasteful, it's useless, patronising, sanctimonious and, above all, annoying.
Hear, hear!
>bitter that it isn't 1994 anymore
yeah the radical, prehistoric dark age of... 29 years ago
incredible you people don't realize how insane you sound
Literally an era of cassette tapes and dial up, you fricking missing link. Shut the frick up and drink more prune juice.
literally older than Evangelion
>Ad hominem implying everyone who doesn't like current woke politics is an istaphobe
It's all so tiresome. At least everyone is mocking you like you deserve. Miserable wokies like you make me sick.
>The only people who complain about "sensitivity readers" are edgelord scum
The parasite screams as it's removed from it's host.
Slink off back to your HR desk, pronoun.
Fpbp.
Unironically have a nice day.
Unironically, get off your massive fat ass and try it yourself if you think you have what it takes, you fricking Internet Tough Guy Keyboard Warrior.
This is an exceptionally excellent post and far too many are scrolling past it.
This explains low quality, not low volume.
FPBP
Nah, it explains both. When you've a whole committee analysing every book for whatever might be problematic it's obviously going to take more time and money to produce, and in turn that makes it significantly harder to break even.
Because making (and distributing) stuff cost money and modern main publishers aren't about passion projects anymore.
>It's not like the quality has vastly improved
My mind filtered out this part automatically for how much moronic this statement is. Sorry for having replied to your bait thread in the first place OP, go kys.
2e guidance on how to make a Wildspace system: [pic]
5e guidance on how to make a Wildspace system:
>Creating A Wildspace System
>A typical Wildspace system has a sun plus a number of planets and moons orbiting it. Two examples of Wildspace systems, Doomspace and Xaryxispace, are described in the accompanying adventure, Light of Xaryxis. Use them as models when creating your own Wildspace system.
Yeah, quality of the product is waaaaay up, for sure man.
The handling of spelljammer is so sad. 2e spelljammer probably got a lot of people interested in actual astronomy. 5e meanwhile is like "just do whatever you want!".
>The handling of spelljammer is so sad. 2e spelljammer probably got a lot of people interested in actual astronomy. 5e meanwhile is like "just do whatever you want!".
Reminded me of the exigents splash book from exalted 3e
It's not only that, the 5e books are half-empty when compared with 2e, for example. And if you compare the prices, 5e books and "boxed sets" cost more than any of 2e, 3e and 4e books, even considering the inflation.
D&D became a "lifestyle brand" for morons and makes it money selling things besides it's books to said morons.
Companies used to employ staff writers to churn out books every month. Now most people in the industry are freelancers.
It's more than that. Not only are the books smaller and on a much slower release schedule they're far more expensive. Not to mention that for the most part they aren't even new or original content. They're old content that's been reworked to fit a new rules system and somehow they manage to be worse and rules ambivalent.
4th edition made wotc very risk averse, being experimental is very risky, why experiment when you can take a tried and tested adventure and tone it for 5th edition?
Because they can't even do that right. Even 5e die hards will tell you that campaign setting and adventure books just aren't worth the money.
They can't create anything new and like most spiteful mutants they just want to tear down the old. If they were worried about bring risk averse they could have just reprinted the old material verbatim. But that's not what they did, they tried to strip mine it and pigeon hole it inside their ideological framework of what rpgs should be and to no one's surprise its bad. Bad to oldgays and newbies a like.
This. Frick WOTC.
It's the difference between a public and private company.
It doesn't really have anything to do with WotC. Corporate executives are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are mostly investment firms. They care about one thing: profit. At all and any expense. They don't care if you tank an IP or a company. They'll just invest somewhere else once they've bled you dry. If they can get a decent return on their investment, they literally don't care if the company no-longer exists the next quarter, as long as they knew to divest before it happens. The people who decide what happens at WotC are agents of investment firms who look at spreadsheets. The majority probably don't have the slightest clue what D&D is, and they don't care.
Because older RPGs had no quality control and would shit out garbage "options" that aren't real options at all because they took a "throw shit at the wall until something sticks" approach to game design.
This shit was the precursor to day-one patches in vidya, they put out steaming hot trash and tried their best to fix it with 300 different splats.
Old RPG had quality control in the sense that people actually played it. TSR stuff was fine until Dragonlance ruined adventures and later Williams made them reduce playtesting to almost nothing.
>TSR stuff was fine
That's either nostalgia or ignorance, because 99% was chaff. Even the compendiums had just lists of forty things that all did the same thing, followed by another list with likewise little innovation or imagination.
