Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

What part of the Battletech story/setting has been subverted? How has it been subverted, and what do you believe is the "writing on the wall" and anyone should see?

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 12:31:43 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 13, 2024, 10:50:04 PM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

100% Let Catalyst and it's IP burn, make a new thing or embrace an existing one, if possible one that (while keeping the game free from IRL politics) is made by explicitly anti-woke people.

If it's free from IRL politics, then why would it matter who it's made by?

Because I won't give my money to people that have made it very clear they hate me and want to see me and mine dead. Something all the woke assholes have made perfectly clear.

Feel free to give YOUR money to those who want to see you and yours dead if you like.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 12:33:50 AM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

What part of the Battletech story/setting has been subverted? How has it been subverted, and what do you believe is the "writing on the wall" and anyone should see?

Oh I don't know, maybe go buy the Battletech Pride Anthology 2023? Since you seem determined to play defense for Catalyst and want to give them money.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 02:32:03 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 12:33:50 AM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

What part of the Battletech story/setting has been subverted? How has it been subverted, and what do you believe is the "writing on the wall" and anyone should see?

Oh I don't know, maybe go buy the Battletech Pride Anthology 2023? Since you seem determined to play defense for Catalyst and want to give them money.

OK, I'll give you that product. However, I still don't see how the story/setting is subverted by that. It's not as if the three setting pieces done in recent years (Dominions Divided, Empire Alone, and Tamar Rising) show any evidence that they are trying to 'subvert' the setting into anything it hasn't been in it's 40+ years.

If you want to go political, then things like Shattered Fortress show that "utopian socialist societies" like the Republic of the Sphere are full of corruption (dark deeds done in the name of the "greater good" and will self-destruct without constant application of these terrible measures).

Sorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

They don't do a Battletech reboot because reboots inevitably alienate as many as they please. Instead, they encourage you to find a place in the Battletech timeline that you like and explore it. My favorite time period(s) for Battletech range from 3049-3081 (Clan Invasion through Jihad). I'm not a huge fan of the original (late) Succession Wars period, and I really don't find Dark Age/ilClan very appealing (but there are a few good bits in there too), so I don't put much of my effort into exploring that part of the timeline. If others like those periods, so be it, that doesn't infringe on my enjoyment of the parts I like. This is largely because the Battletech rules change very little from one period to another, and the biggest impact would be on a Battletech RPG. I'd certainly play a Battletech scenario even in a time period I don't really like, but I wouldn't run (and probably wouldn't play) a Battletech RPG outside of the periods I like.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

They don't do a Battletech reboot because reboots inevitably alienate as many as they please. Instead, they encourage you to find a place in the Battletech timeline that you like and explore it. My favorite time period(s) for Battletech range from 3049-3081 (Clan Invasion through Jihad). I'm not a huge fan of the original (late) Succession Wars period, and I really don't find Dark Age/ilClan very appealing (but there are a few good bits in there too), so I don't put much of my effort into exploring that part of the timeline. If others like those periods, so be it, that doesn't infringe on my enjoyment of the parts I like. This is largely because the Battletech rules change very little from one period to another, and the biggest impact would be on a Battletech RPG. I'd certainly play a Battletech scenario even in a time period I don't really like, but I wouldn't run (and probably wouldn't play) a Battletech RPG outside of the periods I like.

"Reboots alienate too many people" is a silly argument. There's plenty of reboots that were good, like Transformers Prime or Thundercats 2011. You might as say we shouldn't write new fiction period and just keep making endless sequels and requels. That's worked out terribly so far.

But anyway, I just don't like the BattleTech setting. There's no alternatives, so I have to give the entire mech genre a pass. Just like I do every genre nowadays.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 09:34:52 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 02:32:03 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 12:33:50 AM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

What part of the Battletech story/setting has been subverted? How has it been subverted, and what do you believe is the "writing on the wall" and anyone should see?

Oh I don't know, maybe go buy the Battletech Pride Anthology 2023? Since you seem determined to play defense for Catalyst and want to give them money.

