So, in my mindless scrolling of reddit I stupidly, occasionally do, I read the sjw r/rpg subreddit. In the past couple of months they have talked about rpg's that they've been disappointed in.

And it warms the dead cold cockles of my heart to hear how disappointed they were regarding two in particular.

One is Coyote & Crow and the other is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Who would have thought that non game designers would flub up those games? Question of the century I think.

A game designed completely for nothing more than an sj virtue signal is bad?  But, but how could that be? We all know that these are the only games we should be playing or be labeled as terrible people.

Quote from: Thorn Drumheller on October 10, 2023, 10:53:47 AM
One is Coyote & Crow and the other is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Who would have thought that non game designers would flub up those games? Question of the century I think.

Coyote and Crow was explicitly racialized.  It was a work of hatred first, and everything else was secondary.  It is no surprise that it's broadly disliked, and this is before the creator escalated with ludicrous demands and comments that, in fairness, did get him publicity.

But is the Avatar game really made by a non game designer?  I know that this game:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/avatar-legends-the-roleplaying-game 
Ended up with pretty disappointed users, and that it rehashed another system Magpie had used for a less lucrative IP.  But with a kickstarter like that, it's extremely far from a failure.  It looks like it was a smashing success, and no matter how disappointed its users are, I suspect they'd all come back around for a second edition.

Assuming that's the game being discussed.

I don't actually believe going woke results in going broke.  In a functional free market, it would, but when we're talking about publishing books with political agendas, well, you don't need Larry Fink of BlackRock or Stephen A. Schwarzman of Black Stone doing ESG crap and demanding "diversity" quotas behind the scenes (the threat of a bad score and a dumped stock serving as a pretty big stick even for large companies).  You don't need heavy weights because books are cheap.

Compared to other mouthpieces of mass media- radio stations, television broadcasts, access to cable, promoted and primary presence on the web and on all the various gadgets everyone carries with them everywhere- publishing is chump change.  So are hobbyist forums, subreddits, and everything else in this entire hobby.  If someone wants to crap out a make-work SJW-preachpoint screed and call it an RPG every year for decades, while a bunch of leftists slap them with RPG awards for Bestest Game Evah, well, I'm sure there will be plenty of money for that, and to keep it promoted enough. 

To me, at this point, all of that stuff only entertains me because of the haterade videos that Pundit and Pundit-adjacent community members create.  The fact that the free market could save us from this tiresome wave of nonsense isn't something I hold out on, because I figure that money will just always flood in and renew everything.

But it's still nice when something goes woke and actually loses money as a result.  Hiring people based on skin color and politics instead of ability has definitely hurt WotC's book sales, as Pundit pointed out in his last video.  Where the market is big enough to matter, we can see it trying to reject this kind of nonsense.  That is legit satisfying.

Their failure isn't because of the ideology. These game designers fundamentally fail to make a game because they aren't even interested in making a game.  These product are to dishonestly sell a low effort package.  So that we are clear, I am calling these products out as intentional confidence schemes.

When you dig into the background of the products you're talking about, you'll quickly see that it's a package of shit crated by people from the art world, not gamers.  Fake RPGs are just one more grift along with comics, children's books, community projects, etc.  I'm not saying all artist are con men, I'm saying that the art community is a good place for con men to ply their trade and learn the craft of selling low effort materials.

I know there's a lot of people that just play because it's their hobby and then they turn their setting, collection of house rules, or some other homebrew into a product.  Even when it fails, even when it's garbage, you can see that it's an attempt to make something playable.  There are certainly left leaning products like this too but that's not the same as the recent flood of high visual impact product with an obvious failure to play test the mechanics.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5th edition has it bad right now with the critical reception from fans. This is especially hilarious because the game was a proto-woke nightmare when it first released in the early 90s.

