Is there a rpg gaming company that has been succeeding hand-over-fist for more than 5 years? What is the secret of their success? How do they balance content releases?
Catalyst (basically FASA reborn, with the Shadowrun and Battletech licenses) is doing pretty well, and they even had an embezzlement scandal recently. They stagger content releases every couple of months, but they are also pretty heavy on the digital distribution angle and have a pretty loyal fanbase. Steve Jackson Games isn't in danger of closing any time soon, but they have so much merch (Card Games, Board Games, RPGs, sourcebooks, a lot of classic reprints, etc.).
Do they even attempt the scale of DnD's distribution? (Should DnD be persisting with such wide distribution?) I have never those products outside of a comic book/gaming shop... and DnD is in many bookstores.
I love how 3.5/PF guys are like "no fourth ed discouraged role playing because the combat system was well thought out and didn't suck." if you want your players to do cool shit then set up combat situations that encourage it. Chandeliers, crumbly walls, fire places. Its not rocket science in the first adventure I ran the players snuck up to the guard wall and stuffed the peep holes with their bedrolls for that I granted them a surprise round (it was a total player inititive i disnt plan it at all). There were torches that were letting off blinding smoke that have the enemies a +5 concealment and that got reduced by -1 for every torch thu put out (which was a free action). There was a swinging rope bridge. In my most recent adventure there are holes in the floor that allow the players to take a dungeonering check to "teleport" around the battle field. They used these to take over a ground mounted repeating heavy crossbow from the enemy and then mowe down hoards of minions. Except for the dude who failed his check and ended up in a room full I bones which he thought was the dragons lair but turned out to be a Peryton lair (to the deligt of the old school gamer in our group). They were almost drawn into a swamp by ghost lights. The list goes on and on. I run fourth ed. We do 1-2 combats per session. The rest is exp I dish out for them solving non combat encounters. Pathfinder has no mechanics that encourage any of the above things. Well no that's unfair they do but 4th ed has just as many. I just think that these complaints are so invalid. Maybe you guys just play with snoozers. It's okay I've played with snoozers before too they'll ruin any system.
Is there a rpg gaming company that has been succeeding hand-over-fist for more than 5 years? What is the secret of their success? How do they balance content releases?
Catalyst (basically FASA reborn, with the Shadowrun and Battletech licenses) is doing pretty well, and they even had an embezzlement scandal recently. They stagger content releases every couple of months, but they are also pretty heavy on the digital distribution angle and have a pretty loyal fanbase. Steve Jackson Games isn't in danger of closing any time soon, but they have so much merch (Card Games, Board Games, RPGs, sourcebooks, a lot of classic reprints, etc.).
Do they even attempt the scale of DnD's distribution? (Should DnD be persisting with such wide distribution?) I have never those products outside of a comic book/gaming shop... and DnD is in many bookstores.
I love catalyst dearly but there's a big gulf between "successful hand over fist" and "can barely pay our freelancers but at least we're not actively on fire."
Is there a rpg gaming company that has been succeeding hand-over-fist for more than 5 years? What is the secret of their success? How do they balance content releases?
Catalyst (basically FASA reborn, with the Shadowrun and Battletech licenses) is doing pretty well, and they even had an embezzlement scandal recently. They stagger content releases every couple of months, but they are also pretty heavy on the digital distribution angle and have a pretty loyal fanbase. Steve Jackson Games isn't in danger of closing any time soon, but they have so much merch (Card Games, Board Games, RPGs, sourcebooks, a lot of classic reprints, etc.).
Do they even attempt the scale of DnD's distribution? (Should DnD be persisting with such wide distribution?) I have never those products outside of a comic book/gaming shop... and DnD is in many bookstores.
The only other books aside from DnD that I see on retailers shelves (big ones, not mom and pop stores) are Catalyst (Shadowrun and Battletech) and White Wolf. There might be a few more that I'm overlooking, but it's not all just DnD. They aren't as big as DnD, but they are on the shelves side-by-side with DnD (unlike, say, Castle Falkenstein or One Roll Engine, two of my favorite systems). Munchkin (and other Steve Jackson non-RPG games) seems to sell pretty well, and can generally be found at Barnes and Noble or other big books stores, nearby Apples to Apples and other typical board/card games. The bulk of Catalyst's sales are online PDFs, though, which WotC seems to be allergic to at the moment (and that needs to stop).
