Quote from: 3catcircus on December 23, 2021, 08:19:43 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 22, 2021, 01:52:22 PM
I was speaking about the potential effect on my gaming of two specific cases: (a) the paragraphs cut from Volo's in 5e, and (b) the renaming and removing from core rules of demons and devils in 2e compared to 1e.

Lemme ask a simple question.  What is in the 5e Volo's book that wasn't in previous works? Is there something that is only in the 5e book that is new being removed?

Technically it is unique text, but it doesn't look to have any unique information that can't be inferred from other material. For example, in Volo's Guide there are 7 and a half pages of material on the Yuan-ti that are left unchanged - including description of their culture, history, worship, etc. - all about how emotionless and evil they are. Then there are is a third of a page about how to role-play an individual Yuan-ti that were cut - followed by a page with tables of random personality traits that are unchanged. It seems like a token difference that has little effect.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on December 22, 2021, 01:02:16 PM
b) Complaining about their stuff is just as likely to encourage them to double-down and use the complaints to sell to their new audience--"See how much the deplorables dislike it!"--as it is to cause a change. "Disliked by Pundit" may become the new "Banned in Boston."

On B
This and marketing everywhere now banks on outrage marketing ploys to generate free advertising and a scapegoat if the product fails.

They want you to scream and complain. That generates interest in the product. Which means sales.
They do not care if it damages the products image as the cultists and the cattle will buy it no matter.

As said before. Pundit is these creeps best salesman.

Moreso because they have started seeding announcements with misleading claims or focusing on things they know will outrage people just to bait people into complaining. Then when the products looked at, its often not even half as bad if even that. Which discredits the complaints.

Quote from: Omega on December 24, 2021, 05:35:50 AM

b) Complaining about their stuff is just as likely to encourage them to double-down and use the complaints to sell to their new audience--...

Pundit can only hope!

He has seen nothing but increases in his product sales, and membership to this board, every time they try to throw him under the bus.

Their outrage over Ocule's list on this site did both...

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on December 22, 2021, 01:02:16 PM
On B
This and marketing everywhere now banks on outrage marketing ploys to generate free advertising and a scapegoat if the product fails.

They want you to scream and complain. That generates interest in the product. Which means sales. ALIENTES MORE NORMIE CUSTOMERS.
They do not care if it damages the products image as the cultists and the cattle will buy it no matter.  EVENTUALLY REACH A POINT WHERE THEY WALK AWAY.

As said before. Pundit is these creeps best salesman. STRAWMAN

Moreso because they have started seeding announcements with misleading claims or focusing on things they know will outrage people just to bait people into complaining. Then when the products looked at, its often not even half as bad if even that. Which discredits the complaints. HAS PROVEN TO HAVE NO EFFECT

Yet as similar instances in other media have shown, this will cause them to lose money and fail faster.

Movies and Comic fandom has their "Pundit" equivalents to varying degrees. And they have largely been proven just as prophetic.

Marvel and DC comics print divisions have made all the moves you guys outline here, and they are still in the gutter. Losing market share to un-woke Magna hand over fist. Still.

For years loyal "fans" of Dr.Who would pooh-pooh any notion that the woke inclusions in the writing for Dr. Who were bad for the show. They were: 'no big deal' and 'not that bad, you can just ignore it'. And if anyone said "This woke shit will kill the show." The instant reply would often be: "Have you seen the ratings? More people are watching Dr. Who than ever! Your delusional..."

We can see how that all worked out...

And its not just been Dr. Who. Nobody watches the new Trek shows, and Star Wars is in the dog house...

All the outrage bait marketing attempts are failing, and only hurting their pocket book.

There are still plenty of suckers out there in the world. And almost all the people in control of "geek IP" are backed by major corporations with deep pockets.

But the more they try to demonize people for being anti-woke, the more they let their mask slip, and the more normies start to see them for what they are.

There is a tipping point. We have seen the mass fan-exodus from superhero comics and once beloved sci-fi properties for tv and movies.

RPG's are not immune.

Quote from: jhkim on December 23, 2021, 10:01:38 PM

Quote from: 3catcircus on December 23, 2021, 08:19:43 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 22, 2021, 01:52:22 PM
I was speaking about the potential effect on my gaming of two specific cases: (a) the paragraphs cut from Volo's in 5e, and (b) the renaming and removing from core rules of demons and devils in 2e compared to 1e.

Lemme ask a simple question.  What is in the 5e Volo's book that wasn't in previous works? Is there something that is only in the 5e book that is new being removed?

