Quote from: Snowman0147;1120053Then your not getting what I am saying.  Pundit is actually doing well for himself while FFG is dying out due to their own arrogance.  Guess it isn't hard to create a pdf and pod versions of your RPG.  So why is FGG failing and had to lay off so many people?  Could it just be the games suck and cannot support the bloat that FFG made for itself?

I wouldnt say FFG is dying off. Just that, like SJG, they are cutting off anything that doesnt make a profit. But unlike FFG they dont, far as I know, run on the tight margins of error SJG does.

I think part of the problem for FFG was that the Star Wars franchise has been doing its best to crash and burn, rather than attract fans. And as the upswing of Force Awakens turned into a downward death spiral thereafter. The RPGs are lacking the full interest of the fans. Same with the toys. The Last Jedi toys sat on shelves forever.

Add to that an RPG that has gimmick dice and you have a rescipe for potential poor sales eventually if the movies flounder enough or the company owning the IP repulses enough fans. How things have gone for the new series cant have helped sales unfortunately.

As for the game itself. If you can grock the system then its not bad. But it has flaws that can drag it down. YMMV as ever.

And of course it could be as simple as whomever owns FFG just decided to jettison the RPG branch and focus on the board games and the card games.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1120055The other one wanted this horrible abomination of the game which a shit ton of the SJWs sided with this.

What were they wanting?

Quote from: Reckall;1120074They could have underestimated the cost of the license plus the high-value production costs - thus putting themselves outside the realities of the current RPG market. This doesn't necessarily mean that their games were bad.

No, but it does indicate that there is a significant buy-in for the hobbyist who wants to play them which is a barrier to entry. Their miniatures games are evidence of this, very very pricey miniatures with minimal rules. Another barrier to entry is the counter-intuitive narrative style dice mechanic requiring specialized dice (or for those who use a handout that translates normal numbers to squiggles, specialized knowledge).

On the RPG side, the splatbook treadmill has taken on a new form. You can buy decks of character cards to expand on individual character types, giving them advantages at a monetary cost to the Player. Which also complicates the game with special circumstantial rules.

Oddly enough, when they did the WEG Anniversary Reprints, it may have been an admission of defeat. FFG recognizing that elegant rules from a more civilized age may be competitive with the newer material they were selling. Of course, as I have always said, gimmick dice and narrative rules are no match for a solid d6 SWRPG at your game table.....

It is neither a happy or a sad thing that massive layoffs are happening among the RPG staff of FFG. It is a business thing.

Quote from: Omega;1120077What were they wanting?

Too many to fucking list.  Let me just say it was a clucky fucking mess that would had result in battles taking hours to get done simply because you gotta do calculations.  First off you gotta figure out rate of fire because each weapon has a rate of fire that determined by your agility modifier.  That alone was good hour long debate with my group in just trying to figure that rate of fire out.  Then you do the normal attack vs defense rolls as normal.  if you do damage you gotta calculate the damage vs toughness to see if does wounds, if it does wounds you gotta figure how much, if you can do multi attacks you gotta repeat these previous steps, and only then is it the other player's turn.  My group when we did combat it took so long I got fed up blessed everyone with vengeance 9 and the person with vengeance now has 8.  The fact is if your not critting your going to waste hours on a single minions vs pcs fight that should had lasted maybe a half hour in another system.  It was not serious fighting and if I had brought in any thing more powerful than a minion it could had easily been two nights for one combat.  it was just horrible.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1120070True, but if they made good rpgs that people wanted to buy then there wouldn't be lay offs.  Think on that.

The games (specifically the SW game, not sure about the others) did well enough by RPG standards. Unfortunately, RPGs can't compete with board games, mini games, and card games. If WotC used the same approach, Magic would live and D&D would die. Even if many players like D&D want to play it, it's not going to perform at the levels that Asmodee wants.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1120026These kinds of stories clearly demonstrating the lack of playtesting make me cringe.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1120038Oh, they had playtesters (I was one of them) but they did tend to ignore any feedback that didn't fit with their narrative. It was really frustrating when bad spots in the rules would be pointed out and they would just say "that part is already set, what about X?" over and over.

I have a similar story I think I've shared around here from the devs for the Arcanis RPG (i.e. the travesty of game design they tried to create to support their campaign between their 3.5e and 5e versions).

The short version is their "math" guy just presumed that 2d10 and 1d20 were functionally the same in terms of probability distribution and so set their task target numbers using 3e D&D as a guide (further complicating things they replaced static ability score modifiers with an exploding die ranging from d4 to d12).

On their forums I posted a detailed series of charts of the probabilities for success for all the attribute dice (from 2d10+1d4 to 2d10+1d12) including out to three possible explosions of the attribute die.

In the thread the "math" guy said "These look very close to our numbers."

Half an hour later I got an email (not a PM, but to my actual email) from the "math" guy asking if I could email him all my spreadsheets because not only hadn't they actually run the numbers... they didn't even know HOW to run the numbers.

That was why, when I resolved to do write my own game system, I decided to put a lot of focus into the math not just "feeling right", but ensuring it actually did what it was supposed to do.

It's also why I've had years of playtesting now with whole sections of content/rules I started with being ripped out and replaced because how it looked in my head did not translate to how people used it in play. The entire class section was rebuilt from the ground up (and several classes within that separately undergoing major revisions) and whole player species removed and or massively rewritten, attack/damage/skill progression was replaced (going from quadratic to linear progression in the process), situational modifiers reworked from the ground up, the conditions/effects system completely rebuilt.