Quote from: BadApple on October 10, 2023, 12:46:35 PM
When you dig into the background of the products you're talking about, you'll quickly see that it's a package of shit crated by people from the art world, not gamers.  Fake RPGs are just one more grift along with comics, children's books, community projects, etc.  I'm not saying all artist are con men, I'm saying that the art community is a good place for con men to ply their trade and learn the craft of selling low effort materials. I know there's a lot of people that just play because it's their hobby and then they turn their setting, collection of house rules, or some other homebrew into a product.  Even when it fails, even when it's garbage, you can see that it's an attempt to make something playable.  There are certainly left leaning products like this too but that's not the same as the recent flood of high visual impact product with an obvious failure to play test the mechanics.

Historically, there's a category especially of licensed games that have good art and marketing but are low-effort generic rules at best. Back in the 1990s, I'd call out West End Games' Masterbook this. WEG put a bunch of design into Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Torg -- but then they rolled out low-effort adaptations like Indiana Jones, Necroscope, Species, Tales from the Crypt, Tank Girl, World of Aden, and Hercules & Xena -- all of which were just sort of cursory book-making for fans. Take generic Torg rules, throw in a handful of customizations, and add a lot of art and filler text from the series. In the early 2000s, Decipher made similar with their Star Trek RPG and Lord of the Rings RPG.

I played Decipher LotR, and I wouldn't call it a fake RPG, but it was poor and low-effort game design with a lot of stuff that was clearly not playtested. Though, there are a ton of amateurish, badly-designed RPGs out there - and plenty of people have fun playing them.

It seems possible Avatar: The Last Airbender is in a similar category, but I haven't read it, so I don't know.

I have read Coyote & Crow, and while I think it's too difficult on learning curve to be interested in, it is by no means low-effort. It is clearly a labor of love from the author, who worked hard to put together an original system. It might not be good, but it isn't low-effort.

Quote from: jhkim on October 10, 2023, 03:51:43 PM
I have read Coyote & Crow, and while I think it's too difficult on learning curve to be interested in, it is by no means low-effort. It is clearly a labor of love from the author, who worked hard to put together an original system. It might not be good, but it isn't low-effort.

I have a copy of it right here in front of me and the mechanics are shit sandwich of stoner ideas that haven't been ironed out.  It's complicated like a shitty Portland street mural collage rather than complicated like a Swiss clock.  Just because there's lots of part that doesn't mean that it's a product of committed design and high quality crafting.

I was going to do a review but it's literally not worth my effort.

  Its hard to find SJWs that regularly actually play RPGs, rarer still are the ones that buy them.  Combine these two rarities together and not so hard to understand why blatant SJW games failed.  It was geared to a market that does not exist.

Quote from: BadApple on October 10, 2023, 04:12:39 PM
I have a copy of it right here in front of me and the mechanics are shit sandwich of stoner ideas that haven't been ironed out.  It's complicated like a shitty Portland street mural collage rather than complicated like a Swiss clock.  Just because there's lots of part that doesn't mean that it's a product of committed design and high quality crafting.

I was going to do a review but it's literally not worth my effort.

Something can take a lot of effort and still be utter garbage.  If the guy was truly committed to just running a con he could've slapped FATE or PBtA on it and called it a day.  I haven't bothered ever looking at it so I have no opinion on whether lots of work got put into it or not, but the guy could simply be a shitty designer rather than a scammer.

That said, lots of effort from a talentless hack does not in itself redeem a broken-ass game.  FATAL probably took a lot of work too, but that hardly improved it.  I agree with jhkim about those cookie-cutter property RPGs that cluttered up store shelves back in the 90s; those things sucked and were clearly money grabs even at the time.  I avoided them like the plague.

Quote from: Valatar on October 10, 2023, 05:19:52 PM
Something can take a lot of effort and still be utter garbage.  If the guy was truly committed to just running a con he could've slapped FATE or PBtA on it and called it a day.  I haven't bothered ever looking at it so I have no opinion on whether lots of work got put into it or not, but the guy could simply be a shitty designer rather than a scammer.

That said, lots of effort from a talentless hack does not in itself redeem a broken-ass game.  FATAL probably took a lot of work too, but that hardly improved it.  I agree with jhkim about those cookie-cutter property RPGs that cluttered up store shelves back in the 90s; those things sucked and were clearly money grabs even at the time.  I avoided them like the plague.