Technically it is unique text, but it doesn't look to have any unique information that can't be inferred from other material. For example, in Volo's Guide there are 7 and a half pages of material on the Yuan-ti that are left unchanged - including description of their culture, history, worship, etc. - all about how emotionless and evil they are. Then there are is a third of a page about how to role-play an individual Yuan-ti that were cut - followed by a page with tables of random personality traits that are unchanged. It seems like a token difference that has little effect.

See, that's the difficult part.  Random tables being removed seems innocuous. But then would they ever put the brazen strumpet table from 1e DMG into a current product?  It's not the "but this isn't a big deal," that's the problem. It's the "we don't care enough about this content we thought was important enough to originally include that someone who doesn't even play the game complained about so now we have to react to their baseless complaint" that's that problem.

We have seen that in *every* case where someone refused to kowtow to baseless complaints, the complainers silently slink away. When they respond, it only emboldens the complainers.

Quote from: Jaeger on December 25, 2021, 05:07:23 PM
And its not just been Dr. Who. Nobody watches the new Trek shows, and Star Wars is in the dog house...

There is a tipping point. We have seen the mass fan-exodus from superhero comics and once beloved sci-fi properties for tv and movies.

RPG's are not immune.

No, they are not, but I think the example of Star Wars only being in the dog house instead of dead is worth noting, because it's been able to regain some semblance of life almost entirely due to the decidedly unwoke "Filoni-verse" releases of The Mandalorian, the final season of The Clone Wars/The Bad Batch and hype for the upcoming Book of Boba Fett.

Where I find this illustrative for RPGs going forward is that if a popular brand turns away from wokeness it CAN recover. Fans WANT to forgive their favorites. If Hasbro canned the entire current D&D staff and brought in some genuine talent who cared about creating entertaining games instead of woke ideology, it would sail through the next decade as the undisputed champion.

Worth noting though is that Filioni was an insider and Lucas protoge with a passion for classic Star Wars who managed to subvert the wokeness from the inside until he could demonstrably prove his path of focus on solid storytelling was the best path forward. He wasn't a random outsider with an idea of how to fix things; he was someone inside who got the attention of the higher ups by his success.

I don't know that such a person even exists in modern WoTC and an organization of woke sychophants is never going to be in a position to push a different way forward. In which case the crash-and-burn after the tipping point is inevitable and, best case for D&D, it lies fallow for a decade+ like Dr. Who did until someone in Hasbro hits upon a revival product that may or may not re-ignite the spark.

Roleplaying will survive in some fashion regardless. The hobby is not the industry as someone upthread noted... but we may be about to see the "What if WotC never bought TSR?" play out in a rpg environment where the D&D brand exists only as a historical rather than a currently supported system.

"Genuine talent who cared about creating entertaining games"

This exists outside of WOTC, right now.  It's in the OSR.

"The hobby is not the industry."

Correct.

I do love how apparently NOBODY is buying Strixhaven. Definitely warms the cockles of my old heart.

Quote from: 3catcircus on December 25, 2021, 05:23:52 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 23, 2021, 10:01:38 PM

Quote from: 3catcircus on December 23, 2021, 08:19:43 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 22, 2021, 01:52:22 PM
I was speaking about the potential effect on my gaming of two specific cases: (a) the paragraphs cut from Volo's in 5e, and (b) the renaming and removing from core rules of demons and devils in 2e compared to 1e.

Lemme ask a simple question.  What is in the 5e Volo's book that wasn't in previous works? Is there something that is only in the 5e book that is new being removed?

Technically it is unique text, but it doesn't look to have any unique information that can't be inferred from other material. For example, in Volo's Guide there are 7 and a half pages of material on the Yuan-ti that are left unchanged - including description of their culture, history, worship, etc. - all about how emotionless and evil they are. Then there are is a third of a page about how to role-play an individual Yuan-ti that were cut - followed by a page with tables of random personality traits that are unchanged. It seems like a token difference that has little effect.

See, that's the difficult part.  Random tables being removed seems innocuous. But then would they ever put the brazen strumpet table from 1e DMG into a current product?  It's not the "but this isn't a big deal," that's the problem. It's the "we don't care enough about this content we thought was important enough to originally include that someone who doesn't even play the game complained about so now we have to react to their baseless complaint" that's that problem.

We have seen that in *every* case where someone refused to kowtow to baseless complaints, the complainers silently slink away. When they respond, it only emboldens the complainers.

Amusingly enough, Game of Thrones featured harlots and procurers. It's not like there weren't Brazen Strumpets in real life and in fiction. I imagine Gary included them because sex workers are part of the city scene, and can feature in city adventures not just in the purile "hehe whores" way, but as NPCs who may know things due to their illicit occupation.

