Quote from: RPGPundit;1076129Hmm.. poster with 12 posts suddenly shows up to defend Daniel fucking Fox, a known serial sockpuppeteer both for the purposes of promoting his shitty game and for doxxing people (including possibly himself, making him the Jussie Smollett of the RPG world)?

I'm not defending Daniel Fox. As I said, I don't like what little I do know of him.

Being critical of you doesn't equal defending him.

The fact is that your post, in which you threaten to press the "nuclear button", comes across as blackmail.

Do I think he should have made a big deal of it? Not at all. Do I think you're coming across as more than a little whiny when you complain about him complaining about you? Yes.

And what the hell does the number of times I've posted here have anything to do with it? I assure you I'm not a sockpuppet for anyone.


Lou Prosperi

If someone contributes to a product, and you credit them for their contributions, it's pretty cheesy to remove their credit because you decide you don't like them anymore.  Their contribution still exists until the next edition is released.

I doubt WOTC would want to lose Mearls.  He makes them look good.  He is considered a hero by many.

I for one am shocked that Pundit's smoking gun ended up being nothing but empty posturing

How could the man behind the amazingly popular D&DGate movement do this

Quote from: Player's Nuclear Option;1076141I for one am shocked that Pundit's smoking gun ended up being nothing but empty posturing

How could the man behind the amazingly popular D&DGate movement do this

Is this the life you chose for yourself?

Quote from: Haffrung;1076021Adventures with two, maybe three combat encounters in a session, where those combats have real importance and dramatic consequence. So more plot-driven games.

WotC never gets the adventures aligned with the system. When they had a system geared towards relatively few but highly dramatic and cinematic combats, they released combat-dense dungeon adventures. Now that they have a system geared for lots of attritional combats, they're publishing epic plot-driven campaigns. I firmly believe Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth are best suited to 5E, while Curse of Strahd and Waterdeep Dragon Heist would play better with 4E.

I played in KOTS and felt it was too linear and mediocre. I played one session of Thunderspire and felt it was mediocre. It was the same GM for both, so maybe that was the problem. Other 4E games went alright.

Curse of Strahd is a weird beast. It's not sandboxy enough to be a sandbox, and there's not enough plot for it to be a storygame. I don't have enough experience with 4E to know how it would play out using 4E. If I had to pick a system to run Strahd, I'd probably go for Traveller (a fantasy variant.) Older characters, random character generation, brutal combat, no PC magic. That would give it a horror feel.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1076030You do not appear to be responding to anything I wrote.

Welcome to the internet.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1076051David "Olivia" Hill is a scumbag, but he doesn't deserve to die. He just needs to shut the fuck up

NO. David/Olivia Hill might be a scumbag, but has the right to free speech.

An equal right to free speech as anyone else, regardless of their opinions.

Doc, it's either free speech for all...or none.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1076131I have to say, they have made a tremendously good counter-argument there, because it's reinforced my understanding that when Mearls is fired, everyone else left in WoTC is part of the Stalinist-SJW agenda, and will destroy D&D in their fervor.

Excellent! This sounds like a wonderful plan and I hope your emails are as Hiroshima as you've hinted at. Time for Mearls to glow in the dark.

D&D desperately needs its "go woke, go broke" moment and we need it ASAP. When the Hasbro CFO sees the drop in WotC revenue, they will sound the money alarm awakening the One True American God and you can bet there will be house cleaning like a wildfire through the Seattle offices.

...and the RPG hobby shalt be reborn afresh, maybe this time focused on games.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1076146When the Hasbro CFO sees the drop in WotC revenue, they will sound the money alarm awakening the One True American God and you can bet there will be house cleaning like a wildfire through the Seattle offices.

Because that's what happened to Disney-Lucasfilm over the The Last Jedi debacle?

Right?

Right?

...When a corporation is Converged, sadly they very often will prefer going Broke to dealing with the Woke. It becomes a sort of religious test of faith - to Suffer for their Belief. And of course they cast the moral blame on the 'Toxic White Male' fanbase - ie their customers.

That said, I'm not convinced Mearls is truly the last bastion of non-SJW-ness at WoTC. Obviously Jeremy Crawford has very strong SocJus inclinations, he wants the books full of gay and trans stuff - but my impression is he's not an actual hate-filled SJW in the mode of Jessica Price, who did so much damage to Paizo. Of the few other people left at the company, I never got a strong SocJus vibe off Chris Perkins, though he may well be to the left of Mearls - who is already strongly left-liberal by any standard other than that of the San Francisco-Portland-Seattle negaplex. Not saying Pundit is necessarily wrong either though.

