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Why the fuck would they remove the CSA? An extended American Civil War was integral to the actual background of the setting and was arguably integral to the background of their other Deadlands settings like Hell On Earth.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
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Spoilered because my players read this thread:
Might be referring to the "White Fire" cult in Targets of Opportunity. Though the message I got out of that was that both the nog and White supremacists were supposed to be two sides of the same coin, however colored by bleeding heart liberalism it was: the avatars of Nyarlathotep they worship both appear as chittering masses of teeth to the racially unaware.
The origin story of the niggers is written as more sympathetic, "they wuz abused by da justice system," whereas the Whites are fucked up GWOT vets or they wuz always racis an sheit.
I think any sort of ACAB undercurrents are dependent on the author you're dealing with. E.g. Detwiller is a psychotic anti-Christian sperg, whereas Ivey is married to a cop.
Don't give any of them your shekels tho.
On a funny note, the See of Hate also has a lefty Hasan Piker bloc and a feminist front group.
The origin story of the niggers is written as more sympathetic, "they wuz abused by da justice system," whereas the Whites are fucked up GWOT vets or they wuz always racis an sheit.
I think any sort of ACAB undercurrents are dependent on the author you're dealing with. E.g. Detwiller is a psychotic anti-Christian sperg, whereas Ivey is married to a cop.
Don't give any of them your shekels tho.
On a funny note, the See of Hate also has a lefty Hasan Piker bloc and a feminist front group.
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- Apr 25, 2020
That's one of those things we also have to look at: yes, 5e might have been "the best selling ever" but if you look at the first-party books published since 3e...
Yeah, shit doesn't look good. I'm ignoring starter sets, boxed sets and microtransaction shit like those 5-page digital download things (and even those don't add much to the list in 5e's favor). I don't feel like digging for info on third-party publications but the trend should hold there as well.
5e was treated as a cash cow and nothing else from the beginning. Hasbro wanted all the money with none of the effort. And since they don't understand that most of the tail of an RPG comes out of its modules, adventures and settings, all supplementary and optional material, they're banking on core rulebooks to pull all the weight. No wonder the brand is so horribly mismanaged.
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- Nov 23, 2021
That's really fucking gay.
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- Feb 13, 2015
Then don't... make that game? Like, don't make a game about pirates if you have some deep moral outrage about imaginary stealing, don't make a game about an alternate American Civil War if you can't bring yourself to possibly imagine someone depicting one of the sides (because it might offend an ethnic group that's ~13% of the population, factor in how many play ttrpgs and we're talking, what, 1%? Less?)
I don't know (I absolutely do) know why these people insist on making things they ostensibly hate, like the Halo guy who despises guns conceptually.
[Because they're communists engaged in a political project, and that is literally the beginning and end of it]
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- Nov 15, 2021
If I'm supposed to be able to emotionally handle a medieval setting where the people with most in common with my ancestors were serfs who were bought and sold with the land, blacks can handle a Wild West setting where their ancestors were chattel. The reality is they removed the Confederacy because dangerhaired bluechecks like throwing their power around.
It's because libtards went through their own Great Awakening, where they'd been drinking and gambling before, without considering that as contradictory to going to church, but now they feel really, really bad about it and what to pretend. Problem is, the things they're now feeling moral guilt about, such as putting guns, white male heroes, Confederates, and so on in their game, are tied up with their livelihoods. Most people just aren't able to sell everything they have and go be missionaries, which is effectively what these people would really have to do to fully get right with the Church of Woke.
Lucky Coin
kiwifarms.net
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I think you're talking about the Tcho Tcho, but I'm not sure. If you are, their existence makes reddit seethe about racism.
It's been a while since I read the lore book, but I have vague recollections of thinking it was a surprisingly neutral and even handed. The Tcho Tcho are not painted in a sympathetic light at all and are shown as an evil and subversive organization run by cold psychopaths. Sorry about the formatting, I'm phone posting.
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Yes and no.
I suspect that the amount of options and the larger pool of modules are why 3.5 had as strong a tail as it did compared to 4e, but it also ignores something that these lists don't include.