Sure, post-TSR wasn't exactly nonstop homeruns, and some of the best D&D, and even the best RPG stuff in general was done in the TSR era, but the overwhelming majority was a mountain of garbage you had to sift through, to the point where they had to publish aids to help.
Can you elaborate on how Dragonlance ruined adventures?
It's a common exaggeration born from Weis and Tracy Hickman revolutionizing D&D adventures by departing from the traditional sandbox dungeon of old, and making narrative-focused modules that made you feel like you played a novel.
It was so successful that the company started to focus on those, and away from good dungeon and hexcrawl designs that people miss today.
It was successful as a consumer product because a huge percentage of the audience doesn’t play or doesn’t play RPGs as much as they would like. So DL1 and the like gave something for nogame gamers to coonsoom.
>This shit was the precursor to day-one patches in vidya
Everything being connected to the internet is what caused day one patches.
Because tabletop and imagination itself is dying. Can't really fuel a passion when you're stuck between being tired of overwork and having no energy to play / invent.
Don't talk facts to /tg/ it's obviously the wakes corrupting the hobby, and not our bad attitude and demand that companies cater for us instead of making anything ourselves..unlike the wakes who are doing badwrong creativity because.....dyed hair!.../tg/ has been a rotting carcass for a long time. Don't trust its opinions..anyone here is just bitter, sad and angry they aren't being pondered to anymore...maybe the game design threads are alright because atleast people are making something but....
But the eighties werent any better Man. For a thing to be a reason, It has to have changed meaningfully from a period to another.
Its easy to blame overworking because people will agree without need of justification. But think about It, were people less overworked during the 80s?
The problem is that demand for modules has become increasingly professional, consummers want storytelling heavy narratives for their games and these things take time.
If only there were simpler ways to play DnD right?
>The problem is that demand for modules has become increasingly professional, consummers want storytelling heavy narratives for their games and these things take time.
They take time if you make them high quality, but WotC's modules mostly aren't good.
They arent good but they put dressing and aesthetical effort into It, for theater kids that enjoy It way too much.
They waste their time thinking of innovative ways and reason to prompt a D20 roll attribute check and other systems that add nothing to the game experience.
Professionaly desgined art that takes time to be produced.
Internal Company processes for ESG, quality control etc.
As I said, the product became more professionalized. With It cams.bureaucracy and the ever increasing expectations of consummers.
Now look at OSR modules, direct to point books, with simple art, small quantity of Pages, no pointless systems and hours of Fun.
Or, maybe you're a fricking moron and all that Manic Panic caused brain damage.
Oh, in addition to D&D, the oWoD/early nWoD versus current Onxy Path production line, I just remembered another dev who has also stopped making nearly so many books: Steve Jackson Games. My parents have a whole shelf of just GURPS books - Religion, Low-Tech, Cyberpunk, Infinite Worlds, Banestorm, etc - despite never playing the game, because they're just chock full of interesting content.
Now that 4e's rolled around you get a pitiful scale of releases, and SJG also killed Pyramid. I don't think a purely-Wizards explanation works here for that reason.
My best guess is that it (mostly, not always) comes down to company politics. I'd wager the first anon wasn't that far off with what they said. Instead of playtesting a product and having it good-to-go, the whole production process now has so many unnecessary layers, revisions, and proofreads that it just bogs everything down.
Onyx Path and WotC cannot release anymore like they did because every little damn line has to be approved by Paradox and Hasbro because they don't want a second VtM Camarilla situation.
That's my take on it all.
>they don't want a second VtM Camarilla situation.
What happened?
The Camarilla Sourcebook of V5 made an explicit reference to the purge of homosexuals in Chechnya IIRC. Not only that, but they basically used that very sensitive topic of international politics (for both sides) in order to claim, "Yeh, 'twas a vapmire plot cuz' we're so egdy and the vamps now wanna suk da gayzzz!"
Everyone hated it.
Everyone thought it was a bad idea and in poor taste.
And then the actual Chechen government apparently came in to raise its voice; that's when Paradox put the boot down and now White Wolf is no more (at least, nothing more than an IP holding company).
I'm not familiar with the situation, but isn't that called censorship? Like, even if the players hated and the idea is bad or bad implemented, it's still fiction, right? Or they have to treat it differently for being a game and not literature? Because if I wrote a book about fictional creatures interfering in real life events and a government complained, I can only see them as being morons for taking a fictional work seriously.
Chechnya is run by guys who are just a little to the left of ISIS. Thus the Chechen government being implicated in anti-gay pogroms. So yes. They were trying to censor people mentioning their anti-gay pogroms.
