Quote from: Jaeger on February 27, 2025, 02:37:56 PMThe fact that WotC shills are removing themselves from the bandwagon is a good sign.

Some are being forcefully removed by wotc leveraging youtube.

Others are jumping ship like the rats they are and will be looking for some new boat to infest.

Quote from: HappyDaze on March 01, 2025, 10:56:26 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 01, 2025, 09:11:52 AMThat's totally helpful.

It's about as helpful as continuing to rant against the present as you suck down your memberberries.

Ok, true.

I'm trying to do something constructive instead. I'm currently working on original fiction and managed to get some writing done today. I feel so relieved that I did something

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 01, 2025, 09:11:52 AM

Quote from: Spinachcat on March 01, 2025, 05:02:34 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on February 28, 2025, 04:10:12 PMUnfortunately, every other genre sucks ass.

Dude, there's a gorillion RPGs out there. Take the time to investigate what's happening with the small press, the indie guys and the free games and you will find something you like. But if not one game excites you, the problem is you.

The problem is that they don't make the kinds of games I like anymore. It's all dumb zoomer shit now. My tastes go for stuff made in the 80s thru 2000s. Star*Drive, Dark•Matter, Conspiracy X, WitchCraft, All Flesh Must Eaten, etc. They just don't make games like they used to.

Seriously, have you actually tried searching in genres outside of your vaunted medieval fantasy? They all suck compared to where they were 20-30 years ago. It's all creepypasta gig economy bullshit that is completely conceptually divorced from what came before. No shit it's gonna suck. These dumb zoomers don't study the classics and just ape the dumb corporate slop currently available.

All the cool and interesting non-fantasy games that I'd like to play were canceled 20-30 years ago.

But go ahead and blame me for not being a dumb mindless consumer who eats whatever slop is currently being sold. That's totally helpful.

I actually think that you have a point, so why don't you create the game that you want to play? Seriously. I'm sure it won't be easy, but why not just do it? You'll never know how it turns out, unless you try.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on March 01, 2025, 10:00:49 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 01, 2025, 09:11:52 AM

Quote from: Spinachcat on March 01, 2025, 05:02:34 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on February 28, 2025, 04:10:12 PMUnfortunately, every other genre sucks ass.

Dude, there's a gorillion RPGs out there. Take the time to investigate what's happening with the small press, the indie guys and the free games and you will find something you like. But if not one game excites you, the problem is you.

The problem is that they don't make the kinds of games I like anymore. It's all dumb zoomer shit now. My tastes go for stuff made in the 80s thru 2000s. Star*Drive, Dark•Matter, Conspiracy X, WitchCraft, All Flesh Must Eaten, etc. They just don't make games like they used to.

Seriously, have you actually tried searching in genres outside of your vaunted medieval fantasy? They all suck compared to where they were 20-30 years ago. It's all creepypasta gig economy bullshit that is completely conceptually divorced from what came before. No shit it's gonna suck. These dumb zoomers don't study the classics and just ape the dumb corporate slop currently available.

All the cool and interesting non-fantasy games that I'd like to play were canceled 20-30 years ago.

But go ahead and blame me for not being a dumb mindless consumer who eats whatever slop is currently being sold. That's totally helpful.

I actually think that you have a point, so why don't you create the game that you want to play? Seriously. I'm sure it won't be easy, but why not just do it? You'll never know how it turns out, unless you try.

He's been told that many times, and he keeps saying he's getting to work on it. Hopefully he can really start to spend more time working on it and less time bemoaning the good old days.

I'm sorry for wasting your time

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 02, 2025, 07:44:52 AMI'm sorry for wasting your time

Don't be sorry. I think you have a point. There is less innovation in the ttrpg industry lately. That's why I say you should create the game you want to create. Who knows? Maybe people will play it.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on March 02, 2025, 08:29:31 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 02, 2025, 07:44:52 AMI'm sorry for wasting your time

Don't be sorry. I think you have a point. There is less innovation in the ttrpg industry lately. That's why I say you should create the game you want to create. Who knows? Maybe people will play it.