OK, I'll give you that product. However, I still don't see how the story/setting is subverted by that. It's not as if the three setting pieces done in recent years (Dominions Divided, Empire Alone, and Tamar Rising) show any evidence that they are trying to 'subvert' the setting into anything it hasn't been in it's 40+ years.

If you want to go political, then things like Shattered Fortress show that "utopian socialist societies" like the Republic of the Sphere are full of corruption (dark deeds done in the name of the "greater good" and will self-destruct without constant application of these terrible measures).

Me > Walk in my kitchen and find a stranger, pants down on top of the counter in the classic position to take a dump

Me > "Hey! Why are you shitting on my kitchen!?"

Stranger > "How do you know it's shit? It isn't even out yet!"

Setting politics =/= IRL politics tho they may overlap to some degree.

Publishing an identity politics laden product IS the writing in the wall you were asking for. You can choose to ignore it as "it's just one thing", but you don't get to ask me to do the same.

We've seen this movie before: Marvel changes Nick Fury to a black man, some of us complain, we get told SLJ is a great actor and to give him a chance and it's not a big thing and the best actor for the role, etc, etc.

Several years latter and lots of fan money given to Disney where are we?

When they made The Master a woman? Same story.

I can go on and on with different examples and how they've played out.

Now, you can choose to believe that a current year corporation that hires woke writters won't go any more woke than the odd thing here and there you can choose to ignore and buy only the good stuff.

But that's still funding them, that's still helping them pay the woke, you do you boo I know what I'll be doing.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.

I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.

But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.

I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.

I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.

But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.

I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics

No multiverses, eh? What exactly would you call the plethora of official campaign settings for D&D? Much less all the 3pp settings? What would you call Chronicles of Darkness? What would you call GURPS?

I'm sick and tired of some dead boomer's stagnant IP dominating [insert genre here] for decades on end, strangling alternatives, and then shitting the bed. It's not going to kill you if somebody makes a game with more than one setting. The game police are not gonna break into your house and burn the books you already bought for that game you liked.

Like, One Page Rules is releasing its own setting books, but nobody is forcing you to use their setting. The setting isn't baked into the rules. You could write a lot of settings using the same rules. (Also, I heard the writer is a furry who can't help but write the furry races as heroic persecuted minorities, so there's that.)

Worldbuilding isn't a one-size-fits-all. The SST tabletop miniatures game has been out of print for decades, the books were pulled from Drivethru due to losing the license, and there's no alternatives that I know of. One Page Rules Grimdark Future is a pastiche of 40k and doesn't have any army comparable to the Federation, the Skinnies or the Arachnids. This is a good example of how 40k's dominance is detrimental to the hobby as a whole. It actively reduces the amount of creativity and diversity of ideas in the genre.

Federation marines are not religious roided up supersoldiers. They're space Muricans in powered armor. The Arachnids are not just tyranids with a different coat of paint: a brain bug is completely different from a hive tyrant, in the original novel they use conventional technology instead of psionics and biotech, in the OOP ttrpg one of the castes was literally a cockroach used for espionage like that scene in The Fifth Element, etc. The Skinnies... I don't even know what their shtick was besides breathing methane. There's no shortage of other OOP scifi miniatures games with neat ideas that got forgotten.

Apparently OPR has an army builder that supports custom armies but you have to pay a fee to see it, so I have no comment on that.

I'm sorry, but this entire argument over "lore" is stupid.  Because there's no such thing as "lore" in an RPG.  There are only setting conceits and background information.

Roleplaying works best when players can get immersed in their characters.  When they can think like their characters would in the situations their characters find themselves in, that is when "roleplaying" happens.  And this is often dependent on the player's understanding the setting well enough to make informed choices with proper evaluation of possible consequences.  That requires an understanding of the setting and its conceits (basic assumptions).  And background information (i.e., the history of the setting, the cultures of the setting, the past and present conflicts, etc.) help provide context, models, motivations, and examples of what does happen in the setting when X does Y. So-called "lore" only exists as a tool to allow players to understand the setting and its conflicts, such that they can make decisions because of this.  If the last king to raise a demon ended up causing a continent-wide apocalypse, the local villagers will look upon your attempts to raise a demon differently than if the rich and powerful use demons every day to do their housework. It's one of the reasons so many WotC campaigns turn into "modern day Seattle with swords";  these asshats don't have the knowledge, worldbuilding, or talent to competently express a fictional world such that they can provide enough suspension of disbelief for players to effectively roleplay in their settings!  It's also one of the reasons I've always said that "modern" settings are the crutch of weak role-players and DMs. If you have to fall back on modern expectations to buoy your  setting, you've failed as a worldbuilder.

