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@chaosos59
Introduction
Hi, I'm ChaosOS. I'm a TTRPG GM, player, and author. I'm an Eberron superfan but enjoy a large variety of systems and worlds. You can find my writing on my substack and my carrd.
TTRPG design thoughts from Joseph Meehan. Click to read Analyzing Arcana, by Joseph Meehan, a Substack publication. Launched 4 months ago.
When a typeface you've banned for use on middle school science projects follows you lightyears away to an alien planet 🤦🏼♂️
Papyrus comes for us all, in the end.
i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3
Average Deep Space Nine A plot: "What are you willing to sacrifice for the chance at a better world? Who are you willing to hurt? Will the pain you cause now outweigh the peace that it might bring? When both choices are bad, and you do what you think is best, can you live with yourself after? Could you live with yourself if you made the opposite choice?"
Average Deep Space Nine B plot: "What do we do with all this hot sauce!?"
leave your laundry on the floor for them
idk anything about this but I love it
If any competition needed to be on Tumblr, it's this one.
Every time you think it's a given, that there's NO WAY that Red or Yellow could catch up to the other one given the lead, you are wrong. Right down to the wire.
@important-animal-images
Pokémon evolutions
How much for this 6.5 lb wailing vampire? She’s fully grown and full of opinions.
Ghastly wailing vampire screeching her way onto the market for a full 24 scary dollars!
i love that we and cats share pareidolia (seeing patterns where they dont exist), but instead of seeing faces in everyday objects like us, they see snakes
that computer cord? snake. string? small snake. cucumber? short fat straight snake
snake pareidolia is one of the strongest things in human minds too! people report freezing mid-stride before being consciously aware of a snake in front of them, and the same happens with coiled rope, etc. in humans and other primates. it’s even been proposed that the need to detect snakes was a factor in the development of primates’ insanely good color eyesight
It’s because snakes are wonderful and we must stop and admire them at any cost
Well, taking it all into consideration, what's your favorite version of D&D? Despite its complexity + "30 minutes of fun inside 3 hours", I still really like 3.5e (& Pathfinder 1e)
Probably a toss-up between post-Monster Manual 3, pre-Essentials 4E and Rules Cyclopedia era BD&D. I admire their purity of vision; I likely wouldn't make many of the same decisions myself if I had the task of designing an edition of D&D, but they know exactly what kind of games they want to be.
(Raise your hand if, knowing what you know of my work, these answers are in any way surprising!)
If you don't mind answering, what did Monster Manual 3 make better and Essentials make worse, such that the inbetween-time was the peak of 4E goodness?
4E as initially published committed the classic game design blunder of tuning its numbers based on the feedback of playtesters who were really, really good at optimising. The most obvious consequence is that pre-Monster Manual 3 monster stat blocks are overtuned in a way that gives fights with elites and solos an unpleasantly high whiff factor and makes encounters take about 50% longer than intended when tackled by a more typically optimised group. MM3 rejigs some of the math to fix that.
As for Essentials, it has a few good ideas, but I feel like the game starts to lose some of its focus after that point, for reasons that largely boil down to Mike "I lowball dragon CRs on purpose because I believe that tricking novice GMs into unintentionally TPKing their players provides a positive learning experience" Mearls being a fucking hack.
When there's a very obvious bloodstain in the hardwood kitchen floor, but the house is 30k under expected price
I feel like the picture is necessary to understand just how not subtle this is.
it's fine
I’d like to point out that the colour red has more positive than negative meanings.
The most important person in Starfleet history.
Wait, so...Why DID 4E underperform? Or is that outside your expertise here? (No shame if so, you're a game designer, not a market analyst. You can tell by the having a soul).
(With reference to this post here.)
There were a couple of major factors in play there.
First, a big chunk of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition's popularity had come about due to robust third-party support, published under the auspices of Open Game License (OGL). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, however, was not licensed under the OGL, being subject to a much more restrictive license imaginatively titled the Game System License, or GSL. Hasbro reportedly refused to negotiate with existing third-party publishers to get them on board with the GSL, or to offer transition support of any kind; instead, they simply demanded an immediate halt to the publication of all 3E material, and attempted to bludgeon publishers into compliance by threatening to yank their trademark authorisations (i.e., the agreements which allowed them to put the "D&D compatible" logo on the covers of their books).
Predictably, this approach was not well received. The largest of 3E's third-party supporters, Paizo Publishing (now Paizo Inc.), elected to produce their own game which was statblock-compatible with 3E in order to provide a venue for other publishers to continue producing OGL material; many of their peers decided to gamble on Paizo's plan rather than play ball with Hasbro, and this is how we got Pathfinder. Hasbro's behaviour thus caused D&D's third-party support to crater nearly to zero with the publication of 4E and created D&D's largest competitor.
Second, 4E was badly behind the curve on digital availability. Shortly before 4E was scheduled to drop, the digital masters (i.e., the files provided to printers in order to manufacture the books) were leaked on file sharing networks. Hasbro responded by panicking and ordering an immediate and indefinite halt to e-book publication of D&D material (in spite of the fact that the leak had demonstrably originated from their print production arm rather than their e-publishing arm), even going so far as to refuse to honour pre-orders for 4E's now cancelled e-book version.
Combined with a series of mismanagement-induced delays which caused 4E's virtual tabletop tools to miss the game's publication date entirely, and a decision to paywall what few first-party resources did manage to hit their target behind a monthly subscription, this resulted in 4E being available exclusively in print for the first two full years of its lifespan, at a time when D&D's competitors – including the aforementioned Pathfinder – were literally giving their core rules away in digital form for free.
As you say, I'm no market analyst, but I have a strong suspicion that "alienating practically all third-party publishers for a game line which was critically dependent on robust third-party support", "being the first edition of the game ever to face significant direct competition", and "making a game which dropped in the middle of the worst economic recession in thirty years available exclusively as an expensive printed set" resulted in the 4E stepping up to the plate with three strikes already against it. Add to that the almost comical ineptitude of Hasbro's advertising for 4E, and the usual drama of any major edition turnover, and... well.
"But what about the rules" sure, there were some issues with 4E's mechanics, but you need to understand that "4E underperformed because people hated the rules" isn't just a convenient narrative for edition-warring grognards; it's also a fiction which Hasbro itself has tacitly embraced, because the alternative is acknowledging that their publishing department repeatedly shit the bed on 4E's rollout.
@crashional-thinker replied:
this kind of thing sounds like something that would kill d&d as a franchise entirely with how badly hasbro fumbled it, so i'm surprised to see 5e not only still kicking, but also still the primary force to the point that people will say "homebrew 5e" for anything. what's up with that?
"Commercially underperformed" doesn't mean "failed". Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition was still the single best-selling tabletop RPG on the market every year of its lifespan. The idea that nobody bought it at all is another of those edition-warrior myths.
emilio please im not sure how catering would help this situation
emilio please im not sure how catering would help this situation
@featherandstorm
