Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 31, 2022, 08:42:15 PM
No, when I buy a RPG book I own it, I don't need to keep paying to play the game.

Games as a Service require you to keep on paying if you wish to keep on playing.

You're being disingenuous or dense. Or at least asserting that Games as a Service only has one possible manifestation and are railing against your own strawman. At this point, any of the above could be true.

GAAS could just as easily be focused on the support architecture for a game experience. Sell an irrevocable app or book and then sell support software, digital environments, the whole 9 yards with the expectation that updates would come regularly and as part of whatever mechanism that services paid for.

One could make the strong argument that we have several examples of GAAS that go back to the beginning of what could be thought of as the tabletop gaming industry. Miniature wargaming very much functions on that kind of a model, with the service being the production and maintenance of miniatures and officially recognized mechanical updates on a regular basis.

Can you continue playing third edition Warhammer? Absolutely. All day long and twice on Sunday. Are you going to get into any officially sponsored and sanctioned tournaments or in other ways engage with the current echo system of the IP? Definitely not; they're interested in advancing the service and providing the service.

"Pay to play" is how you have an industry and not just a bunch of people who get together and wave things at each other.

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"exclusionary choices"... Care to point exactly what those are and who am I excluding?

At any point have you been anything other than utterly dismissive of the underlying concept of GAAS? Or the people who want to talk about it in good faith? Or even the people who want to criticize Wizards in good faith while speculating about how they could do it better and not just focusing on how they're fucking it up?

No. The answer is no.

You're not interested in having a discussion, you want to take a big crap over anything and everything that isn't exactly the One True Way you think something exists.

That's your prerogative but I am not compelled to not point it out.

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No, never mind, since you just lost all respect or good will by resorting to calling me names:

"Reactionary Asshole"

Listen doorknob, to be a reactionary you need to be part of the status quo, I'm not, WotC IS, therefore I'm clearly a revolutionary and you're a bellend that needs to go fuck himself.

Don't like it, don't be it. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and you're not playing Glorantha...

I will point out that you just declared, publicly, that while you are tenaciously and rapidly holding onto the most possible conservative position (not in the political sense but in the technical sense), that nothing in the industry should change, that a new concept must inevitably fail, and that unless it's done to your satisfaction in accordance with what has gone before you will say not a single positive word about any concept, and maintaining that Wizards, for whom the main complaint that pretty much all of us here have is that they are changing in bad ways, in ways which are unhealthy for both their audience and the industry – that you're not part of the status quo and Wizards is.

You do realize that's stupid, right? I feel like the necessity of asking the question begs the question, but that's definitional.

Perhaps I was wrong and you really don't have a point under all that. I'd say that's a terrible shame.

Quote from: Omega on August 31, 2022, 08:48:41 PM
At the end of this post is a vid showing off a session run in TTS and it has certainly come a fair distance. Looks to still lack one or two features I'd like to see. But for running a straightup VTT D&D RPG session it looks pretty good. I'd more likely use it with a flat map and counters. But the 3d side seems to be moving ahead.

One of the interesting things about TTS is that you absolutely can use it with a flat map and counters. It's not even hard. The mechanisms for doing so are literally as easy as loading up a flat plane with the JPEG that you've drawn up for your map and loading up counters with smaller JPEGs that you've drawn up for your counters, and telling them how thick they should be – and then you literally just push them around on the map just like you would on the tabletop.

Not a lot of people play their TTRPGs that way because there is a certain cachet and coolness to having 3D models, lighting models, and the whole 9 yards, just like a lot of people like to have as many fiddly minis on the table as they possibly can even while playing an RPG which is focused in the theater of the mind.

But you don't have to.

Look at the number of boardgames which are available in Tabletop Simulator which effectively have flat boards and chits. Hugely popular.

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As for tech and a dislike of. Personally I think it is more a dislike of the wrong tech or in some cases tech for just tech's sake. Which for many can be a huge turn off. We see this in the board gaming biz fairly often. And there is hard hard hard resistance to any board game that relies totally on an app to run for example because apps can end up being pulled and tech advances may make them no longer playable. And then you have a paperweight.