But we have this "progressive" ban-everything problematic attitude over at WOTC that literally wants to take all the fun out, and sanitize the product. It's not that D&D needs a strumpet table to be able to play, it's that, as we all know by now, D&D has to conform to the sensibilities of a sub-subset of people in the hobby. Activist "progressives" who find everything problematic.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 26, 2021, 11:38:11 AM
If Hasbro canned the entire current D&D staff and brought in some genuine talent who cared about creating entertaining games instead of woke ideology, it would sail through the next decade as the undisputed champion.

If this was in the cards, it would have happened already. Hasbro wants to profit from growing D&D The Lifestyle Brand. The game is but one aspect of that, and a troublesome aspect because it's played by deplorables.

I don't think they deserve our trust anymore. Besides there are many alternatives that never went to bed with the SJWs in the first place. Are we supposed to dump the Green List companies if Hasbro decides they want our money after all? I would rather see any/all of the Green List games eat Hasbro's lunch.

"'There isn't any such thing as bad publicity,' or, to express the same idea in reverse, 'all publicity is good publicity'" - anon

"It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." - Sir Oscar Wilde

Stop. Talking. About. Fifth edition D&D. You're only feeding the monster you hate. You are driving internet traffic via the forum & thread tags. People come to this site based on random internet searches about the Beast.

Just let it go.

If this site discussed everything except the Beast even making any discussion of the Beast prohibited it would diminish its power. When you stop talking about a thing IT.FUCKING.VANISHES.

I'm a veteran of the U.S. Marines and I've of course dug into USMC history. Ever heard of the late Major General Smedley Butler? Maybe  not because the mainstream media ignores his existence. Why? Because of the "Business Plot". You can research this attempted coup of the U.S. government by wealthy elites spoiled by Butler online. The man is one of the greatest heroes in U.S. history. He saved Americans of his age from the kind of Plutocratic government we find ourselves under today.

Not a chirp. No statue. No day in his honor. Why? Because any mainstream conversation of him has been prohibited. The media just doesn't talk about him. Which is how you shut-down WotC. Just ignore 5e. I mean even calling it D&D is wrong because Gary said it wasn't D&D:

"However, in regards to the new D&D one, I believe that there is a question of "legs" for many new players, because as things stand the game allows too rapid level increase."

"There is no relationship between 3E and original D&D, or OAD&D for that matter. Different games, style, and spirit"

"IMO there has been a vast shift in game focus in 3E. The archetype has gone by the board, comic book-like feats are a feature, the whole purpose of play is set on killing things, and power gaming is encouraged. Long-term play is not facilitated by the new game. However, all that seems to be acceptable, as so many of the RPG players like it."

"The main differences in the older works I did and 3E are style of writing, reliance on archetypes, limitatations on character advancement, availability of and creation of magic items, and general single-class play for human characters."

"Yes, I played [D&D third edition] for about 20 sessions in the test of Ernie and Luke Gygax's module THE LOST CITY OF GAXMOOR. I enjoyed the gaming but not the rules."

" I believe that the D20 and OGL were gross errors of business judgement, highly detrimental to the underlying game system they opened up ... In my estimation WotC was the sucker, and by doing what they did they didn't give the D&D game fans an even break...not to mention the harm it did to their company and the D&D mark."

Stop talking about 5e or 4e or Pathfinder or 3.5 or 3e like that's D&D. It simply isn't. What D&D was is now firmly in the hands of the OSR. THAT is what we should be talking about when we type "D&D".

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 26, 2021, 11:38:11 AM
No, they are not, but I think the example of Star Wars only being in the dog house instead of dead is worth noting, because it's been able to regain some semblance of life almost entirely due to the decidedly unwoke "Filoni-verse" releases of The Mandalorian, the final season of The Clone Wars/The Bad Batch and hype for the upcoming Book of Boba Fett.

Where I find this illustrative for RPGs going forward is that if a popular brand turns away from wokeness it CAN recover. Fans WANT to forgive their favorites.

True - we have seen this effect once with 4e. Where all the WotC fans instantly forgot how they were treated once 5e was released. It is noteworthy that mass firings did occur to put Mearls in charge though.

Still, In my opinion the Bar for WotC "getting their act together" post 4e was very low.

Baizuo had taken the design shortcut with Pathfinder in just layering their employee's house rules on top of the OGL. They fixed none of the underlying issues with the 3.x system.

And 3.5 was already getting rather unwieldly under WotC... And despite the merits it did have, 4e was reviled.

Enter "D&D Next" a.k.a. 5E:  "Saving" D&D players from two unwieldly systems in one stroke...

5e was "good enough" that people could squint real hard to see the game they wanted to see, and it said D&D on the cover.