When I first started running 4e (about a year after it came out), I had the same problem that many people did: my players all stared at their cards, trying to figure out what power would work to fix whatever situation they were in, instead of just figuring out organically what they wanted to do. Four of my players had never played a tabletop RPG before, one had played 3.5, and one last played when AD&D was the current edition.
I ran into an article somewhere that suggested giving every player a card that said "Do Something Cool." I immediately did this and explained that they could use this card at any time to come up with whatever wacky things they wanted to try. Swing form a chandelier? Throw this ever-present lantern at that goblin? Throw the dwarf into a pile of Orcs? whatever!
It really opened things up. The highlight for me was when (in the first session we used them) the non-gamer--who had never played anything geekier than Uno and had been sort of peer-pressured into playing with us by her friends--had her wizard "Do Something Cool" by casting a Light spell on the end of her staff and trying to convince a group of Shades that she was casting a radiant spell of some kind.
Just by having the card there, she kept thinking outside the box. Freezing Cloud was used mid-combat to freeze the surface of a small pond for an escape route. Magic Missile was used to push a lever on the other side of a room and stop some awful machinery. et cetera...
No matter what the system is, talk to your DM and say, "I want to do this; how do we make it happen?"
Is it too late to hope for a skill based, classless system?
Isn't that Whitewolf?
Umm. It's a lot of RPGs. White Wolf has rudimentary classes, anyway, based on what gothic stereotype you wanted to play (what most people would normally attribute to "race", I guess). Shadowrun, GURPS, ORE, Castle Falkenstein (which does away with attributes), Dogs in the Vineyard (and other similar games), Eclipse Phase etc. That's neither here nor there in a discussion about 5E DnD, though. You know it's going to have classes and levels, or it would never appeal to their core demographic (RP gamers who aren't already disenchanted with levels and classes and haven't moved on to other systems). Although the argument can be made that they want to attract those kind of gamers to increase their market share, at the risk of alienating their core demographic.
I guess this leads to the question everyone is really asking, which transcends the system wars or the anemic online offerings, and that's "What in the world is WotC thinking?"
Not as a rhetorical question, either, but I think people really want to know some sort of cohesive vision for the product. At the moment, it seems more confusion and bullshitting than anything else.
Expecting a company to continue to produce content for 20+ years for one system is madness. People complain when there is too much "bloat", but also complain when they don't release 3 new books a year.
Why would this be madness? Why couldn't they produce a rules system solid enough to stand the test of time? Sure, allow minor revisions and errata to make it into "revisions" (not "reboots") to tweak and sharpen the system over time. 3.0-3.5 was a step in this direction. (Why 3.5 and not 3.1? Where were 3.1-3.4?) Focus the publishing cycle on settings. Years 1-2 Realms, Years 3-4 Eberron, Years 5-6 Darksun, Years 7-8 Greyhawk. They wouldn't need to abandon the old cycle in the new, either, working up occasional supplements and then coming back to it for a new cycle. Maybe each great cycle (Realms through Greyhawk) could start with a new setting (ala Eberron) and cap off with a linking idea, like Ravenloft, Spelljammer, or Planescape. Homebrew enthusiasts could then pollinate their campaigns with ideas from all of these cycles without needing to convert good concepts to a completely different rule-set. I did once run a Palladium game (Nightbane) off of a Ravenloft module, it was rough work, but possible, because of all the good IDEAS in the module, not simple stat blocks, traps, and battle scenarios. It was rough work, however. How much easier would it be if I had the fortune of having the rules systems be compatible?
Campaign settings don't really make money. A company can't survive on a profitable product once every decade.