That is not censorship. They weren't prevented from printing / writing / saying the thing by a government entity. A company is well within its rights as the IP holder, product creator and employer to squash internal issues such as these.
They literally stat-blocked the Chechnyan President as a thin blooded vampire. You're probably American, given your strange ideas about "free speech", but in business and politics pragmatism means you have to yield ground to "optics" - and the optics on having a private game company pick an international diplomatic incident with a former Soviet Bloc state made everyone at Paradox wince. For weeks, it was all that would show up when people googled their games.
Chechnya isn't a country moron.
Not him but yeah, it's a state within the russian federation.
Remind me eurofriend. Just who invented RPGs?
NTAYRT but Gygax didn't, numerous people were making them simultaneously, D&D was just the first one to market.
Also Arneson invented D&D and Gygax was just a glorified marketer and PR man.
Wargamers who played Braunstein and Strategos with Gygax and Arneson. Neither of them invented the concepts Arneson used to piece together an original game, which Gygax then wrote down.
So, Americans?
>comfort me, my American ego needs stroking
Frick off, two world wars and you were late to both of them
>They literally stat-blocked the Chechnyan President as a thin blooded vampire
Ah, yes, as I can tell by your pic-related.
Oh. I see. There isn't a pic-related.
Given that most of this thread is people lying (or people reposting Monte Cook's lies), this is to be expected.
Because modern ttrpg a boring uneventful game of dragging play acting and bloated combat.
Expectations of storytelling have gone sky high and so the recent modules take years to be completed and end up a shot product still because modern systems are shit.
The only solution is for 5e e other modern fantasy systems to return to their Dungeon crawling Origins or to drop the game act all together and do a complete overhaul of rules so that it gets closer to being a narrative driven game
Because each splatbooks sells worse than the last until you've cannibalized your game and go broke. They learned from the collapse of White Wolf and TSR
That was settings not splatbooks. Each new setting tended to fragment the existing playerbase rather than serve different portions of the existing playerbase or attract new players.
WotC, in particular, realized that they don't need to make content. Just filler. The kind loyal core customers they cultivated are the kind of people who think the system is too complicated already and need D&D Beyond to make their characters for them. They'd rather spend 60 USD or more on a cool piece of shelf decoration than a book jammed for of material to actually read and use as part of their games. They don't even want to make their own games, they want safe and easy to use campaign books that hold their hand through the entire story, doing all the actual work of planning and staging a game for them.
mix and match:
1. the current employees are bad writers due to anti-merit hiring practice
2. they have to design by committee which takes a lot of time
3. the more new content you write the higher chance of offending some group or another which is extra bad no-no wrongthink and gets your entire project canned
4. all content must include the same set of DIE agenda checkmarks so it all ends up being the samey in the end either way
5. the publishers are glorified propaganda organizations and shit things out based on an agenda and not what the market wants
It's quintessential /tg that people would rather spend 10 minutes arguing over what they remember something to be than spend 1 minute googling it to find out what it actually was.
Which actually confirms that "Timmy Feats" and "Ivory Tower Design" were actual part of 3.X.
Except that's not what he says at all about timmy cards, and more importantly his whole "Ivory Tower" nonsense only applies to the Player's Handbook, with it being completely contradicted in every other book. The idea that they didn't give players "behind-the-scenes" advice is complete rubbish, in no small part because the books included "behind-the-screen" sections that offered exactly that kind of information. Hell, the books that immediately followed the three core rulebooks were a series of class advice books, which included feat selection advice like when Toughness should be taken or avoided, directly contradicting Cook. Sure, it would be nice if that was all in the PH, but the PH would have been over 1,000 pages long if that had been the case.
Cook was writing years after the fact in an attempt to help his friend sell his "D&D for Dummies" book, a completely useless guide book that largely just repeated advice that had already been provided. His "Ivory Tower Design" nonsense dissolves when you actually pick up literally any book aside from the PH.
And, once again to address your lies, your "Timmy feats are real!" is flat out rebuked even by Cook himself, who simply says that they didn't make every option equal, a functional impossibility anyway in any system that actually has mechanical weight to its options and not just flavor slapped on top. They didn't make "Timmy feats", you moronic troll, they just made feats that are better in some situations and not others. Like Toughness being a way to patch over low-level, low-HP characters so they don't die in a breeze. Y'know, the exact example Cook gives.
>While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain choices are deliberately better than others.
This line absolutely confirms that "Timmy Feats" were part of 3.X's design. They intentionally made the game have "bad options" and "good options."