Cue success: 5e was doing well, and then the whole pop-culture thing with D&D happened...

SW still has an incredible uphill battle though even with Faverau and Fillioni doing their thing - The Devil Maus has shed a ton of fanbase already who are not even watching the new shows.

They will have to score with a big hit that effectively retconns the last few films before SW can truly start to recover.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 26, 2021, 11:38:11 AM
If Hasbro canned the entire current D&D staff and brought in some genuine talent who cared about creating entertaining games instead of woke ideology, it would sail through the next decade as the undisputed champion.

Worth noting though is that Filioni was an insider and Lucas protoge with a passion for classic Star Wars who managed to subvert the wokeness from the inside until he could demonstrably prove his path of focus on solid storytelling was the best path forward. He wasn't a random outsider with an idea of how to fix things; he was someone inside who got the attention of the higher ups by his success.

IMHO - The problem for WotC is that they are completely converged at this point.

The RPG industry was always rather incestuous. And it is clear that no one is getting hired by WotC for D&D unless they pass the purity test.

Even if the current D&D devs are purged - the replacement pool is a very deep SJW bench.

So this:

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 26, 2021, 11:38:11 AM
I don't know that such a person even exists in modern WoTC and an organization of woke sychophants is never going to be in a position to push a different way forward. In which case the crash-and-burn after the tipping point is inevitable and, best case for D&D, it lies fallow for a decade+ like Dr. Who did until someone in Hasbro hits upon a revival product that may or may not re-ignite the spark.
...
Roleplaying will survive in some fashion regardless. The hobby is not the industry as someone upthread noted... but we may be about to see the "What if WotC never bought TSR?" play out in a rpg environment where the D&D brand exists only as a historical rather than a currently supported system.

In my opinion - A contender will step up. But...

Making an objectively better competitive product is not enough to effectively challenge the first movers when faced with the fact that First mover status in RPG hobby is HUGE. And Established RPG IP fans are very long-suffering.

The First mover has to make a huge mistake that alienates the fanbase, or be incompetent enough, long enough, for you to take a big enough chunk out of their market share, (preferably both at the same time) so that the network effect for your game is built up to the point that it is literally not worth the effort of the old IP's players to switch back.

That is a tall fucking order. Especially considering that in the current RPG market that means releasing 4-6 supplements per year. On top of having a Character app, and having your supplements ready to go for virtual table tops.

D&D just crashing, with no game immediately taking its place, and the rest of the RPG hobby just continuing to trundle along with their narrow slice of players is a viable outcome to WotC's woke madness. For a while...

But even in the "What if WotC never bought TSR?" scenario, somebody will eventually make a game that will fill that gap. Things will just take longer and "the industry" will get a much bigger shake-up.

Quote from: S'mon on December 26, 2021, 03:40:23 PM
I do love how apparently NOBODY is buying Strixhaven. Definitely warms the cockles of my old heart.

If so, then it shows that catering to the segment of the player base that showed great enthusiasm to be able to play in a faux potterverse and making a hardcover release just for them is a very different thing from selling it to the D&D GM's that actually run the games...

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
"'There isn't any such thing as bad publicity,' or, to express the same idea in reverse, 'all publicity is good publicity'"[/b] - anon

Empirically untrue.

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
...
If this site discussed everything except the Beast even making any discussion of the Beast prohibited it would diminish its power. When you stop talking about a thing IT.FUCKING.VANISHES.
...
Not a chirp. No statue. No day in his honor. Why? Because any mainstream conversation of him has been prohibited. The media just doesn't talk about him. Which is how you shut-down WotC. Just ignore 5e.

In my opinion, your underlying assumptions are incorrect.

We are not the mainstream - we are the resistance.

If we stop 'talking about it' and stop continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; it does not vanish.

It cedes complete control of the narrative to WotC and their market leader bullhorn.

Because they will never stop talking about themselves or telling all with ears to hear how everything that they are doing is right and correct.

Dissenting viewpoints are important.

And they are more powerful than ever when the internet that makes it very hard for them to be permanently silenced.

It's important to never let them feel unopposed.

Given WotC's status and size in the hobby, and the tens of millions of dollars put behind them, no one currently working on 5e D&D should even have a clue that Pundit or the RPGsite even exist.

But they all do. Every man jack of them. The other big RPG forums with large memberships filled with head in the sand normies and SJW's. They know. They all know.

It irks them. It vexes them. And that is Good.

They are trying to do exactly what you are saying; not mention Pundit and the RPGsite out of existence.

And it is obviously not working.