This would be my ideal world, much like ADnD 2nd edition seemed grounded in. Was it this model that proved the downfall of TSR? I doubt it. From what I understand, legal issues took them out over time. Would this bring in the sweet profits of constant reboots? Maybe not, but I think the reboot well might be beginning to run dry, and this might be the more sustainable publishing model.
The 2nd edition that bankrupted the company? They had warehouses of unsold product. When Dancey was given the job of reviving them the first thing they did was find out what products actually made money. Adventures were right out. Campaign settings did not do terribly well, definitely not in the format they were then of boxed sets. The shift to rules expansions was entirely a business one.
If we want professional game design level of quality we have to expect the professional game designers can't live off of making a product once every decade.
You keep mentioning business reasons for unpopular decisions. But the business problems you mention are problems because of terrible management.
'Campaign Settings don't really make money' - why not? If the books sell, then money can be made. If production costs are higher, that can be dealt with. And it's clear they do sell, and that people want a lot of them. If there is no demand, then don't produce them. There's an old joke about a shopkeeper telling someone, 'You're the 10th person I've told today - there's no demand for them!'
2nd edition had warehouses full of unsold product? That's the fault of management again.
It's perfectly possible to write a book that sells well for a long time. I've been watching TSR and WOTC for a long time, and it seems clear to me that their financial problems are much more to do with their attitudes to business, or just plain incompetency, than the vagaries of the market.
Don't assume that businesspeople know what they're doing and that when they grab for money it's out of necessity (or even greed). Incompetence and stupidity, in my experience, are the two biggest problems in every business I've worked with.
Yeah, I'd be very surprised at any kind of classless system. D&D is very tied to the sword and sorcery setting, and it has fairly specific tropes, and when you have those classes simplify the char gen a lot. If you want classless you should play Hero System or something (and you love math....which I do).
There's not much else I can add here other than to reiterate, if you don't like the system, that's fine. Mechanics are something you either can get behind or you don't. But never say a system discourages roleplay. Only you and your friends can bring out character and make things memorable. If you're GM doesn't let you do cool shit, that's on them, and if they're hiding behind the system like a shield, that's their fault.
I'm sick and tired of the arguments that 4e is about roll-playing vs. role-playing. I've had some fantastic moments playing and GMing 4e, from a bastard thief leaving the party to their death while he looted a treasure vault rhen riding off into the sunset with the girl to characters literally rising from the dead after being struck down to take out the bad guy, those are moments I cherish because of the story they told and the people who told them, not because of a sweet roll on a daily. (Though there is a small hint of satisfaction there just like when anyone does well in a game)
tl;dr: Players make the game, not the game itself. Quit your bitching.
Matev on
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
They're not going to come to your house and take your books away. If you like the look of the system, there's enough material out there to last you a lifetime.
This is the exact logic behind me buying the entire WOTC run of Star Wars: Saga edition...
I'm hopin' for a double class system. Class and theme, one for fights, one for notfights.
This sounds exciting. Tell me more.
Der Waffle Mous summed it up, sort of. Right now character's noncombat abilities are tied to their class--through class skill lists, ability score preferences, so on. If I want to play a Martial Defender who also spends a lot of time in the library, I'm going to have a hard time representing that mechanically, so he can use all the knowledge I'm saying he has. It can be done, certainly, now that the Knight exists, but Knights are pretty boring, I think. A better solution, in my mind, would be to decouple noncombat ability from combat class. So if we used something like the current 4e Theme structure for this, I could have a Brawler Fighter (Librarian), and have the mechanical spine for my character's story for a guy who spends a lot of time with books. Maybe tie one skill to the class, so the fighty guy is always a bit Athletic and the magic guy always knows a little Arcana, but most of the skill list would go into the theme.
For bonus points, make sure there's never a choice between +1 damage and +1 flavor. Don't make me choose between the Fighter utility power that lets me grab on an OA and the Librarian power that lets me smugly nerd out as an immediate interrupt when an ally fails a knowledge skill check.
And while I'm dreaming, gimmie Paragon and Epic themes, so I go from liking libraries a whole lot to owning a sweet library to founding Fantasy Interplanar Wikipedia so everyone can know everything forever!!