And other people just do not want to be chained to a monitor or a phone just to play a damn game. There is always going to be differing thresholds of what someone will accept and what they will not. I will never buy a game that is app dependent. I will be very reluctant to use a computer at the table. But. I am fine with using computers for VTT because it allows me to game with friends far and wide.

A lot of people are afraid of distraction, and that's a legitimate. Being in a digital environment provides different pressures for the experience for everyone at the table. Is it meaningfully different than the chance that the cat will walk in and everyone goes off rails giving it some pets? That the pizza arrives? That people are getting texts from their girlfriend?

The individual qualities differ but the overall concern is both valid but probably unnecessary.

Concerns about access and availability are legitimate when it comes to digital domain game tools. But it's not like we haven't had concerns about access and availability of books, whether you just built an entire glass of orange Fanta across the table onto the Players' Guide or the new supplement you can't afford yet drops a big upgrade to your favorite class.

Personally, I am interested in games which are tech-enhanced. That is to say, I can run everything out of the book if I want to – but an online tool makes it easier and faster and/or more convenient for me to focus on the parts of the game that I enjoy and less on the parts of the game that I find a little tedious or just annoying overhead.

I think you're going to see a lot more of that as we go forward because it saves so much trouble and is obviously useful without being absolutely required. Give me the choice between buying another (ANOTHER!) new different variant set of dice or loading an app on my cell phone? I'm taking the app. Every time, now. And if they don't have an app, I'm building a website which rolls those dice and makes them pretty for me.

The virtual tabletop is just an extension of that concept. It doesn't replace the game, it extends the game. It expands the game in the experience you can have with the game. If your VTT comes with a cool little doohickey that allows you to track things in game that you can't necessarily do with something on your real table – you'll use it. Because it's right there and it's convenient and it provides you something you wouldn't otherwise have.

Just like the other players at the VTT; something convenient and that you wouldn't otherwise have.

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But we keep coming back to the problem with WOTC that we are seeing with other venues. That the VTT can go sour if they go woke. What is a VTT made by or for WOTC going to be like? Yeahhhh. No thanks.

But, having had this discussion, we can look at this problem in a more useful way:

Is it the technology that's a problem? No, not really. It's the fact that we don't trust Wizards to provide the service that we would like to enjoy. As producers, they have burned the trust from us as a community and as an audience, and most importantly as a market, so we aren't willing to give them the power to screw us.

Could Wizards make something awesome? Certainly! They have a ton of money, they can hire great artists, they can even hire a few decent programmers. I don't think that any of us doubt that they could manage to create a technically appropriate environment and tool.

We don't trust them to manage it. We don't trust them as community arbiters. We don't trust them to have control over whether we can play with what we pay for in ways that we expect to be able to.

Put that way, it's clear that the problem is not with the technology or even the expectations of the technology – it's with the expectation of Wizards as an organizational entity and as an agent of trust.

We don't trust them. And they aren't signaling any reasons that we should; on the contrary, they are signaling as hard as they can that we cannot trust them and should not trust.

That's the real problem. It's their problem.

That might not turn out to be important in the scale of the market that they cater to. It's quite possible that they can make an absolute butt load of money while engaging in practices that we find organizationally questionable.

And that will go chugging right along right up until it can't, when someone like Critical Role or other corporately recognized signal figure does something that they don't like and gets deplatformed for violating the latest update to the Woke liturgy. And then the schisms will begin.

In the meantime, the rest of us will be playing games that we like using tools that we enjoy with people we want to spend time with and having a great experience, and we can laugh as their architecture comes tumbling down.

I'm cool with that.

Quote from: Batjon on August 20, 2022, 03:00:39 AM
The mental patients have taken over the insane asylum.

Quite literally true.

At 1:00 into the one D&D world reveal trailer Perkins goes on about how with 5e "They did a smart thing."  by creating a "stable, well loved" version of the game."

There was no "They".