Every game with mechanical weight has deliberately good and bad options. It's literally impossible for a designer to make distinct mechanics absolutely equal in all situations, you total fricking moron, and having good and bad options isn't having "timmy feats", you piece of shit.
When forced to choose, as they always are with any mechanics that are not identical, a designer will often opt to make the decision he wants to encourage be the one that is mechanically stronger, ie. an active feat that requires strategy and planning may be erred on the side of being more beneficial than a passive feat that gives a static bonus. This isn't some grand heresy, it's basic fricking design, you complete assbackwards frickhead moron.
>Every game with mechanical weight has deliberately good and bad options. It's literally impossible for a designer to make distinct mechanics absolutely equal in all situations, you total fricking moron, and having good and bad options isn't having "timmy feats", you piece of shit.
Deliberately creating good and bad options is what makes them "timmy feats" dumb ass.
>When forced to choose, as they always are with any mechanics that are not identical, a designer will often opt to make the decision he wants to encourage be the one that is mechanically stronger, ie. an active feat that requires strategy and planning may be erred on the side of being more beneficial than a passive feat that gives a static bonus. This isn't some grand heresy, it's basic fricking design, you complete assbackwards frickhead moron.
That design format works for CCGs where cards have a rarity factor not in TTRPGs where everything is in theory equally available. Also practically all "active" feats are pretty but useless and it is the feats that give static bonuses that are actually powerful.
A good example of a "timmy feat" is Great Cleave. It sounds impressive, being able to make an unlimited number of attacks as long as you are dropping opponents, but how often is it actually going to come into play after 4th level? Not often. 3.X was full of feats like this. Cool at first glance but pretty much useless outside of niche circumstances.
If your DM doesn’t regularly use hordes of little guys when you have a Cleave guy, your DM is a fricking butthole.
What is a little guy at level 10? level 15? level 20? You need hordes of enemies with CRs of 2 or less for Great Cleave to be useful. CR 2 opponents are worth no experience starting at level 10.
>worth no XP
So?
Fricking munchkins have ruined this whole goddamn hobby.
>Deliberately creating good and bad options is what makes them "timmy feats" dumb ass.
Repeating the same dumb shit, after you were explained why it's dumb shit, is why you're being called a complete moron. At this point, it's clear there's no getting through to you, because you are willfully being as dumb as you can possibly be, so the only thing left is to just flag you as a moron.
Great Cleave is one of the fundamental feats for some of the most broken melee builds in the game. The whole Frenzied Berserker sub-category of builds depends on it.
Cleave is. Great Cleave is not.
Cleave is prerequisite for the FB class, but Great Cleave is what enables them to take full advantage of the Supreme Cleave feature. When combined with their damage bonuses, it's not atypical for them to clear a room by themselves with ridiculous kill chains.
It's like you've never played the game but still want to comment about something you really should just be quiet about. Please go find a corner and stay there.
Not all situations are equally common. Fast Underwater Basket Weaving being overpowered once over twenty campaigns doesn't mean it's not a waste of space and a trap feat. And this is without mentioning feats that don't even reach that level.
Monk.
>looks cool
>isn't
>is actually fricking worthless
>mechanically underpowered as frick compared to other classes
>primarily exists to convince players that if they just buy enough splatbooks and use the right combo of feats, magic items, and sheer luck, they can play a character that is almost as effective as if they just made an unarmed fighter
>here's a thing we did
>and why it probably didn't work as well as we intended
>and maybe we should have done something different
>and also we don't fully understand the deep underlying flaws of what we did, so we'll put part of the blame on our players for not appreciating the road to system mastery we intended to lay out because we didn't think this through as much as we pretended we did
Feats are cancer.
Can you insipid c**ts go somewhere else to argue politics? This thread is for osr games.
Because you didn't fricking bother to check the actual number of books published.
I'm pretty sure it didn't take ten years for Exalted 1e or 2e to publish their Sidereals splat. GURPS also definitely isn't chunking out nearly the book load it used to. And I know 5e doesn't put out as many books as 3e or 4e.
All the companies you guy are talking about old and managed by old people who have been in management since the 90s, 30 years ago.
You want lots of publications equal to the old 64/96 page softcover B&W churn?
Go look up PBtA games or 5E Guild. Those people would have been sending in pitches or being hired as freelancers but now can sell their own stuff. The companies owning the sites take their cut and so don’t need to churn out books.
The digital marketplace is where the money is. Hence Valve turning to Steam alone and Live Service games coming after.
