Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 02, 2023, 05:30:01 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 02, 2023, 07:19:22 AM
Does anyone know anything about Kelsey Dionne and the Arcane Library? I mean, I only just heard of her "shadowdark" book at all today. When i also in very short order learned it uses a system very similar to Lion & Dragon's background, xp, and especially level benefits (random tables) system. And that she paid Dungeoncraft and Questing Beast to do Infomercials disguised as "reviews". Questing Beast at least had the courtesy to say so right at the start of the video.

Pundit - when you cite the similarities to Lion & Dragon, I'm not sure what the point is. Are you just saying that you and she have similar taste as game designers, which is presumably a compliment to her? Or are you implying that there is something unethical about the similarities between Lion & Dragon and Shadowdark?

It was absolutely not meant to be an accusation, but she took it as such, which really shocked me. Because since she has so many OSR mechanics that she used ... it was my assumption that even if I didn't know her she must follow the OSR (blogs, youtube, twitter) and knows how our culture goes, and knows that we love to brag about other people taking inspiration from our mechanics or even the kind of mechanics we want to see more of in design, etc.

But she didn't. She thought it was a kind of hit, and got defensive.

Thanks for the clarification, Pundit. That said, since you're openly attacking her, I think it's hardly surprising that she should be defensive.

That claim was in the same post where you said that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft were lying about what they claimed were honest opinions about the game, and that she unethically paid them both to lie. If you're going to mix that with claims like "she has good taste" -- then you should make it more clear what is genuine praise as opposed to shade.

Going on to your later claims:

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM
It doesn't change the fundamental problem: the influencer culture is toxic, especially when united to the millennial bullshit about "you can't say anything mean", and the whole thing looks prefabricated.  I'm not the only one who thinks so, I'm just the only bigger name in the OSR who had the balls to say it in public (rather than in DMs to me).
It's literally the worst way to market to an anti-corporate anti-establishment anti-influencer anti-woke counter-culture movement like the OSR.
But the reality is she ISN'T marketing to us. She's marketing to 5e... to all those kids who never discovered the OSR

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM
And she's inviting all the 5e people to come to the OSR, but not to join the culture of the OSR, but rather to INVADE it with the 5e "community values" that frankly make that fandom so toxic. Now I'm not saying she is being malevolent in her intention, she's doing all this without any real thought for the culture clash that will inevitably follow. But she obviously LOVES the design culture of the OSR, way more than she likes 5e; so she has to figure out that if she wants 5e to become more like the OSR, instead of the OSR being ruined by 5e fans, she needs to teach this wave of immigrants how to integrate and adopt OUR values, rather than trying to impose the values they're fleeing from on our culture, starting with herself.

I don't have much of an opinion on this, since I don't know much about it all. That said, it's clear to me that this is another attack, and I don't think you should be shocked if she is defensive.

Can you explain more about how 5e players playing Shadowdark would ruin the OSR? They're playing their game their way. How does that impact how previous OSR people play their games? I would think that the OSR could handle different people playing in different ways.

Quote from: erc1971 on March 04, 2023, 04:45:57 PM
Arcane Library had a Q&A stream a bit earlier today.  I did not watch the whole thing, but what I did watch was laser focused on the mechanics of the game.  No politics at all - and this is a good thing.  So I will add my completely irrelevant approval for the green list

I do agree it is bizarre how Arcane Library went from never heard of them to the biggest thing since sliced bread in a day.  She did something right though, marketing genius.  I won't ever blame anyone for paying for advertising or accepting money to advertise - everyone deserves to be paid for their work.  I am pleased that Questing Beast was up front about it, so kudos to him there.  Transparency is something I do want when someone does a review.

When it comes to Dungeon Craft - I don't think he reviews products he doesn't like, as I have never seen him be anything but 100% praiseworthy towards anything he has reviewed.  If I am mistaken on this, let me know, I am old now and my brain forgets stuff now and then!  Also, Dungeon Craft is tight with Questing Beast, so QB might have really liked the book and spread the word to him.

He has said in several videos he only reviews things he likes so yeah. He's also good friends with Kelsey iirc.

Quote from: Slambo on March 04, 2023, 07:46:30 PM
He has said in several videos he only reviews things he likes so yeah. He's also good friends with Kelsey iirc.

He's using the wrong terminology then.

review: "To examine with an eye to criticism or correction."