There was Mearls. (Not that he was any great champion of D&D's legacy...)

From info dropped on other forums, along with things Pundit has mentioned - he had to fight his own Dev team to get 5e as simple as it was. Perkins and crew wanted to make a more complicated game. A different game...

So now Mearls got bounced, and the cool kids have their shot.

Except that because of 5e's big success the opportunity that they have inherited is a bit of a poisoned pill.

They have to ride the line between what they really want to do with the game, and what 5e fans will tolerate. And there is also the question of the consistently declining quality of their releases...

The 50th release will give 5e a boot at the time, but I think that they will be unable to help themselves going forward, and we will see another Dr. Who situation play out in real time.

Quote from: Jaeger on August 31, 2022, 09:19:43 PM
From info dropped on other forums, along with things Pundit has mentioned - he had to fight his own Dev team to get 5e as simple as it was. Perkins and crew wanted to make a more complicated game. A different game...

You know – the funny thing is that I actually believe that a more complicated, different game could have been a perfectly viable D&D edition. It wouldn't be the first time and it probably won't be the last, and it's not like we don't know that "system mastery" is a thing that a lot of D&D players enjoy displaying in a social context.

Is that what the market wants right now? For D&D? I'm not sure even the market knows. It would have to be well educated on their choices and that is something very explicitly being avoided by a lot of the people involved.

So now the mental patients are truly running the asylum, not just filling out the paperwork but deciding where the social outings go. It's probably not going to end well.

Quote from: SquidLord on August 31, 2022, 08:53:55 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 31, 2022, 08:42:15 PM
No, when I buy a RPG book I own it, I don't need to keep paying to play the game.

Games as a Service require you to keep on paying if you wish to keep on playing.

You're being disingenuous or dense. Or at least asserting that Games as a Service only has one possible manifestation and are railing against your own strawman. At this point, any of the above could be true.

GAAS could just as easily be focused on the support architecture for a game experience. Sell an irrevocable app or book and then sell support software, digital environments, the whole 9 yards with the expectation that updates would come regularly and as part of whatever mechanism that services paid for.

One could make the strong argument that we have several examples of GAAS that go back to the beginning of what could be thought of as the tabletop gaming industry. Miniature wargaming very much functions on that kind of a model, with the service being the production and maintenance of miniatures and officially recognized mechanical updates on a regular basis.

Can you continue playing third edition Warhammer? Absolutely. All day long and twice on Sunday. Are you going to get into any officially sponsored and sanctioned tournaments or in other ways engage with the current echo system of the IP? Definitely not; they're interested in advancing the service and providing the service.

"Pay to play" is how you have an industry and not just a bunch of people who get together and wave things at each other.

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"exclusionary choices"... Care to point exactly what those are and who am I excluding?

At any point have you been anything other than utterly dismissive of the underlying concept of GAAS? Or the people who want to talk about it in good faith? Or even the people who want to criticize Wizards in good faith while speculating about how they could do it better and not just focusing on how they're fucking it up?

No. The answer is no.

You're not interested in having a discussion, you want to take a big crap over anything and everything that isn't exactly the One True Way you think something exists.

That's your prerogative but I am not compelled to not point it out.

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No, never mind, since you just lost all respect or good will by resorting to calling me names:

"Reactionary Asshole"

Listen doorknob, to be a reactionary you need to be part of the status quo, I'm not, WotC IS, therefore I'm clearly a revolutionary and you're a bellend that needs to go fuck himself.

Don't like it, don't be it. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and you're not playing Glorantha...

I will point out that you just declared, publicly, that while you are tenaciously and rapidly holding onto the most possible conservative position (not in the political sense but in the technical sense), that nothing in the industry should change, that a new concept must inevitably fail, and that unless it's done to your satisfaction in accordance with what has gone before you will say not a single positive word about any concept, and maintaining that Wizards, for whom the main complaint that pretty much all of us here have is that they are changing in bad ways, in ways which are unhealthy for both their audience and the industry – that you're not part of the status quo and Wizards is.