...Seriously, give me a good, balanced fight system, and the ability to make Smart Fighter, Charming Druid, Muscle Wizard, and Perceptive Sorcerer, and I will probably be pretty happy with 5e.
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
Then they weren't separate. They said they were separate but they weren't.
I know you're a very clever guy, so how come that isn't obvious?
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
Then they weren't separate. They said they were separate but they weren't.
I know you're a very clever guy, so how come that isn't obvious?
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
Then they weren't separate. They said they were separate but they weren't.
I know you're a very clever guy, so how come that isn't obvious?
Who said what now?
WPs and NWPs were supposed to cover separate areas. Combat and non-combat, from your reply to my post about separating combat and non-combat abilities. If not, I am not sure what your point was or why you were posting at all.
But they did not actually do that. NWPs had combat aspects. So they failed to separate combat and non-combat abilities.
Also, I'm English and a teacher, so imagine I said that very slowly and in a patronising manner. ;-)
I am having flashbacks of Weapon and Non-Weapon Proficiencies.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
wow everyone in the party is proficient at blind fighting
Weapon and non-weapon proficiencies were separate only in the sense of they were two separate categories. In much the same way at-will and encounter attack powers are.
How many of each you got was still determined entirely by class.
A buddy of mine has started playing Legend, and really likes the track-based system. I'm not sure if it wouldn't be too MMO for some folks, but I kind of like the idea of getting one track for your theme, one track that everybody in your class gets, and one track that is determined by your choice of class features. Maybe even have a fourth track that you can choose out of any of your class, theme, race, etc lists. So your elf wizard might be bookish, while mine might aspire to be the very definition of "elf wizard" and terrence over there is more into raising sheep.
No one said they separated combat and non-combat. I said this talk is reminding me of em. Which may have been a failed approach but everyone that played the system knows NWP was still "take one token non-combat NWP and then pack in the rest."
And even I somehow min-maxed it apparently because my dwarf with cooking even was imba. Crit a giant with a frying pan, roll percentile, 100... oh my~
The idea of "pick your combat effectiveness, stop, pick your non-combat effectiveness" is actually a good idea imo.
Reminds me of my strength-based body-building Sorceress in 4e. So much fun to explain that she flexed her muscles and lightning shot out of them.
But anyway, separating the skills out like that would be awesome for RP, and I like the idea of the nerdy fighter with his library full of military history. He's going to keep fighting- for knowledge!
No one said they separated combat and non-combat. I said this talk is reminding me of em. Which may have been a failed approach but everyone that played the system knows NWP was still "take one token non-combat NWP and then pack in the rest."
And even I somehow min-maxed it apparently because my dwarf with cooking even was imba. Crit a giant with a frying pan, roll percentile, 100... oh my~
The idea of "pick your combat effectiveness, stop, pick your non-combat effectiveness" is actually a good idea imo.
Ah, you using the word flashback etc made me think you were upset about the idea and then it got confusing.
I think it would work if you tried to look at non-combat fantasy adventure roles, which aren't, in the fiction, usually professions. Things like 'Fixer', 'Woodsman' and so on. The trouble is that D&D has been mixing the two - Cleric=herbalist, Wizard=researcher, Ranger=tracker, Rogue=treasurehunter - for so long that it would require a redesign of the class base.
I'd love to see a Wizard who could track, or a noble Cleric with good contacts, or a streetwise Paladin.
No one said they separated combat and non-combat. I said this talk is reminding me of em. Which may have been a failed approach but everyone that played the system knows NWP was still "take one token non-combat NWP and then pack in the rest."
And even I somehow min-maxed it apparently because my dwarf with cooking even was imba. Crit a giant with a frying pan, roll percentile, 100... oh my~
The idea of "pick your combat effectiveness, stop, pick your non-combat effectiveness" is actually a good idea imo.
Ah, you using the word flashback etc made me think you were upset about the idea and then it got confusing.
You probably would read my comment differently if you had "been there."
No one said they separated combat and non-combat. I said this talk is reminding me of em. Which may have been a failed approach but everyone that played the system knows NWP was still "take one token non-combat NWP and then pack in the rest."