11th highest grossing film of all time...the fail narrative is getting old

Quote from: HorusArisen;107615811th highest grossing film of all time...the fail narrative is getting old

Solo lost money, as I expect you know. Not because Solo was a bad film. Because TLJ was a bad film.

Quote from: S'mon;1076159Solo lost money, as I expect you know. Not because Solo was a bad film. Because TLJ was a bad film.

If you say so, I'm sure mismanaging and poor advertising didn't affect it as much as the 1.3+ billion dollar success before it did :rolleyes:

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1075960to use Federal troops against protesters you would have to first show how the state(s) 'unable or unwilling to suppress violence that is in opposition to the constitutional rights of the people'.  Failure to do so would put you in violation of The Posse Comitatus Act.

I'm not from the US, but the police being told by the Portland mayor's office not to do anything to those Antifa people that were redirecting traffic seems like a clear inability or unwillingness to suppress actions (though not actual violence) that were pretty bizarre (basically taking over a power that is reserved to the police).

The videos are still up on youtube, including people filming the police standing by, chomping at the bit but unable to do anything about the bastards right in the middle of the street directing traffic "because I told you so, you white boy" (or some such phrase).

Quote from: HorusArisen;1076171If you say so, I'm sure mismanaging and poor advertising didn't affect it as much as the 1.3+ billion dollar success before it did :rolleyes:

   All I know is that The Last Jedi killed my enthusiasm for Star Wars to the point that Solo is the first widespread theatrical Star Wars release I skipped in thirty years. I'm probably just an outlier, though; too attached to Legends, too old and not woke enough to begin the training in the ways of the glorious New Order.

Quote from: HorusArisen;1076171If you say so, I'm sure mismanaging and poor advertising didn't affect it as much as the 1.3+ billion dollar success before it did :rolleyes:

God, curse me with a failure on par with The Last Jedi. I will bear that burden.

Seriously, Solo's problems were entirely its own and can be summarized as... A) came out less than six months after TLJ, B) recast an iconic role played by Harrison Ford, C) was a movie literally no one was asking for (but I suspect was important to the creators in terms of contextualizing the sequel trilogy), and D) there was literally zero tension surrounding the fates of Han, Chewie, Lando or the Millennium Falcon throughout the film.

It was basically a film tailor-made to be skippable by general audience fans... so it was. The worst part of it was it gave the haters of TLJ the idea that they were the ones who actually tanked Solo and not all of the above + a raft of production cost overruns when, at best, they might have made a 1% difference in Solo's actual box office numbers.

Quote from: HorusArisen;1076171If you say so, I'm sure mismanaging and poor advertising didn't affect it as much as the 1.3+ billion dollar success before it did :rolleyes:

You don't understand the film business very well, do you?

TLJ had a reported budget of between 250 and 300 million dollars. Advertisement for big studio films often equals 100% of the filming budget, and big franchises like MCU and Star Wars tend to spend even more than that. Let's give Disney a hand here and say they just spent 100% of the budget, so it goes to between 500 and 600 million.

The 1.3 Billion worldwide take is a gross figure, which doesn't take into account the theaters' cut, which goes anywhere between 25 and 40 percent of the gross. Let's assume because it's Disney (and therefore makes it more of a sure thing for the theaters) that the theaters' cut is on the low end, let's say 20%, which comes out at 260 million. So, Disney's actual worldwide take for TLJ was about 1 billion, which means a net profit of between 400 and 500 million.

The problem is investors don't give a shit about the intricacies of the market. They want maximum return, which means more than last time. If a business isn't growing, it's shrinking (because stagnating is the same as shrinking to an investor...he could be putting his dollars into something that was actually growing). And TLJ made about 500 to 600 million less in profit than TFA, and that's after a reportedly higher initial investment.

Four or five hundred million might be a lot to you and me, but to Disney and the investors it was a colossal failure, which led directly to the dumpster fire that was the Solo release, and the almost immediate reaction by the CEO admitting their mistake in rushing the releases out too quickly and a subsequent slowdown in order to prevent such a significant drop in the returns for future releases.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1076173All I know is that The Last Jedi killed my enthusiasm for Star Wars to the point that Solo is the first widespread theatrical Star Wars release I skipped in thirty years. I'm probably just an outlier, though; too attached to Legends, too old and not woke enough to begin the training in the ways of the glorious New Order.

Of the new trilogy, the first movie was pretty good; but the directions they took by the end of the trilogy pissed off their fan base.  RPG companies are capable of doing the same thing.  And the RPG market needs their fan base to be excited about the current product offering.  D&D 4E......?