You do realize that's stupid, right? I feel like the necessity of asking the question begs the question, but that's definitional.

Perhaps I was wrong and you really don't have a point under all that. I'd say that's a terrible shame.

Could be, have you ever seen one? Nope

You're a total doorknob, yes I am dismissive of a practice that has been proven to be anti-consumer, you want to be a cooonsumer? Go ahead, no one can stop you, but your demand that I stop pointing out the serious issues with GAAS is stupid.

Are you seriously this stupid? Yes, I'm totally against anti-consumer practices, so sue me.

As for the rest of your drivel go fuck yourself you bellend.

GAAS are anti-consumer, it's a subscription model where you don't own jack shit and can be banned without getting your money back for wrongthink, it's also (in the case of RPGs) a way to enforce the One True Way and to keep you buying their shit (microtransactions) and to very likely to establish a pay to win mechanic.

Go ahead, give all your money to the corporation, who can stop you? Or me pointing out the obvious pits is causing you cognitive dissonance?

The corporation is not interested in the hobby like the creator is. The corporation in interested in profits, and often short term gains over long term growth to maximize shareholder value. One and done releases are qualitatively preferable to endless shovelware treadmill releases. If the creator only has enough good ideas for one core book and one supplement, then all I want is those 2 books worth of good ideas in a two book package instead of years of weekly filler releases. Goods as a Service is antithetical to ownership and perpetual licenses. Downloadable DRMed and online content stops working when the provider pulls it or folds, but offline DRM-free products work in perpetuity. Public Libraries are are a great resource, but I like owning my own books too, while a commercial library would have no vested interest in letting me buy once when it can milk me every month, possibly on top of an initial fee too.

Quote from: SquidLord on August 31, 2022, 08:40:25 PM
Unless you would like to advocate for the position that a game should be sold as a single book, at a single time, and never thereafter updated or expanded with more content. I would disagree with but respect to that position because at least it's consistent.

It's terrible for creators who, themselves, would like to continue selling you things, making money, sleeping indoors and eating – but that may not be a concern. Maybe it's not.

There's a world of difference between selling supplements, splat books, and modules and selling a subscription. You're making this out as if it's one or the other extreme. Yeah creators gotta eat. They've been doing that for decades. Now we have the 800 pound gorilla incumbent moving to a service model. This is a company whose most recent book of adventures featured "creators" with zero tabletop experience. These are the creators that the service model is gonna feed? Oh those poor people! LMAO More like greed fucking execs need new vacation properties.

Quote from: rytrasmi on August 31, 2022, 10:04:22 PM

Quote from: SquidLord on August 31, 2022, 08:40:25 PM
Unless you would like to advocate for the position that a game should be sold as a single book, at a single time, and never thereafter updated or expanded with more content. I would disagree with but respect to that position because at least it's consistent.

It's terrible for creators who, themselves, would like to continue selling you things, making money, sleeping indoors and eating – but that may not be a concern. Maybe it's not.

There's a world of difference between selling supplements, splat books, and modules and selling a subscription. You're making this out as if it's one or the other extreme. Yeah creators gotta eat. They've been doing that for decades. Now we have the 800 pound gorilla incumbent moving to a service model. This is a company whose most recent book of adventures featured "creators" with zero tabletop experience. These are the creators that the service model is gonna feed? Oh those poor people! LMAO More like greed fucking execs need new vacation properties.

LOL, missed that part.

If the creator wants to keep eating he needs to keep producing shit people want to buy. He can sell it for as much as the market is willing to give him for his stuff.

But we're not talking about the creator, we're talking of a megacorporation (Hasbro) who pays shit to it's writters, and will continue to do so no matter how much imbeciles like squidlord line their pockets.

Just look at AAA videogame publishers, who gets rich? The top dogs, the developers, writters and artists get paid shit. Something that remains true even when the industry is makes way more than all of Hollyweird combined.

So it's a "Won't someone think of the creators!?" argument to shill for the megacorporation that wants to fuck the consumer without lubricant.