So, sorry BCT, but whining about the (mis)use of lore and "IP" is a fundamental misunderstanding of what roleplaying is and how you do it.  A game that provides lots of hooks for players is a good game (and setting).  And what you call "lore" is one of the fundamental methods of doing so.  Where "lore" becomes a problem is when it saps the agency and choices of the players (a la DM-PC or metanarrative the world must follow).  Of course, Vampire does this, because it's a terrible game made by terrible people whose primary motivation was LARPing all of their social and sexual fetishes with tween girls.  The problem isn't the "lore"; it's the fact that the lore is both useless and counterproductive to roleplaying anything but a perv and sex-pest.

And this is why the female Astartes is a bridge too far.  Part of the setting conceits of WH40K is the way that humanity has needed to become something different (and arguably less than human) in order to survive.  It's not the right place for "representation."  It jars many players out of the setting when the happy, lesbian girl-boss sweeps in to save the day.  That's not WH40K.  So, where the "lore" in WH40K makes it harder to immerse yourself (due to contradicting what you as a player have internalized to help you understand the setting and place), it is stupid and wrong.  Lots of other minor details have been changed in the setting that produce no outcry, primarily because those changes didn't contradict something vital to the ability to immerse the player.  And lots of changes having nothing to do with modern politics have seen 40K players lose their minds, because it affected the tenor of the setting in ways that broke immersion.  It's just that modern woke people are so fucking narrow and talentless that they can't even hide their "message" enough to allow people to still immerse themselves in the setting.  They demand you come back to reality to pledge your allegiance!  Were I woke, I'd be embarrassed that my side was obviously so devoid of talent and intelligence that the best they could conjure was this.  But, hey, I guess if they were self-aware, they couldn't be woke!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 03:23:56 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 01:06:08 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.

I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.

But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.

I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics

No multiverses, eh? What exactly would you call the plethora of official campaign settings for D&D? Much less all the 3pp settings? What would you call Chronicles of Darkness? What would you call GURPS?

I'm sick and tired of some dead boomer's stagnant IP dominating [insert genre here] for decades on end, strangling alternatives, and then shitting the bed. It's not going to kill you if somebody makes a game with more than one setting. The game police are not gonna break into your house and burn the books you already bought for that game you liked.

Like, One Page Rules is releasing its own setting books, but nobody is forcing you to use their setting. The setting isn't baked into the rules. You could write a lot of settings using the same rules. (Also, I heard the writer is a furry who can't help but write the furry races as heroic persecuted minorities, so there's that.)

Worldbuilding isn't a one-size-fits-all. The SST tabletop miniatures game has been out of print for decades, the books were pulled from Drivethru due to losing the license, and there's no alternatives that I know of. One Page Rules Grimdark Future is a pastiche of 40k and doesn't have any army comparable to the Federation, the Skinnies or the Arachnids. This is a good example of how 40k's dominance is detrimental to the hobby as a whole. It actively reduces the amount of creativity and diversity of ideas in the genre.

Federation marines are not religious roided up supersoldiers. They're space Muricans in powered armor. The Arachnids are not just tyranids with a different coat of paint: a brain bug is completely different from a hive tyrant, in the original novel they use conventional technology instead of psionics and biotech, in the OOP ttrpg one of the castes was literally a cockroach used for espionage like that scene in The Fifth Element, etc. The Skinnies... I don't even know what their shtick was besides breathing methane. There's no shortage of other OOP scifi miniatures games with neat ideas that got forgotten.

Apparently OPR has an army builder that supports custom armies but you have to pay a fee to see it, so I have no comment on that.