And even I somehow min-maxed it apparently because my dwarf with cooking even was imba. Crit a giant with a frying pan, roll percentile, 100... oh my~
The idea of "pick your combat effectiveness, stop, pick your non-combat effectiveness" is actually a good idea imo.
Ah, you using the word flashback etc made me think you were upset about the idea and then it got confusing.
You probably would read my comment differently if you had "been there."
'Campaign Settings don't really make money' - why not? If the books sell, then money can be made. If production costs are higher, that can be dealt with. And it's clear they do sell, and that people want a lot of them. If there is no demand, then don't produce them. There's an old joke about a shopkeeper telling someone, 'You're the 10th person I've told today - there's no demand for them!'
According to interviews from TSR's postmortem period, campaign setting books sold, at best, a quarter as many copies as typical non-campaign-specific sourcebooks, and supplementary books for campaigns sold even worse. That was only compounded by the fact that most people would only play in one or two campaign settings, which meant that TSR was publishing increasingly specific campaign material despite the fact that supplements for campaign settings sold as low as a tenth as many copies as a general D&D supplement would be expected to sell. There's still some demand for campaign settings; that doesn't mean that it's beneficial to long-term sales to fragment the player base, and it doesn't mean that the vocal minority of players who really want to see their pet setting revived for 5e make up a large enough segment of the player base to make revising the setting profitable. Choosing to publish ten campaign setting sourcebooks that will likely sell 2,000 copies each instead of two 'core' D&D books that would likely sell 10,000 copies each is the sort of terrible business move that helped push TSR into bankruptcy.
I'm curious how you'd deal with higher production costs without either a) slashing page count without cutting the price, or b) increasing the price without increasing the page count.
I think this is one of those case where co-releasing a new setting at the actual time of release would be a good thing.
eg. with 4th edition, I bought PHB/DMG/MM as a trio, yet individually I wouldn't have bought MM...but it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Do a package deal on a PHB/DMG/MM and/or Setting combo, and you have the potential to get excellent distribution of a new setting that clearly needs expanding, that gets new players in, and gives an additional source of new edition hype beyond simple rule changes. "Apparently in Axerend, dwarves are masters of dragonriding!" etc.
Let's try and bring the idea of a combat and non combat class to wizards. If they're asking for player input we might as well give them something good.
I think they can give more weight to spell casting while making the whole system balanced. How our group plays 3.5 (with lots of splat books and plenty of min-maxing) has actually dipped the balance of power away from casters, and more towards melee combatants. edit: In terms of how useful they are at ending encounters. I think the mistake alot of people make when comparing classes is thinking about how one would fare against any other. It doesn't matter that a wizard can cast a Save or Die on the fighter. Because idealy they aren't actually fighting each other.
Posts
Do they even attempt the scale of DnD's distribution? (Should DnD be persisting with such wide distribution?) I have never those products outside of a comic book/gaming shop... and DnD is in many bookstores.
Edit: iPhone posting can get wierd.
That has potential...
Isn't that Whitewolf?
I ran into an article somewhere that suggested giving every player a card that said "Do Something Cool." I immediately did this and explained that they could use this card at any time to come up with whatever wacky things they wanted to try. Swing form a chandelier? Throw this ever-present lantern at that goblin? Throw the dwarf into a pile of Orcs? whatever!
It really opened things up. The highlight for me was when (in the first session we used them) the non-gamer--who had never played anything geekier than Uno and had been sort of peer-pressured into playing with us by her friends--had her wizard "Do Something Cool" by casting a Light spell on the end of her staff and trying to convince a group of Shades that she was casting a radiant spell of some kind.
Just by having the card there, she kept thinking outside the box. Freezing Cloud was used mid-combat to freeze the surface of a small pond for an escape route. Magic Missile was used to push a lever on the other side of a room and stop some awful machinery. et cetera...
No matter what the system is, talk to your DM and say, "I want to do this; how do we make it happen?"