Absolutely. There are some games that I hate and are terrible designs, but that doesn't mean that they're a scam or lazily-done. (I've never read FATAL so I have no opinion either way on it.)

There are low-effort RPGs. I gave some before. Another example that comes to mind is the Cortex systems: Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Smallville, Leverage, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. These were mostly low-effort adaptations of the generic Cortex system to a property. They may have put more effort into MHR, but my impression is still that it isn't heavy on game design.

There are good licensed RPGs, though. James Bond 007 was excellent. WEG's Ghostbusters and Star Wars took a lot of effort to create a good design that works for the setting. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG also thoroughly reworked the Unisystem to fit the action.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 10, 2023, 02:11:42 PM
Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5th edition has it bad right now with the critical reception from fans. This is especially hilarious because the game was a proto-woke nightmare when it first released in the early 90s.

This brings me joy. 

Quote from: Valatar on October 10, 2023, 05:19:52 PM

Quote from: BadApple on October 10, 2023, 04:12:39 PM
I have a copy of it right here in front of me and the mechanics are shit sandwich of stoner ideas that haven't been ironed out.  It's complicated like a shitty Portland street mural collage rather than complicated like a Swiss clock.  Just because there's lots of part that doesn't mean that it's a product of committed design and high quality crafting.

I was going to do a review but it's literally not worth my effort.

Something can take a lot of effort and still be utter garbage.  If the guy was truly committed to just running a con he could've slapped FATE or PBtA on it and called it a day.  I haven't bothered ever looking at it so I have no opinion on whether lots of work got put into it or not, but the guy could simply be a shitty designer rather than a scammer.

That said, lots of effort from a talentless hack does not in itself redeem a broken-ass game.  FATAL probably took a lot of work too, but that hardly improved it.  I agree with jhkim about those cookie-cutter property RPGs that cluttered up store shelves back in the 90s; those things sucked and were clearly money grabs even at the time.  I avoided them like the plague.

Yeah... you're never going to convince me that they did more than throw some ideas up on a whiteboard and spent a couple of hours stitching them together. 

Quote from: BadApple on October 10, 2023, 06:26:47 PM
Yeah... you're never going to convince me that they did more than throw some ideas up on a whiteboard and spent a couple of hours stitching them together.

It's going to come down to semantics.  A person beating his toes repeatedly with a sledgehammer is putting in a lot of "effort".  It's "work" lifting that hammer, technically and figuratively.  The "accomplishment" is somewhat less, however.  Take that into the mental realm where "work" is defined as worrying really hard about irrelevant things. With similar "accomplishment" produced.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 10, 2023, 06:44:51 PM

Quote from: BadApple on October 10, 2023, 06:26:47 PM
Yeah... you're never going to convince me that they did more than throw some ideas up on a whiteboard and spent a couple of hours stitching them together.

It's going to come down to semantics.  A person beating his toes repeatedly with a sledgehammer is putting in a lot of "effort".  It's "work" lifting that hammer, technically and figuratively.  The "accomplishment" is somewhat less, however.  Take that into the mental realm where "work" is defined as worrying really hard about irrelevant things. With similar "accomplishment" produced.

I don't care if it took them 10 minutes or four years if they didn't actually follow through on making it all work the way it was intended.  If a team of super geniuses spend a day crafting the greatest game system ever and they play tested it and ran all the math then it's excellent and they put in the effort.  If, as I suspect with this, a group of guys got together, got stoned, and spent a year half assing it, it's low effort.

I've seen high effort, low quality shit before.  There is a difference. 

Quote from: oggsmash on October 10, 2023, 04:16:47 PM
  Its hard to find SJWs that regularly actually play RPGs, rarer still are the ones that buy them.  Combine these two rarities together and not so hard to understand why blatant SJW games failed.  It was geared to a market that does not exist.

This. 

RPG's are still niche.  They're more accepted these days, but real players are still a minority.  Now let's make a niche of a niche.  Yeah, that customer base is tiny.

If I ever get around to making an RPG, it's not going to reference any woke talking points. 

Hell, RPGs are already more egalitarian than they should be by not having males and females roll different stats to reflect male size, speed, and strength averages.  A female fighter is just as good as a male.