"Don't ask questions, just consume our products."

"Nevermind the man behind the curtain."

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 31, 2022, 10:16:15 PM
If the creator wants to keep eating he needs to keep producing shit people want to buy. He can sell it for as much as the market is willing to give him for his stuff.

But we're not talking about the creator, we're talking of a megacorporation (Hasbro) who pays shit to it's writters, and will continue to do so no matter how much imbeciles like squidlord line their pockets.

Just look at AAA videogame publishers, who gets rich? The top dogs, the developers, writters and artists get paid shit. Something that remains true even when the industry is makes way more than all of Hollyweird combined.

So it's a "Won't someone think of the creators!?" argument to shill for the megacorporation that wants to fuck the consumer without lubricant.

Exactly. OneD&D not about creators; it's about mega-corp squeezing every last dime out of their IP and their customers.

Quote from: rytrasmi on August 31, 2022, 10:04:22 PM
There's a world of difference between selling supplements, splat books, and modules and selling a subscription. You're making this out as if it's one or the other extreme. Yeah creators gotta eat. They've been doing that for decades. Now we have the 800 pound gorilla incumbent moving to a service model. This is a company whose most recent book of adventures featured "creators" with zero tabletop experience. These are the creators that the service model is gonna feed? Oh those poor people! LMAO More like greed fucking execs need new vacation properties.

I'm pretty sure I've said on more than one occasion that subscriptions to core books are not the only way that GAAS could function and probably isn't ideal.

But, that said, is a subscription option for supplements, assuming no supplements are going to be coming out anyway and individually priced, such a terrible architecture? What would the subscription price have to be in terms of percentage less than the shelf price of those supplements in order to mitigate the value of the risk a subscriber would take and waiting to buy the supplement itself? How about if the subscription provided early access to given supplement content?

How about a supplement for extra tools of some quality?

I am, pointedly, not the one trying to say it has to be one of the other extreme. I have repeatedly said that there are a multitude of different things that could be done within the architecture, and tried to present a number of options which would at least be interesting. That somebody could make a living with.

As I said in a previous post, the problem is not the idea of GAAS. Not really. The problem is that none of us trust Wizards to provide a service that will be evenhandedly provided so that we get to play games we like in the ways we want and get the value from our money.

I absolutely agree that Wizards has been an absolutely shitty company and betrayed a lot of trust. But that's been true for a very long time. (I'd say starting about the time just after AD&D was released, but I'm a cynic.)

I'm not sure why people can't just handle the idea of Games as a Service and different ways it might be done well from weather Wizards is going to do it well.

There's no question that Wizards is going to do a shit job of it. I'm not sure there's more than two posters who have posted to this forum in the last five years who aren't in agreement that is 87% likely, if not more.

That's already been beaten, the horse has been turned into a bloody smear, and the remnants have been consumed by bacteria. There are only so many times you can Boogaloo on the microscopic traces remaining.

Does it serve any purpose to picket the scab preemptively?

The real agenda of D&D One online is the following:

-Removal of the DM from the game.

-Why?

Think about it, finding a good DM is hard.  The average game in D&D lasts 6 or less sessions and people quit and move on.  What if with your digital tabletop they can offer you your sandbox with other players, who just log in and you can have professionally voice actored DM's like Matt Mercer be your DM for the first Group D&D Module!!! 

Yeah, they are going to do that.  They'll charge you full price for the module, they'll give you a Matt Mercer Voice Actor DM and they will go to great and I do mean great strides to ensure your as the paying customer never die, never have any real threat to your character and its all about babying the party.  The digital tabletop looks nice, but they are going to use it for an AI DM to remove the DM from D&D.  I guarantee you at sometime in D&D 6E, possibly including launch they will put that in as an option.  If WotC removes the DM from play, they can put out whatever they want for indoctrination and the players just have to accept it because that's the game they bought.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on August 31, 2022, 11:07:14 PM
The real agenda of D&D One online is the following:

-Removal of the DM from the game.

-Why?