Mostly because the early companies weren't so anal about copyright as today's are, so encouraged fans and other companies to make compatible modules and add on games. As an example, Traveller RPG had countless fan made magazines, as well as smaller companies like FASA, Paranioa Press, and Judges Guild making and selling products for the game. Nowadays it's copyright this and propiatry ownership that, something that started becoming more extreme from the 90s onwards. Everyone is terrified to publish anything that might result in an action against them. Greyhawk sites are being taken down now because WOTC objects to them competing with what they want to publish. Copyright and corporate greed makes today's 'hobby' suck in comparison to the freedom, imagination and co-operative methods of the past.
Are you high? TSR and Palladium were the absolute worst on that front ever.
And the mentality that these two companies had has spread to all levels of the gaming industry today. Originally (read my earlier post for examples) many games companies did stuff for each other's systems, borrowed art, added rules, published articles in magazines (Dragon, White Dwarf, Dungeon, Imagine, etc) all the time. Now everything is tied down and it's rare if anything from out of house is allowed to be published nowadays.
>Mostly because the early companies weren't so anal about copyright as today's are
TSR was so notoriously litigious towards third party creators that many 3rd party supplements for D&D during the TSR era had to rename even the core six attributes for fear of getting C&D'd over copyright if not outright sued.
Evil cannot create anything new it can only subvert and destroy what good forces have already made
Cost of advertising.
As others have said games used to be made by enthusiasts who in turn probably had zero business experience. Yes, you could self publish back then. Yes, you can do PDFs on Drive Through RPG today. But without ads, without hype those things will fail (commercially speaking).
Look at movie budget breakdowns. What percentage is put into ads? 60% or so?
Look at RPGs on Kickstarter. If they are extremely lucky and get funded (big if) they quickly disappear because the hype dies down. Contrast this with any list of the currently most played RPGs. How many of these are original (released in the last ten years without prior editions)? The popular games all have active communities because of prior editions. The captive audience keeps the game alive. Their word of mouth *is* free advertising to the publishers.
And yet you need to invest BIG in every new release to make it worthwhile...
we get it, you're a performative closet case. Moving on.
Mate, TSR would have sued their own mothers. Back in '93 or so there was this website, Morpheus' TSR Haven or something like that, with painstakingly typed on text versions of splatbooks and USENET articles. That site was sued into oblivion at a time when almost no one had internet outside of a corporate, educational or military location.
If the conversation was over you'd shut the frick up. Now go frick a kangaroo you nonce.
Munchkins overran the industry. The only question that matters is how many pluses do you get on that die roll!
Tabletop game companies use to use a studio business model same as video game developers. Now the industry is almost all freelancers working from home. The best thing to come out of “big” game companies was the art imo. Art has generally declined along with art budgets. No staff artists anymore.
The internet makes it vastly, vastly easier to find information about systems and inspiration for characters and campaigns. There's a much lower demand for thse sorts of publications.
Go touch grass.
Stop touching man ass.
What the frick are you even bloviating about moron. Stop being such a try hard.
Bookflation. They've gotten longer, gone over to all hardcover instead of hardcover corebooks and softcover supplements and the big dogs like WotC and Paizo want glossy full-color printing. Price of a print run hasn't come down that much though and we never really recovered from the financial crisis so you either put out less books or you do tiny print-runs like White Wolf was doing right before CCP shut them down.
The crappy books are on DMsguild and drive thru rpg. WoTC are focused on turning D&D into a microtransaction filled hellscape. Good luck to them ttrpgs aren't video games.
Them trying to turn everything into a subscription based 'service' will kill them even faster.
They want to sell modern RPGs as improv and and an outlet for your creativity (just pay us to plug in) rather than games
Sadly true.
>Because it's not just being played by a highly specific brand of white, cissy, straight-ish, fat, greasy, tiny-dicked neckbeard anymore
It never was even before you sanctimonious piece of shit, but you're probably a fricking zoomer that was born in the middle of this shitshow so can't even fathom to understand how things where before: the distribution of "diverse" people within the hobby was (and is) reflective of the local distribution. There were PoC nerds, nerd girls, homosexual, paraphiliacs (eg: furries) and even traps. The difference from back then and current day is that the companies publishing content for these hobbies progressively got bankrupt of ideas reaching its peak in trying to capitalise on post2008 cultural unrest for cheap hype, but since buffoons like yourself actually exist they aren't wrong in actuality taking this course.
For D&D the obvious explanation is that there's just no money (in amounts relevant to the combined WotC balance sheet) in books.