I quite agree. I'd be interested in seeing what he produces and I encourage him to get to it. If he's running into trouble with actualizing ideas, then start threads that can solicit useful input to grease the brain and then, again, get to it.

He's not wrong about me. It is a me problem. This is an autistic special interest of mine.

I wouldn't call it a strict lack of innovation so much as a loss of diversity and regression in places, particularly for genres outside of D&D.

For example, the traditional conspiracy technothriller genre with psychic superspies, chupacabra, greys, Rosicrucians and templars has been completely supplanted by Cthulhu derivatives and creepypasta.

The space opera genre is still stuck in the 60s-70s New Wave unless it's an Alien/Outland pastiche, despite attempts to modernize and diversify the genre like TSR's Star*Drive.

Because of copyright law lasting for longer than human lifetimes and making no provision for orphaned or abandoned works, once a game dies then nobody else is allowed to iterate on its ideas, forcing them to reinvent the wheel over and over. That's assuming they know and care enough to try.

The hobby has insane first mover advantage and brand loyalty. When a game does decline and die, then nobody is interested in making or playing a spiritual successor.

When most of TSR's settings were canceled after the WotC buyout and only sporadically referenced later if at all, nobody sold spiritual successors. There's no spiritual successors to Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Birthright, etc. They died and fans simply bemoaned the lack of support. And that's for a hugely popular IP like D&D.

The best we ever got was Pathfinder when 4e came out, and only because 4e was a miniatures game pretending to be an rpg. But Golarion is just another generic Faerun pastiche.

When World of Darkness got rebooted twice (once in 2004 and again in 2018), nobody cared enough to make spiritual successors despite the immense flame wars online. Back in the 90s we had visionary writers like C.J. Carella and Steve Brown who made their own contemporary fantasy games in response to WoD just because they thought it wasn't suitable for their purposes. But it seems like vision has completely vanished from folks since then. You'd expect the bridge burning and vitriol to inspire a few heartbreakers, but we only hear crickets.

The indie market for 3d printed miniatures games is more diverse.

I'd like to make my own games, but the more I learn from the history of the hobby the unhappier I become. I'm disheartened, intimidated...

Ttrpg publishing is a crapshoot. It's impossible to determine whether something will stick. Ghosts of Albion, Masque of the Red Death, StokerVerse and Vaesen all tried to do Victorian Era horror but they all got cancelled.

I'm better off writing prose, posting it on YouTube with text-to-speech, getting popular that way, then getting a TTRPG adaptation. That worked for the Magnus Archives, which is a bunch of creepypasta with the framing device that it's interviews recorded and archived by the not!Talamasca.

Sorry, I'm rambling again.

I'm gonna try spending the rest of today working on my prose. That's what really makes me feel accomplished.

I'm going to respond to OP, not Box's latest post (which I don't disagree with), because I finally had time to watch the video and I had some thoughts.

To summarize for anyone who didn't watch, he begins making strong and clear statements for the first few minutes, then he offers off-the-cuff thoughts and observations.  The initial part has him mentioning: 
(1) From 1:30, he mentions how he feels betrayed by them and explicitly discusses the issues where orcs are no longer orcs and are now just people with light gray skin and two little tusks
(2) From 2:12, he claims that WotC seem all about making you play in their reality versus it being a "flexible game for everyone"
(3) At 3:00 he briefly calls out that real world politics are more and more in the game
(4) At 3:10 he points out that there's no monster-building guidelines in the 5.5 DMG or 5.5 Monster Manual
(5) At 5:15 he says he's done giving them money
(6) Much after this section, at 10:55, he speculates that maybe they'll be bought by Elon Musk