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
I mean even calling it D&D is wrong because Gary said it wasn't D&D:
...
" I believe that the D20 and OGL were gross errors of business judgement, highly detrimental to the underlying game system they opened up ... In my estimation WotC was the sucker, and by doing what they did they didn't give the D&D game fans an even break...not to mention the harm it did to their company and the D&D mark."

Gary is entitled to his opinions. And in spite of his business failings he did have a singular vision of what D&D should be. Which I believe on the whole was a good thing.

But he could not escape his business failings. He blew it.

And his opinion on the OGL is just flat out wrong.

The OGL is what has allowed WotC to leverage D&D's market leader position to have the D&D/d20 system as the preeminent RPG, sucking all the air out of the room for everyone else.

One need only look at the number of gaming companies taking in house games and making them '5e compatible', in order to cash in on sales that their house systems could not hope to gain.

Ryan Dancey's OGL idea was a brilliant move. Once WotC has done something resembling getting their act together we now see the effect it is having on the hobby.

It has helped take D&D from being the 800lb. Gorilla in the hobby, to the 80,000lb King Kong of RPG land.

Never has D&D been so dominant.

IMHO when he was alive and in control of TSR, G. Gygax could only have wished he thought of the d20 and the OGL ideas first.

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
I'm a veteran of the U.S. Marines and I've of course dug into USMC history. Ever heard of the late Major General Smedley Butler? Maybe  not because the mainstream media ignores his existence. Why? Because of the "Business Plot". You can research this attempted coup of the U.S. government by wealthy elites spoiled by Butler online. The man is one of the greatest heroes in U.S. history. He saved Americans of his age from the kind of Plutocratic government we find ourselves under today.

PLEASE start a post about Smedly Butler in Pundy's forum.
Love to hear more.

From a business perspective:
The D20 License was genius.
The OGL was idiocy.

Why?

D20 License allowed everybody to play in the D&D IP sandbox, but there was a hard deadline and defined rules for usage. AKA, WotC stayed in control of their own product.

OGL ended their control, created dangerous competitors and never can be pulled, so the competitors are empowered to keep nipping at their heels forever.

Of course, that's from a BUSINESS perspective. From a hobbyist perspective, the OGL is the greatest gift as its allowed us to have the OSR and now the OSR 2.0 where nobody even gives a shit about the OGL anymore.

Except for the name, D&D is entirely in the hands of the hobby.

And I don't believe the name is strong as people believe.
My proof? Look how competitors to D&D using slightly modified D&D rules have "gone big" over the decades - from Palladium in the 80s to Pathfinder in the 00s.

Quote from: Jaeger on December 26, 2021, 08:06:45 PM

Quote from: S'mon on December 26, 2021, 03:40:23 PM
I do love how apparently NOBODY is buying Strixhaven. Definitely warms the cockles of my old heart.

If so, then it shows that catering to the segment of the player base that showed great enthusiasm to be able to play in a faux potterverse and making a hardcover release just for them is a very different thing from selling it to the D&D GM's that actually run the games...

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
"'There isn't any such thing as bad publicity,' or, to express the same idea in reverse, 'all publicity is good publicity'"[/b] - anon

Empirically untrue.

Quote from: Theory of Games on December 26, 2021, 04:43:00 PM
...
If this site discussed everything except the Beast even making any discussion of the Beast prohibited it would diminish its power. When you stop talking about a thing IT.FUCKING.VANISHES.
...
Not a chirp. No statue. No day in his honor. Why? Because any mainstream conversation of him has been prohibited. The media just doesn't talk about him. Which is how you shut-down WotC. Just ignore 5e.

In my opinion, your underlying assumptions are incorrect.

We are not the mainstream - we are the resistance.

If we stop 'talking about it' and stop continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; it does not vanish.

It cedes complete control of the narrative to WotC and their market leader bullhorn.

Because they will never stop talking about themselves or telling all with ears to hear how everything that they are doing is right and correct.

Dissenting viewpoints are important.

And they are more powerful than ever when the internet that makes it very hard for them to be permanently silenced.

It's important to never let them feel unopposed.

Given WotC's status and size in the hobby, and the tens of millions of dollars put behind them, no one currently working on 5e D&D should even have a clue that Pundit or the RPGsite even exist.

But they all do. Every man jack of them. The other big RPG forums with large memberships filled with head in the sand normies and SJW's. They know. They all know.

It irks them. It vexes them. And that is Good.

They are trying to do exactly what you are saying; not mention Pundit and the RPGsite out of existence.

And it is obviously not working.

I agree. A refrain I often hear is that when someone leaves "the cult", their exit is usuall towards people discussing the issues. They find a sympathetic ear and a place where they don't feel alone and isolated.