So it turns out shadowdark did switch to using ancestry at some point idk when the copy I saw still used race but the current QuickStart does use ancestry. Which is a bit of a red flag but given that the game doesn't include safety tools that I've seen and she doesn't get political on Twitter I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Idk if I'll be purchasing this product myself only because I've got great games that do all this and more. Also after this drama good to see how the pieces land IMO. Will she reveal herself to be a chaos cultist or just another person trying to break into the market of ttrpg design.

I think we will see definitively over the next few weeks. This is also why I don't immediately make updates when things happen, better to see the end result rather than make a change every other day

Quote from: jhkim on March 04, 2023, 07:31:01 PM
That claim was in the same post where you said that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft were lying about what they claimed were honest opinions about the game

Unless you mean the original post Pundit made (since deleted), I don't recall Pundit calling anyone a liar.
I do recall Pundit claiming that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft accepted money, which was true of Questing Beast and not of Dungeoncraft, and then Pundit deleted the tweet and clarified why he made that claim.

Quoteand that she unethically paid them both to lie

If you do happen to be talking about that initial (now deleted) tweet, I'll point out that pointing out that someone takes money for something isn't the same as calling someone a liar- it's pointing out that even if you try to be neutral, if someone is paying for you to review them, you have a reason to not be neutral.  If we assume that you will try to be neutral, even in the face of that reason, this is called a conflict of interest, a term chosen so as not to ungenerously assume that everyone is just a shill waiting for a greased palm.  It's to point out that if party A has a patron relationship with party B, and party B tries to be neutral in an issue that party A's interests are involved in, that is a less ideal situation for anyone seeking impartiality than if party C, who has no relationship with A or B, is the one to make that call.

Such a review is technically unethical, and calling that out is a helpful action.

Quote from: Venka on March 04, 2023, 06:21:47 PM
I was gonna say "the broader TTRPG community" but actually maybe just "the 5ed community".  Certainly she's given interviews to youtubers and her products have been discussed on reddit before.  Even this new reasonably OSR-like product has been pointed more at existing 5e players, a reasonably large group.

I'd regard Professor Dungeon Master as at least OSR-adjacent, Deathbringer is an OSR-ified take on 5e. And Questing Beast seems pretty full-on OSR to me https://www.youtube.com/@QuestingBeast/videos

I think Pundit has a pretty narrow view of what constitutes OSR or True OSR. I think there is a lot of 5e/OSR overlap these days. The weird thing is that I suspect it was partly Pundit's own work on 5e which facilitated this! 5e D&D always took a lot from the OSR, in reaction to 4e D&D.  Matt Colville is another big 5e Youtuber with a lot of OSR influence.

Quote from: Venka on March 05, 2023, 01:42:07 AM

Quote from: jhkim on March 04, 2023, 07:31:01 PM
That claim was in the same post where you said that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft were lying about what they claimed were honest opinions about the game

Unless you mean the original post Pundit made (since deleted), I don't recall Pundit calling anyone a liar.
I do recall Pundit claiming that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft accepted money, which was true of Questing Beast and not of Dungeoncraft, and then Pundit deleted the tweet and clarified why he made that claim.

Pundit's claim was that she paid Dungeoncraft and Questing Beast to do Infomercials disguised as "reviews" (in reply #3771). That's not just saying that they accepted money. It's making a claim about what they did for the money.

Questing Beast explicitly said that his review was sponsored, but also explicitly said that he would still give his honest opinion of the game. Pundit's claim contradicts this, and is saying that the review was unethically biased - calling it an "infomercial" here and "payola" on Twitter. That makes Questing Beast out as a liar.

Dungeoncraft has said that he neither accepted money as well as his being his honest opinion of the game. So this charge is doubly calling Dungeoncraft a liar.

---

Pundit makes similar disclaimers to Questing Beast when he reviews products that he himself worked on, or from people that he has a business relationship with.

I'm not claiming that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft are telling the truth. I don't know. But Pundit has accused all three of unethical behavior and lying.

Quote from: jhkim on March 04, 2023, 07:31:01 PM
That claim was in the same post where you said that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft were lying about what they claimed were honest opinions about the game, and that she unethically paid them both to lie. If you're going to mix that with claims like "she has good taste" -- then you should make it more clear what is genuine praise as opposed to shade.

Yeah, to me it came across as "She's stealing my work, and paying shills to promote it!" - definitely an attack.

Quote from: jhkim on March 05, 2023, 02:10:01 AM
Pundit's claim was that she paid Dungeoncraft and Questing Beast to do Infomercials disguised as "reviews" (in reply #3771). That's not just saying that they accepted money. It's making a claim about what they did for the money.