Sales numbers. You see, all of those cool "Complete X" and "Creatures and Constructs" books are great; it's why 3.5 has so much customization in it and is one of the reasons I think it had such a strong tail that it kept getting played even after 4e and even 5e came out. They also sold a lot less compared to the paychecks going into making them. That's because 3.5 made that shit like twice a month at its most methed out paces. And that's ignoring the shit they put onto their websites and in their magazines too.
Wizards indeed tried to be smart in 3e and 3.5, since unlike most splats, quite a few were designed to appeal to and get players to buy them since it gave them new classes and prestige classes to work with, rather than just more books for the DM to buy for the group. Great idea in theory, but it seems in practice that it didn't seem to be worth it. Could've been due to number sold. Could've been due to selling fine but having writers on retainer was expensive. But either way, none of them ever hit sales target.
But what Wizards did notice, looking at each edition of DnD ever made, was that there were always three books that sold well. The core books. Those always sell the most no matter the edition. It's extremely rare that anything non-core even makes it into top 20 lists to give an idea.
Hence why 4e and 5e were designed to be more "finished" so to say, where each class has a higher amount of options and styles of play inbuilt in the core. It's also why 3rd party splats became more encouraged in 5e's case, since it's cheaper to share that cost with someone, even if they're a demented person who wants an invincible wheelchair that costs 100 GP for their shitty victimhood fantasy.
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- Mar 13, 2024
I can tinker with it, got nothing else better to do.
Video game companies do this as well, it's the "executive" mindset. They make unrealistic expectations (if it's not over a billion, it failed) and "punish" both the developers and customers for not meeting their "lofty expectations."
All I read from this was "we want people to play our game our way even if it hurts the settings and upsets our fans, our new fans are so much more important!" If I had a nickel...didn't Paizo try to do that where if you didn't meet certain "diverse" specifications they'd "rocks fall, everyone dies" your party?
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- Oct 20, 2019
Me: 'A 3d6 system is better imo than a d20 system, example a +1 to hit weapon isn't that meaningful in a d20 system.'
Response #1: 'Magic swords also let you hit creatures that are immune to normal weapons'
Response #2: 'If you roll often enough it adds up'.
Now I know you understand this mathematically. The point of the above is to show that it's grossly misleading to present such a chart against an argument that +1 to hit is much more relevant across many rolls in a 3d6 system than a d20 system. And that's a point in favour of the 3d6 system because it's more psychologically rewarding for the player and also has the effect already mentioned of being able to adjust frequency more independently of capability.
In the same vein, the argument of throwing more chances at the player in an attempt to demonstrate that +1 becomes significant as a long-term trend is also misplaced. Because there's a cost for each individual roll. That cost is player time and investment. Yes, a 1 in 20 chance will become significant when you've handed out the magic swords to multiple low-level henchmen or a PC fights over a dozen rounds. It shows up in aggregate you are correct. But a player is not a Monte Carlo simulation. If they roll a dice 60 times and the +1 makes a difference on 3 of those rolls, then the +1 is a boring thing that doesn't feel rewarding. On the 3d6 system, the +1 to hit is a meaningful reward that makes them feel better.
Nor can we simply translate bonuses across systems. We can do that with target probabilities, like where the equivalent of a 16+ is a 13+, but not by saying "well a +1 sword in Hero would be a +3 sword in D&D" because in a d20 system frequency and capability (target cap) are more inextricably linked.
3d6 systems:
Response #1: 'Magic swords also let you hit creatures that are immune to normal weapons'
Response #2: 'If you roll often enough it adds up'.
It is true, because we're not talking an abstracted general case, but a specific case of dice rolls in an RPG. This isn't a chart of how often +1 makes a difference. This is a chart of how often +1 makes a difference at a particular target number. I never said that +1 is more significant at all outcomes, I said that it is more significant across all rolls. It's mathematicaly correct but there are two things that make it not undermine what I've argued. Firstly,in this chart the target numbers are not adjusted for their frequency of occurence. With normal scaling of challenges the overwhelming majority of dice rolls are not going to be aiming for a 5% chance of success. Secondly, it also treats target numbers the same across both 3d6 and d20 systems. But GMs are not (usually) stupid. They know that if they want a 25% chance of something then in d20 the target is 16+ and that in a 3d6 system they set it at 13+ (more or less). Your chart would make sense as a rebuttal if GMs decided the level of challenge by arbitrary number - i.e. it was massively harder to hit an enemy knight in Hero than in D&D. But the numbers aren't arbitrary - GMs set the target number to achieve the difficulty they want. I.e. you're going to see a LOT fewer 16+ target numbers in Hero 6e than in d20.