So, to a degree, this is meant to kind of appeal to people who are also fed up with WotC for many new and old reasons, but it does kind of seem like a laundry list of things.  I definitely feel that core issues about their lore (of which he only brings up the total replacement of orcs) are only touched on, and I was expecting more of that.  They are also much more representative of the core rot at WotC's creative direction for 5.5 and beyond, and they are explicitly because of the social messaging and politics that the people they pretty exclusively hired were up to.  While you would never have guessed that Mexican orcs were on the menu- that's just funny that they managed to create the first actually racist orc depiction out of any major project- it's completely predictable that they would screw up any depiction that they could possibly deem "problematic", and a big part of that is so that they can smear anyone who stands up for anything normal as racist themselves.  So by just touching on this issue, I think he doesn't want to dive headfirst into the pool.  Similarly, his extremely brief touching on modern politics being injected into the game; we're free to read into that with how monsters have been reworked away from humanoid (with those that weren't just becoming humans with star trek foreheads), and we're free to remember how "race" has been replaced with "species" (species don't have racial modifiers in any way, those have been moved to backgrounds, a universally negative change only supported by a political urge), and we're free to also remember how "ki" is gone, renamed to "focus", along with the naming convention of the monk class (which you can tell they badly wanted to rename to martial artist or something), or how they issued errata just to delete sections of the 5.0 DMG that helpfully discussed how to create a culture for a new custom race.

But he doesn't go into that- just a quick mention, which to me seems like he just wants to avoid controversy (listing out even a few of these things would add much less than a minute to the video).

Further, I think these issues are much more important that transient annoyances like "they didn't tell us the monster formula".  Well, 5.0 had a monster formula (to derive how challenging a monster is from its stats) that was provably not the one that they used for the monster manual, and they also changed that formula about a third of the way through 5.0 and didn't share that one either, so anyone hoping they would share the real one for 5.5 was already being far too optimistic.  I think those are just kinda thrown on there to justify his personal decision to not chase WotC products.

Early in this thread, some posters speculated that WotC-friendly youtubers had been, in some cases, getting favorable ratings, boostings, etc., and that WotC was cutting this back.  That's a perfectly plausible conspiracy theory, but I don't think we have any evidence to claim it yet.  What I think we definitely are seeing is someone who is both personally ticked at how badly WotC has betrayed everyone's trust as custodians of a beloved game and set of associated stories, and has been hearing that story from many of the people around him.

As a content creator though, you can't create content about a void.  Discussing WotC products could be replaced by trashing WotC products, or by praising some third party products, or else he's out of content to make.  Pundit has his own line of non-WotC products, but he talks about D&D in several of his videos, because they are the giant in the room.  What's this guy's plan? 

By the way, being a lore guy for WotC is a tough job anyway.  Even when they were making their beloved products in the 80s and 90s, it was still product set up to sell and nowhere nearly as artistic and deep as even an average DM could accomplish (in many cases by simply implementing something from a paperback novel as a setting).  That those products are objectively the high water mark is already damning.

Finally, I think his later reference about Musk buying it was conversation-bait.  While Musk himself did make a couple memes about it as part of calling Hasbro out for a recent book where they shit all over the original creators and do white guilt apology bullshit, that breeze has blown past.  It's not implausible that Hasbro might spin off WotC- or that WotC might spin off D&D.  But if they do this, it would probably not be to some right-wing culture warrior.  The best case there would be some Chinese company that hires people you've never heard to implement something that sounds like it came out of the 90s- and that could easily go south too.