That's just factual.  Hypothetically if I'm a creator and you a reviewer, and I pay you to do a review, you are providing me an infomercial.  Even if you are honest (and even if you are honest and you dunk on the game), it's still an infomercial because I paid for my thing to be in the face of your viewers.  I also don't feel that pointing someone out as taking money for a review is the same as calling them a liar (again I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I'm not aware of an accusation of falsehood directly).

Regardless though, it's clear that this is about the magnitude of the response to Questing Beast's review- should we be as mad as Pundit is that he only reviews contents he likes, and either always or almost always for some money?  You can make a case that we should be, that we should demand fully honest and impartial reviews with no conflicts of interest.  I'm just not mad about that though, at all, but I don't make a living in this industry.  If you had a policy to never pay for reviews, and clear bright lines about what forms of advertising are ethical, you'd definitely be at a disadvantage- both compared to others that don't share those standards, and objectively, as you'd obviously have more reach and dollars if you used every technique available.


Edit:   I don't feel this deserves its own post but I wanted to get it off my chest.  Kelsey did say on twitter, in response to discussions about the "roll a cool table on level up to get a random class thing", that she got the idea from Pokemon Red.  While I'm sure this is an honest mistake (she would have been very young when the first generation of Pokemon came out), the benefits you got in that game were never random.  Each creature had a set of abilities they would try to learn at each level, and your stats, which would sometimes jump unusually, were actually determined by your base stats (specific to your species, ex, charmander has a different base speed than pikachu), plus your inherent values (a 4 bit number for each of your stat types, generated at random when you captured the pokemon), all multiplied by your level.  Then something called "stat XP" was added, and this rather complex feature allowed you to gain a fixed amount of value to all stats eventually (it's explained here https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Effort_values#Stat_experience and other places).  But this would make it look like your gains were random, when, in fact, they were the results of whatever other pokemon you had defeated in combat, had a predictable maximum, and making sure to cap all your stat XPs so you had your maximum possible stats was always done in competitive pokemon back then.

Anyway so while she may have thought the level gains in gen 1 pokemon were random, they weren't.  Sorry for that, I had to put it somewhere.

Quote from: S'mon on March 04, 2023, 05:04:48 PM

Quote from: erc1971 on March 04, 2023, 04:45:57 PM
Arcane Library had a Q&A stream a bit earlier today.  I did not watch the whole thing, but what I did watch was laser focused on the mechanics of the game.  No politics at all - and this is a good thing.  So I will add my completely irrelevant approval for the green list

Listening to it now. Good crunchy OSR stuff.

She mentions a design aim of opening the whole OSR up to 5e players. I fear Pundit's fear of mobs of 5e players playing OSE and maybe even Lion & Dragon may come true. 

Edit: No Raise Dead in the game! Pretty hardcore! 

Oh look, yet another similarity with Lion & Dragon.

Quote from: jhkim on March 04, 2023, 07:31:01 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 02, 2023, 05:30:01 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 02, 2023, 07:19:22 AM
Does anyone know anything about Kelsey Dionne and the Arcane Library? I mean, I only just heard of her "shadowdark" book at all today. When i also in very short order learned it uses a system very similar to Lion & Dragon's background, xp, and especially level benefits (random tables) system. And that she paid Dungeoncraft and Questing Beast to do Infomercials disguised as "reviews". Questing Beast at least had the courtesy to say so right at the start of the video.

Pundit - when you cite the similarities to Lion & Dragon, I'm not sure what the point is. Are you just saying that you and she have similar taste as game designers, which is presumably a compliment to her? Or are you implying that there is something unethical about the similarities between Lion & Dragon and Shadowdark?

It was absolutely not meant to be an accusation, but she took it as such, which really shocked me. Because since she has so many OSR mechanics that she used ... it was my assumption that even if I didn't know her she must follow the OSR (blogs, youtube, twitter) and knows how our culture goes, and knows that we love to brag about other people taking inspiration from our mechanics or even the kind of mechanics we want to see more of in design, etc.

But she didn't. She thought it was a kind of hit, and got defensive.

Thanks for the clarification, Pundit. That said, since you're openly attacking her, I think it's hardly surprising that she should be defensive.

Her reaction to that tweet was BEFORE I pointed out that she gave money to a reviewer.

Quote
That claim was in the same post where you said that Questing Beast and Dungeoncraft were lying about what they claimed were honest opinions about the game, and that she unethically paid them both to lie. If you're going to mix that with claims like "she has good taste" -- then you should make it more clear what is genuine praise as opposed to shade.