Think about it, finding a good DM is hard.  The average game in D&D lasts 6 or less sessions and people quit and move on.  What if with your digital tabletop they can offer you your sandbox with other players, who just log in and you can have professionally voice actored DM's like Matt Mercer be your DM for the first Group D&D Module!!! 

Yeah, they are going to do that.  They'll charge you full price for the module, they'll give you a Matt Mercer Voice Actor DM and they will go to great and I do mean great strides to ensure your as the paying customer never die, never have any real threat to your character and its all about babying the party.  The digital tabletop looks nice, but they are going to use it for an AI DM to remove the DM from D&D.  I guarantee you at sometime in D&D 6E, possibly including launch they will put that in as an option.  If WotC removes the DM from play, they can put out whatever they want for indoctrination and the players just have to accept it because that's the game they bought.

It's a shame they won't just ask customers what they want.  That's how a smart company does business.  It's much easier to sell someone what they already want.

WotC has a DM problem.  The DM's want actual content and rules, but WotC can't deliver rules or lore anymore.  If they put any lore out the sensitivity writers they hired tears them to shreds.  So what to do, what to do?  Well they released Spelljammer with as little as humanly possible page content and useful content to a DM, save the module I guess?  IMHO, WotC is going to push for DMless content sooner rather than later and this will be last edition where the DM is considered part of the game.  By the time the transition the younger players gender.... I mean to digital they can drop the DM. 

By dropping the DM, WotC no longer has to write compelling content and world building.  They can put out player centric content and the "forever dm's" can now play as well.  They might even give you an option to overrule Digital Matt Mercer if at least 50.0001% of the group allows it.  It seems like a win win when putting yourself in a leftist thought bubble.  They want to control creative content, what better way than selling a boxed module with a preconceived ending w/o a DM to fix it.

Quote from: SquidLord on August 31, 2022, 11:05:14 PM

Quote from: rytrasmi on August 31, 2022, 10:04:22 PM
There's a world of difference between selling supplements, splat books, and modules and selling a subscription. You're making this out as if it's one or the other extreme. Yeah creators gotta eat. They've been doing that for decades. Now we have the 800 pound gorilla incumbent moving to a service model. This is a company whose most recent book of adventures featured "creators" with zero tabletop experience. These are the creators that the service model is gonna feed? Oh those poor people! LMAO More like greed fucking execs need new vacation properties.

I'm pretty sure I've said on more than one occasion that subscriptions to core books are not the only way that GAAS could function and probably isn't ideal.

But, that said, is a subscription option for supplements, assuming no supplements are going to be coming out anyway and individually priced, such a terrible architecture? What would the subscription price have to be in terms of percentage less than the shelf price of those supplements in order to mitigate the value of the risk a subscriber would take and waiting to buy the supplement itself? How about if the subscription provided early access to given supplement content?

How about a supplement for extra tools of some quality?

I am, pointedly, not the one trying to say it has to be one of the other extreme. I have repeatedly said that there are a multitude of different things that could be done within the architecture, and tried to present a number of options which would at least be interesting. That somebody could make a living with.

As I said in a previous post, the problem is not the idea of GAAS. Not really. The problem is that none of us trust Wizards to provide a service that will be evenhandedly provided so that we get to play games we like in the ways we want and get the value from our money.

I absolutely agree that Wizards has been an absolutely shitty company and betrayed a lot of trust. But that's been true for a very long time. (I'd say starting about the time just after AD&D was released, but I'm a cynic.)

I'm not sure why people can't just handle the idea of Games as a Service and different ways it might be done well from weather Wizards is going to do it well.

There's no question that Wizards is going to do a shit job of it. I'm not sure there's more than two posters who have posted to this forum in the last five years who aren't in agreement that is 87% likely, if not more.

That's already been beaten, the horse has been turned into a bloody smear, and the remnants have been consumed by bacteria. There are only so many times you can Boogaloo on the microscopic traces remaining.

Does it serve any purpose to picket the scab preemptively?

Shills gonna shill.