Yeah, no multiverses, IDGAFF about D&D's different settings, especially BECAUSE they are a multiverse not really different settings.

IPs dominate the market BECAUSE it's what the market wants, how are you gonna fix that? Force people to buy/play/reads/whatever different stuff?

You have a creative brain, write up the setting for a totally not SST RPG, I bet there's lots of developers waiting to get their hands on something like that. But that's lore and you hate lore.

Here, go read Armaggedon 2419 AD and the sequel Airlords of Han, then use that as the starting point for your own lore, it's public domain. Add whatever you want to, power armor included.

That's where Buck Rogers got it's start, but while Buck is Copyrighted the original novel is public domain, expand on it, add more enemies, aliens, bugs, whatever, add space travel for the humans. Boom you have a setting for RPGs with lots of room to play in, WITHOUT multiverse bullshit, the party jumps on a ship and goes to a different planet, where the sentients aren't the same as in the last planet.

I'm working on a game with THAT characteristic, where you can play in different planets, but it's set in the past, not the future, it's the future as it never was from the 1920s-1930s point of view.

If the market wants to destroy itself, then be my guest. I've done everything I could do.

I'm sure lore, or "background and conceits", can be used well, but after my experiences with the Vampire LARPers and Blizzard games I'm just exasperated with the entire concept. It's used badly more often than it's used well.

If I want to play a vampire mad scientist, then the Vampire LARPers would force me to play as a samosa clan (or whatever, I don't care to get the name right) that has a ton of other baggage that I'm not interested in. I have never appreciated D&D's division of races, backgrounds, classes, factions, etc. more than I have after experiencing that dumpster fire fandom.

If I want to play voracious space bugs, then my options don't look good. Tyranids are a faceless force of nature and don't have any utility as a storytelling tool beyond that because they can't have characters, dialogues, or proximate objectives. Also, I'm not spending a fortune on figurines to those assholes at GW. The zerg are a fucking joke, dumb animals under the control of a psychotic succubus with boyfriend/daddy issues. It's so obnoxious.

I am writing original settings with backstories (like that not!SST thing), because I am exasperated with this kinds of things but I still want to see them done well. I'm more interested in exploring themes and plots than I am expositing trivia, so I don't limit myself to only those settings.

On the other hand, I don't have as much motivation to write as I would like. Beyond general self-doubt in my writing ability, I don't get the impression that there's an audience.

I posted 10,000+ words of original fiction to one of those fiction writing sites a couple months ago. It currently sits at a paltry 70 views.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 07:56:00 PMIf the market wants to destroy itself, then be my guest. I've done everything I could do.

I'm sure lore, or "background and conceits", can be used well, but after my experiences with the Vampire LARPers and Blizzard games I'm just exasperated with the entire concept. It's used badly more often than it's used well.

If I want to play a vampire mad scientist, then the Vampire LARPers would force me to play as a samosa clan (or whatever, I don't care to get the name right) that has a ton of other baggage that I'm not interested in. I have never appreciated D&D's division of races, backgrounds, classes, factions, etc. more than I have after experiencing that dumpster fire fandom.

If I want to play voracious space bugs, then my options don't look good. Tyranids are a faceless force of nature and don't have any utility as a storytelling tool beyond that because they can't have characters, dialogues, or proximate objectives. Also, I'm not spending a fortune on figurines to those assholes at GW. The zerg are a fucking joke, dumb animals under the control of a psychotic succubus with boyfriend/daddy issues. It's so obnoxious.

I am writing original settings with backstories (like that not!SST thing), because I am exasperated with this kinds of things but I still want to see them done well. I'm more interested in exploring themes and plots than I am expositing trivia, so I don't limit myself to only those settings.

On the other hand, I don't have as much motivation to write as I would like. Beyond general self-doubt in my writing ability, I don't get the impression that there's an audience.

I posted 10,000+ words of original fiction to one of those fiction writing sites a couple months ago. It currently sits at a paltry 70 views.

If it's not fanfiction why not go ahead and selfpublish it?

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 11:58:48 PMIf it's not fanfiction why not go ahead and selfpublish it?

Maybe in the future.