No, it was BEFORE that. At the time I commented on the many design elements that Shadowdark has with L&D, that was my first interaction with her, and I had already been told (by OSR people in private) that they suspected that some of the cheerleaders of the game may have been paid, but I had not yet seen actual proof at that time.

Quote
Going on to your later claims:

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM
It doesn't change the fundamental problem: the influencer culture is toxic, especially when united to the millennial bullshit about "you can't say anything mean", and the whole thing looks prefabricated.  I'm not the only one who thinks so, I'm just the only bigger name in the OSR who had the balls to say it in public (rather than in DMs to me).
It's literally the worst way to market to an anti-corporate anti-establishment anti-influencer anti-woke counter-culture movement like the OSR.
But the reality is she ISN'T marketing to us. She's marketing to 5e... to all those kids who never discovered the OSR

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 04, 2023, 02:02:37 PM
And she's inviting all the 5e people to come to the OSR, but not to join the culture of the OSR, but rather to INVADE it with the 5e "community values" that frankly make that fandom so toxic. Now I'm not saying she is being malevolent in her intention, she's doing all this without any real thought for the culture clash that will inevitably follow. But she obviously LOVES the design culture of the OSR, way more than she likes 5e; so she has to figure out that if she wants 5e to become more like the OSR, instead of the OSR being ruined by 5e fans, she needs to teach this wave of immigrants how to integrate and adopt OUR values, rather than trying to impose the values they're fleeing from on our culture, starting with herself.

I don't have much of an opinion on this, since I don't know much about it all. That said, it's clear to me that this is another attack, and I don't think you should be shocked if she is defensive.

Can you explain more about how 5e players playing Shadowdark would ruin the OSR? They're playing their game their way. How does that impact how previous OSR people play their games? I would think that the OSR could handle different people playing in different ways.

It's  not about the way they play, though obviously there's some concern about Wokism trying to make demands; it's about the culture of how the OSR puts the emphasis on Designers, while 5e puts its emphasis on "influencers" and "celebrities". You can see this in how she marketed it, which was so alien to the way the OSR does things: she didn't approach it from the point of emphasizing the design of the game, promoting at the grassroots with other OSR designers (who have a fantastic culture of sharing and endorsing fellow designer's games, in stark contrast to some design cultures that have a kind of zero-sum game mentality of trying to keep new designers down out of fear of being removed from the status of high priestess or whatever); instead she did the very typical 5e thing of picking "influencers" who aren't necessarily designers to create a buzz about how Shadowdark is the Current Thing that everyone who is a cool kid will want to Consume.

As far as the OSR being immune from takeover of that culture, I'd say that the success of Shadowdark is kind of evidence to the contrary. It's easy for an emphasis on shallow fashionability to replace a culture based on merit.
Likewise, the strong pushback even from some people who are (or claim to be) OSR people against my daring to question the practice of paid reviewing shows that it would be very easy for a toxic culture of "you can only say nice things" (which sounds wonderful but actually protects the inept and the vile from any criticism) taking over and destroying the culture of strong and effective critique (which is the best way to make designers actually BETTER at their craft). I literally got several people telling me that my reviews are bad because I "should only emphasize on positive things" because if I point out flaws or problems in a game that means I'm "not being supportive of fellow creators" (which is in fact the opposite of the truth).

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 05, 2023, 08:21:21 PM
You can see this in how she marketed it, which was so alien to the way the OSR does things: she didn't approach it from the point of emphasizing the design of the game, promoting at the grassroots with other OSR designers...  ...instead she did the very typical 5e thing of picking "influencers" who aren't necessarily designers to create a buzz about how Shadowdark is the Current Thing that everyone who is a cool kid will want to Consume.

She - really, her marketing professional wife/partner - wanted to make lots of money for the Kickstarter. So she did what works to make lots of money. It's not specifically a 5e thing; it's a Youtube thing, and social media in general. You go where the money is. The traditional OSR approach you mention predates social media (really the heyday was around 2008-12), and does not make traditional OSR designers a lot of money.

I have more faith in someone when they don't dance around the question. "I'm not entirely sure what you mean."

Good to know.

https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/faq

Quote from: Punch and Pie on March 06, 2023, 05:16:38 PM
I have more faith in someone when they don't dance around the question. "I'm not entirely sure what you mean."

She was confused by the question because it was a dumb fucking question. She then immediately spelled it out for the deliberately obtuse. I didn't read that as dancing around.

Is there something you have seen that places Arcane Library in the yellow or red?