Now I know you understand this mathematically. The point of the above is to show that it's grossly misleading to present such a chart against an argument that +1 to hit is much more relevant across many rolls in a 3d6 system than a d20 system. And that's a point in favour of the 3d6 system because it's more psychologically rewarding for the player and also has the effect already mentioned of being able to adjust frequency more independently of capability.
In the same vein, the argument of throwing more chances at the player in an attempt to demonstrate that +1 becomes significant as a long-term trend is also misplaced. Because there's a cost for each individual roll. That cost is player time and investment. Yes, a 1 in 20 chance will become significant when you've handed out the magic swords to multiple low-level henchmen or a PC fights over a dozen rounds. It shows up in aggregate you are correct. But a player is not a Monte Carlo simulation. If they roll a dice 60 times and the +1 makes a difference on 3 of those rolls, then the +1 is a boring thing that doesn't feel rewarding. On the 3d6 system, the +1 to hit is a meaningful reward that makes them feel better.
Nor can we simply translate bonuses across systems. We can do that with target probabilities, like where the equivalent of a 16+ is a 13+, but not by saying "well a +1 sword in Hero would be a +3 sword in D&D" because in a d20 system frequency and capability (target cap) are more inextricably linked.
3d6 systems:
- Afford a GMs and players a greater range of probablilities to play in which is a good thing. Both for GM's ability to fine tune challenges and a player's sense of reward ("I rolled an 18!" > "I rolled a 20")
- Make bonuses to hit more meaningful thus making them greater rewards and incentivising players to play cleverly to achieve multiple bonuses.
- Achieve, imo, a better balance between unpredictability and being too swingy. Tension > Randomness. Only way to adjust the randomness in a d20 system is to give tougher or weaker opposition / challenges.
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Your specific, objectively wrong claim is that +1 is "meaningless" or "irrelevant." It has been shown over and over that this isn't true. +5% to hit has an effect on important statistics, like DPR, chance to fail, etc significantly greater than 5%. This is just how statistics works. For the most part, internet dice arguments are dominated by people who don't really understand anything other than means and medians
Response #3: A +1 in 3d6 is less or similarly meaningful than a +1 in d20 if your target is low or high. In fact, it's only significantly larger than a +5% chance to succeed over seven values, about 8 through 14.
You really like not engaging some of the most mathematically salient points. Why even bother typing multiple paragraphs if you're going to ignore the central points? I guess at the end of the day, sure getting +1 makes you feel really good, since if you absorb lots of internet arguments from people who focus myopically on means and medians, it's a +12% effect close to the mean of 3d6. The problem is, I already agreed with this, but you want to be contrarian, ignore that as well, pretend that the valid point was unacknowledged, and respond to me as though I disagreed with everything you said, rather than one specific part.
Since you're going to ignore everything I say and argue with a ghost, there's really no need to continue this discussion.
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- Nov 15, 2021
3.5 is Hasbro's cash cow edition that nearly destroyed the brand, not 5e. It financially collapsed in about three years because Hasbro greedily milked it for all it was worth. 5e generated continuous revenue and high player engagement for a decade. The only editions to have sustainable business plans are 1, 3.0, and 5e, with 5e having the best business plan of any of them.
The market will bear a certain number of adventures and core rule books sold every year. However, a new rule book causes a spike in sales. This makes finance-oriented idiots who see the world in terms of line graphs think that they can repeat this spike over and over, as often as they can, and drive revenue to the moon.
This, it turns out, is impossible. Instead, what happens is a death spiral where new books are churned out faster and faster, in a desperate attempt to regenerate those spikes, until the game collapses, a bunch of people get fired, and the brand is rebooted.