The result is that it's taken me longer to get the project done than I intended, but by this point I'm certain the mechanics are rock solid (current playtests seem to be limited to reporting relatively minor and specific bugs like the pyromancy talent having a trigger that doesn't necessarily require a hit roll, but an effect that does require a hit roll).

TL;DR the lack of actual playtesting in the industry is no joke, but is critically important to having a quality product if you're not just selling a setting and a few house rules for an existing setting (and even then, test your house rules).

Quote from: HappyDaze;1120087If WotC used the same approach, Magic would live and D&D would die.

  Wizards may use the same approach to some degree--it's probably why nothing but D&D has been attempted for nearly a decade in their RPG department, since nothing can sell well enough to justify taking resources from D&D. That's only theory, mind.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1120073Petty my ass.

Perhaps that's the case. Maybe then I should stress the CHILDISH part. A item could sell poorly for so many reasons. And let me stress I'm not interested in this game.
But saying the sales of an item indicate how truly good it is, without any other nuance speaks to childish thought patterns.

Edit: Let me double stress. I hate narrativistic dice systems and I hate stupid specialty dice. I hated how they laid out their books and I found the whole venture very uncreative. But Imarguing the principle of the point and not them themselves.

Quote from: Chris24601;1120089not only hadn't they actually run the numbers... they didn't even know HOW to run the numbers.

Alleged math guy can't actually do math. What are the odds?

Quote from: Chris24601;1120089TL;DR the lack of actual playtesting in the industry is no joke, but is critically important to having a quality product if you're not just selling a setting and a few house rules for an existing setting (and even then, test your house rules).

I'm not certain which is worse, bad quality playtesting, or no playtesting at all. Either way, without it, too many things will come up in play that will break the game. D&D actually got a good round of playtesting, with multiple groups running games and tweaking the rules to suit them, until a working version that could be published evolved. Can't say that for a lot of the modern games being designed. With FFG bad quality playtesting was deliberate, which really hurt their game. I might have actually ran games using their rules if I wasn't getting negative feedback like this from players on the forums.

Even with negative feedback, I'll always take a look for myself at the rules, to determine if the designers knew what they were doing and if they make the game fun, and easy to play/run. If there are obvious faults in rulings which disrupt my ability to immerse myself in the game, then the game is a no-go for me.

FFG's Star Wars was precisely a no-go for using non-standard dice. This is the same problem with the Modiphus version of Fallout by the way. They are using custom dice and complex mechanics that are distracting from creating good story lines. For my Fallout 4 games, I'm using a d100 Basic Roleplaying version of the Fallout rules which has been circulating on the Internet for years, and modifying the Modiphus item cards and encounters to work with the BRP.

Quote from: Chris24601;1120089It's also why I've had years of playtesting now with whole sections of content/rules I started with being ripped out and replaced because how it looked in my head did not translate to how people used it in play. The entire class section was rebuilt from the ground up (and several classes within that separately undergoing major revisions) and whole player species removed and or massively rewritten, attack/damage/skill progression was replaced (going from quadratic to linear progression in the process), situational modifiers reworked from the ground up, the conditions/effects system completely rebuilt.

Oh do I know that feeling all too well my fellow sufferer.
aheh.
This is why in board gaming it is so ruthlessly stressed to playtest your design to death, raise its corpse, and playtest it to un-death.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1120087The games (specifically the SW game, not sure about the others) did well enough by RPG standards. Unfortunately, RPGs can't compete with board games, mini games, and card games. If WotC used the same approach, Magic would live and D&D would die. Even if many players like D&D want to play it, it's not going to perform at the levels that Asmodee wants.

Actually HASBRO did threaten to make the same approach after the mess of 4e and having to put WOTC on a tighter budget leash. 5e had to do well or that was the end of the RPG line.

Quote from: Brad;1120093Alleged math guy can't actually do math. What are the odds?

I see what you did there...

Quote from: Brad;1120093Alleged math guy can't actually do math. What are the odds?

You'd be surprised at the number of designers who
A: Do not know about the bell curve.
B: Know of the bell curve but cant grasp it.
C: Have a little or alot of trouble with probabilities and interactions at all.

This comes up A-LOT over on BGG. Theres a thread pretty much dedicated to answering probability questions. And once every few weeks theres another thread with someone wanting to know why dont you use cards instead of dice since drawing a card from a depleting deck is the same as rolling a dice?

As a playtester I bump into on occasion designers not taking into account the bell curve and how it skews things.

I've only seen a rare handful of designers willfully ignorant of, or outright ignoring these factors and every time so far its ended in them torching their nasient careers and they are never heard from again.

Quote from: Omega;1120102You'd be surprised at the number of designers who
A: Do not know about the bell curve.
B: Know of the bell curve but cant grasp it.
C: Have a little or alot of trouble with probabilities and interactions at all.

This comes up A-LOT over on BGG. Theres a thread pretty much dedicated to answering probability questions. And once every few weeks theres another thread with someone wanting to know why dont you use cards instead of dice since drawing a card from a depleting deck is the same as rolling a dice?

As a playtester I bump into on occasion designers not taking into account the bell curve and how it skews things.

Really, there are people who think that about decks of cards? I remember i once had a 24 entry chart but no d24 so someone suggested 2d12 and i explained why that was wrong, but thats the worst ive seen it (in the end we just flipped a con for +12 on heads...then we changed it to calling it while the coin was mid air cause it was more fun)