Until something that isn't cultural poison makes a solid case of stepping into the middle of modern gaming and saying "here's my core rule books with ten classes and a design precept that I'm gonna defend strongly, here's my splatbooks you can add to that", and have this thing be at least 80% of the scope of D&D in every direction, TTRPGs are going to remain in orbit around whatever dead husk is currently named D&D.  The closest we saw to that was when Paizo made Pathfinder as a way to challenge 4e, and that schism featured Paizo (who would later be the first to rename "phylactery" and delete "race") as the "return to tradition" heroes who continued to support 3.5's design concepts, including, at that time, races with attribute penalties, good, evil, law, and chaos as cosmic forces, and many other aspects of their Golarion setting that they would, just a few years later, decry as being insufficiently progressive and delete. 
So should something like that form, it would get followers, but it would need to actually be trying to make a game that directly competes with D&D- it might be inspired by some OSR pieces, but it wouldn't properly be OSR, is what I'm saying.  And it would be a huge effort, and I don't think anyone is even working in that space really.

Quote from: Venka on March 02, 2025, 11:04:14 AMSo by just touching on this issue, I think he doesn't want to dive headfirst into the pool.  Similarly, his extremely brief touching on modern politics being injected into the game; we're free to read into that

I got that sense too. He's obviously bothered by the woke stuff but doesn't want to offend anyone. It reminds me of how JK Rowling first addressed the transgender issue with sensitivity and kid gloves but is now throwing haymakers. Either this guy will back down when the mob comes for him (as they always do when they don't receive full, unquestioning conformity) or he will say f*%# it and start lobbing grenades like JK Rowling. Either way, I'm glad he has shown some integrity by pushing back against the soulless corporation that is Hasbro/WotC. He could have sold his soul, but he chose to call out the BS instead.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on February 28, 2025, 03:11:19 PMModern rpgs just suck imo. Nothing looks interesting compared to what they were making 20-30 years ago. D&D going bankrupt doesn't change that.

I think we're getting too flooded with new games that add nothing new to rp. There's a bazillion remakes of D&D, which amount to adding in house rules. I know. I have a sort of D&D game, but mine will never see the market. It's just for my table. I'm not arrogant enough, or talented enough to consider publishing the drek.

That, or we're just too fucking old and have seen it all. New games arrive and we shrug it off saying something like - oh, another damned this or that game.

Back to the main topic - don't even know who in the blue hell that dude is, nor why I should even listen to him.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on Today at 11:45:23 AMThat, or we're just too fucking old and have seen it all. New games arrive and we shrug it off saying something like - oh, another damned this or that game.

I decided to read the ttrpg adaptation of the Magnus Archives, a creepypasta anthology audio series, just to see how it differs from past horror ttrpgs. I'm looking through the chapter on monsters and npcs. Although it started publishing in 2016, the actual writeups feel like they'd be quite at home in the 2nd edition Chill rulebook or the 1st edition Nightlife rulebook (both from 1990). There's a lot of well worn tropes here: evil twins, mind control parasites, parasites that eat you alive to reproduce, neverending hallways, monsters that flay and steal your skin to impersonate you, literal spider women that weave metaphorical webs of manipulation... there's even vampires that lure victims telepathically and then suck out their insides with lamprey-like tongues.

I used to think that creepypastas had a reputation for being more "creative" than pre-internet horror, but it seems I was completely wrong. This is the kind of material that would be perfectly at home in an 80s horror anthology or novel.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on Today at 11:45:23 AMBack to the main topic - don't even know who in the blue hell that dude is, nor why I should even listen to him.

That's not really the main topic though.  You've been told who this guy is- he's a youtuber that makes content relevant to 5e viewers.  Which presumably doesn't include you (or really most of this forum).  The reason it's relevant isn't that you should listen to him in the general case, it's that this is a guy who up until this point has been fine with WotC's version of D&D, by far the most popular TTRPG, and yet here is is being turned off enough by their latest shenanigans.

If you're some OSR guy, 5.0 had a few branches handed out- you could fashion a bridge, play 5e if you like.  But 5.0 was not an OSR game.  If you're a 3.X guy, 5e had a lot more for you- but 5e was never really like 3.X.  If you're some 5.0 guy though, where you follow the 5.0 stuff and make content and run games, and now they are somehow losing you- that's not what they want, right?  That's kind of interesting.