The problem is that an individual player's appetite for new rules is finite. There are about 600 pages of rules in the core rule books of any edition. Start adding in expansions, though, and this balloons up to thousands of pages. Most people don't want 2500 pages of rules. Consequently, the very first rules expansion sells very well, but each addition expansion sells less and less. An edition is on its way to dying once the owner of the brand starts building its revenue plan around expanding the rules. You're a couple years out from it collapsing and a reboot of the game, not because players are clamoring for new core rules, but because revenue numbers don't look good, and the brand thinks a core rule reboot is just the thing.
Even my lib-leaning friends aren't buying 6e because 5e is fine and we have more rules than we need. Collectively, we own every expansion. There are already so many rules that, in a lifetime of gaming, there are tons of monsters we will never fight, spells we will never cast, lands we will never explore, and classes we will never play.
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- Nov 23, 2021
I don't really think"hurts." The setting really does it justice lol. The joke's on them though, I've been running my Deadlands game with the Confederacy in it for over a year at this point. Funny story, my players are all way more liberal than I am and their favorite character is a crazy, former confederate partisan from Tennessee who is completely unrepentant.
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- Apr 25, 2020
That was my point, though:
(...) Hasbro wanted all the money with none of the effort. And since they don't understand that most of the tail of an RPG comes out of its modules, adventures and settings, all supplementary and optional material (...)
Notice I didn't mention rules, because rules aren't content. RPGs may rely on rules revisions to stay fresh and sometimes generate hype, but they live or die on their adventures and settings. On the things you can do with the system, beyond just autistically coming up with builds and posting them to reddit because you haven't found a table that would accept you, or last longer than session zero, in eight years. Now, in hindsight the screencaps I provided didn't help make that particular point, I should have gone looking for the amount of lore, setting, and adventure books that came out for each system. Even ignoring the large amount of third-party content for 3e, there's just not that much for 5e by comparison. Back in 3e Wizards released something like 60 short adventures for free, the kind of content I argue is the most important in keeping a system healthy because they're stuff you could run straight, or steal ideas/setpieces for your own games. For 5e, half the shit they released was retreads/updates of existing adventures, huge railroad-y modules you could only really play once, or promotional tie-ins with other properties.
So let me rephrase my argument: I think Wizards fucked up 5e by going into it with the assumption that the third-party content would keep it afloat and relevant, and thought they could lowball the effort required to keep the game's ecosystem healthy by trying to cash in on pop-culture tie-ins (CR and Strange Things), nostalgia (old adventures, trying to revive the D&D cartoon) and crossovers (all the MtG shit). That reflects on how little content they actually put out.
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Hasbro made 3.0, 3.5, 4e, and 5e. What they understood from the 3.5 and 4e debacles is precisely the opposite of what you said. That big glut of splats and modules doesn't make money. You end up cannibalizing your own sales and wearing out the market. That's why the 5e business strategy centered on biannual, book-length campaigns and associated Adventurer's League content, with very rare rules expansions. Those adventure campaign books often outsold every other RPG book on the market save for the 5e core rule books themselves. They did colossally well. There is no metric by which they were a failure.
The basic problem here is that 3.5 didn't succeed. It failed. Your argument is based on looking at a failed edition, 3.5, as a model of success, and the most successful edition in history, 5e, as a model of failure. Following the 3.5 model is what you do if you want to be bankrupt in 4 years.
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- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
We're talking about different things, then. You're talking about success in terms of profits and sales, I'm talking about success in terms of developing and managing good game.
In that case, fair enough. I concede that 5e is a far more successful product than 3.5e ever was. But I still hold it's a much worse game despite its profits. Because what's successful in business and financials doesn't necessarily translate to a good experience to the end-user.
strawberry15
kiwifarms.net
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- Oct 20, 2023
8 years and 70+ books is not good. that measn 1 book per month, def. a horrible amount of content.
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- Oct 20, 2019
What's to engage in? There's nothing wrong with your maths. The error is in misapplying it or granting something weight based on whether it is true, rather than if it is true and important. Which is why I made my response about that. Specifically:
Target numbers are not evenly distributed in usage. Not between the games, not within either game. My statement is about its significance across total dice rolls. I know you understand this mathematically. It's you who is deliberately ignoring what I actually wrote so far as I can see. If something is more significant across 90% of all dice rolls, then you saying 'but in these 10% of cases at the extremes it flips a little' isn't changing my point. It's like when you see a headline saying something has doubled the risk of a disease and the reader gasps "double - that sounds high" even what a study actually shows is your chance of the disease has gone from 0.01% to 0.02%. Yes, it's doubled. It doesn't refute anybody's position who said the chance was low.