I guess this leads to the question everyone is really asking, which transcends the system wars or the anemic online offerings, and that's "What in the world is WotC thinking?"
Not as a rhetorical question, either, but I think people really want to know some sort of cohesive vision for the product. At the moment, it seems more confusion and bullshitting than anything else.
You keep mentioning business reasons for unpopular decisions. But the business problems you mention are problems because of terrible management.
'Campaign Settings don't really make money' - why not? If the books sell, then money can be made. If production costs are higher, that can be dealt with. And it's clear they do sell, and that people want a lot of them. If there is no demand, then don't produce them. There's an old joke about a shopkeeper telling someone, 'You're the 10th person I've told today - there's no demand for them!'
2nd edition had warehouses full of unsold product? That's the fault of management again.
It's perfectly possible to write a book that sells well for a long time. I've been watching TSR and WOTC for a long time, and it seems clear to me that their financial problems are much more to do with their attitudes to business, or just plain incompetency, than the vagaries of the market.
Don't assume that businesspeople know what they're doing and that when they grab for money it's out of necessity (or even greed). Incompetence and stupidity, in my experience, are the two biggest problems in every business I've worked with.
I'm sick and tired of the arguments that 4e is about roll-playing vs. role-playing. I've had some fantastic moments playing and GMing 4e, from a bastard thief leaving the party to their death while he looted a treasure vault rhen riding off into the sunset with the girl to characters literally rising from the dead after being struck down to take out the bad guy, those are moments I cherish because of the story they told and the people who told them, not because of a sweet roll on a daily. (Though there is a small hint of satisfaction there just like when anyone does well in a game)
tl;dr: Players make the game, not the game itself. Quit your bitching.
This is the exact logic behind me buying the entire WOTC run of Star Wars: Saga edition...
This sounds exciting. Tell me more.
Zithra Melitch in Star Wars: An Empire's End
Jellica in In the Shadow of Zeus
Like a fighter face or a sagely thief or a cleric with connections up the wazoo.
That would be absolutely brilliant and so will not happen.
Der Waffle Mous summed it up, sort of. Right now character's noncombat abilities are tied to their class--through class skill lists, ability score preferences, so on. If I want to play a Martial Defender who also spends a lot of time in the library, I'm going to have a hard time representing that mechanically, so he can use all the knowledge I'm saying he has. It can be done, certainly, now that the Knight exists, but Knights are pretty boring, I think. A better solution, in my mind, would be to decouple noncombat ability from combat class. So if we used something like the current 4e Theme structure for this, I could have a Brawler Fighter (Librarian), and have the mechanical spine for my character's story for a guy who spends a lot of time with books. Maybe tie one skill to the class, so the fighty guy is always a bit Athletic and the magic guy always knows a little Arcana, but most of the skill list would go into the theme.
For bonus points, make sure there's never a choice between +1 damage and +1 flavor. Don't make me choose between the Fighter utility power that lets me grab on an OA and the Librarian power that lets me smugly nerd out as an immediate interrupt when an ally fails a knowledge skill check.
And while I'm dreaming, gimmie Paragon and Epic themes, so I go from liking libraries a whole lot to owning a sweet library to founding Fantasy Interplanar Wikipedia so everyone can know everything forever!!
...Seriously, give me a good, balanced fight system, and the ability to make Smart Fighter, Charming Druid, Muscle Wizard, and Perceptive Sorcerer, and I will probably be pretty happy with 5e.
I didn't play those editions of D&D, but wouldn't the problem have been exactly what we're talking about here - combining combat and non-combat abilities instead of separating them?
No, the point is that they were separating them. You had X amount of each.
The problem was that NWPs could still affect combat so you'd be dumb to not take them etc. etc.
Then they weren't separate. They said they were separate but they weren't.
I know you're a very clever guy, so how come that isn't obvious?
Who said what now?
WPs and NWPs were supposed to cover separate areas. Combat and non-combat, from your reply to my post about separating combat and non-combat abilities. If not, I am not sure what your point was or why you were posting at all.
But they did not actually do that. NWPs had combat aspects. So they failed to separate combat and non-combat abilities.
Also, I'm English and a teacher, so imagine I said that very slowly and in a patronising manner. ;-)
wow everyone in the party is proficient at blind fighting
small world
How many of each you got was still determined entirely by class.
A buddy of mine has started playing Legend, and really likes the track-based system. I'm not sure if it wouldn't be too MMO for some folks, but I kind of like the idea of getting one track for your theme, one track that everybody in your class gets, and one track that is determined by your choice of class features. Maybe even have a fourth track that you can choose out of any of your class, theme, race, etc lists. So your elf wizard might be bookish, while mine might aspire to be the very definition of "elf wizard" and terrence over there is more into raising sheep.
aaaaand I'm linking Legend's website here, because they have a Child's Play donation drive on their front page.
And even I somehow min-maxed it apparently because my dwarf with cooking even was imba. Crit a giant with a frying pan, roll percentile, 100... oh my~
The idea of "pick your combat effectiveness, stop, pick your non-combat effectiveness" is actually a good idea imo.
Reminds me of my strength-based body-building Sorceress in 4e. So much fun to explain that she flexed her muscles and lightning shot out of them.
But anyway, separating the skills out like that would be awesome for RP, and I like the idea of the nerdy fighter with his library full of military history. He's going to keep fighting- for knowledge!
Now you just need to get a job at Wizards...
Zithra Melitch in Star Wars: An Empire's End
Jellica in In the Shadow of Zeus
Ah, you using the word flashback etc made me think you were upset about the idea and then it got confusing.
I think it would work if you tried to look at non-combat fantasy adventure roles, which aren't, in the fiction, usually professions. Things like 'Fixer', 'Woodsman' and so on. The trouble is that D&D has been mixing the two - Cleric=herbalist, Wizard=researcher, Ranger=tracker, Rogue=treasurehunter - for so long that it would require a redesign of the class base.
I'd love to see a Wizard who could track, or a noble Cleric with good contacts, or a streetwise Paladin.
You probably would read my comment differently if you had "been there."
i.e. @Horseshoe
You're still aiming for confusing, rather than communication, so I'm gonna stop for a bit.
According to interviews from TSR's postmortem period, campaign setting books sold, at best, a quarter as many copies as typical non-campaign-specific sourcebooks, and supplementary books for campaigns sold even worse. That was only compounded by the fact that most people would only play in one or two campaign settings, which meant that TSR was publishing increasingly specific campaign material despite the fact that supplements for campaign settings sold as low as a tenth as many copies as a general D&D supplement would be expected to sell. There's still some demand for campaign settings; that doesn't mean that it's beneficial to long-term sales to fragment the player base, and it doesn't mean that the vocal minority of players who really want to see their pet setting revived for 5e make up a large enough segment of the player base to make revising the setting profitable. Choosing to publish ten campaign setting sourcebooks that will likely sell 2,000 copies each instead of two 'core' D&D books that would likely sell 10,000 copies each is the sort of terrible business move that helped push TSR into bankruptcy.
I'm curious how you'd deal with higher production costs without either a) slashing page count without cutting the price, or b) increasing the price without increasing the page count.
eg. with 4th edition, I bought PHB/DMG/MM as a trio, yet individually I wouldn't have bought MM...but it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Do a package deal on a PHB/DMG/MM and/or Setting combo, and you have the potential to get excellent distribution of a new setting that clearly needs expanding, that gets new players in, and gives an additional source of new edition hype beyond simple rule changes. "Apparently in Axerend, dwarves are masters of dragonriding!" etc.
..and if they are, then any good ideas are going to get drowned out by people wanting casters to dominate the game again.
I think they can give more weight to spell casting while making the whole system balanced. How our group plays 3.5 (with lots of splat books and plenty of min-maxing) has actually dipped the balance of power away from casters, and more towards melee combatants. edit: In terms of how useful they are at ending encounters. I think the mistake alot of people make when comparing classes is thinking about how one would fare against any other. It doesn't matter that a wizard can cast a Save or Die on the fighter. Because idealy they aren't actually fighting each other.