And given for some reason you accuse me of not engaging with your maths (I did), how about you use a little more mathematical precision yourself. Let me translate your "if your target is low or high" into actual numbers because it shows the issue in your post. The flip over point is at approximately 4% probability at each end. That is when the odds of success are either lower than 4% or higher than 96%, the +1 becomes more significant in the d20 system.
Is it clear what I am disagreeing with you over? And why I'm "not engaging in the most mathematically salient points" in your opinion? It's because I'm not challenging your maths, I'm saying that a statement that 'it's more meaningful when the target is low" makes it sound like it matters. Casual language hides the truth that except in extremes of probability like <=4% chance of success, what I say is true. And given that what I said wasn't "it's always true" but that it's true in the large majority of cases, I see nothing false in what I said that you seem to take so much issue with.
If you think I'm writing too much for you, fine. But you went to the trouble of producing an actual chart to show that I was wrong and it doesn't do that. You have target numbers one to one across both systems and as already explained (and ignored by you) target numbers aren't arbitrarily set nor could they be and have a meaningful game. Target numbers are derived from desired chance of outcome. If I want a 4% chance of success, I'm going to set a different number in a 3d6 system than I would in a d20 system. So would any GM. The game systems themselves are designed to do so.
A +1 to hit in a 3d6 system is relevant a lot more often than it is in a d20 system. It was a simple enough statement that is provable unless target numbers cluster at the extremes, which they do not in any game system I've ever heard of. Unless there's one out there that relies on flipping coins.
Objectively? The cut off for what someone thinks is meaningless or irrelevant is a subjective thing and I'm willing to concede that you may convince yourself that giving multiple low-level henchmen +1 to hit and aggregating the effect of that over round after round is relevant, but even you must concede that in comparison to a 3d6 system it's massively less relevant. Can you accept that much as a starting point?
You accuse me of not engaging with your points but my post responded to every point you made. You just didn't like that my responses weren't "your maths is wrong" but showing play-based reasons why they don't matter. As I said in my last post, and which you declined to engage with, players are not Monte Carlo simulations. Every dice roll is an active investment by a player. It doesn't matter if you have them roll one action or a hundred because the question isn't the aggregate effect, despite your insistence, it's the proportion. And a player rolling a die a hundred times and seeing +1 make a difference 5 of those times is not going to be happier than a player who rolled it 20 times and saw it make a difference once. Your argument is akin to comparing both and saying 5 > 1, therefore happiness is greater. Whilst ignoring that 95 > 19 and therefore that +1 has faded into insignificance to them.
Well it was initially a good faith attempt to explain my point of view. You're welcome to point out anything in your original post that I ignored. But saying "yes but it misses the point" isn't ignoring something you said. It's disagreeing with your premise. The multiple paragraphs in this post? I don't know. Just a hope you'll come back to this and accept it as a genuine attempt to explain. Please do tell me what I actually ignored if there is something. I honestly do not see it.
Contrarian how? You do not represent some default perspective. I made a comment about d20 vs. 3d6. You say you agreed with it but come in with a whole lot more. If all you're looking for is for me to say that the effect of a +1 in a d20 system is mathematically provable then you can have it. I never argued otherwise. If what you're arguing over is because to you "meaningless" isn't a natural language word to be assessed in the context of a comparison between systems but must be interpreted as "cannot be measured", then you can't. Because I'm happy to say that compared to a 3d6 system, a +1 to hit in d20 largely is. Because as I said in the post you replied to, if something is only coming up 1 time in 20 that doesn't feel significant to players. It's only significant to theory crafters who focus myopically on means and medians.
I genuinely don't see any point you made I ignored. I see points I commented on and then said but they don't change what I said. If I've missed something, point it out and I'll respond.
Sunflower Samurai
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
The Trench Crusade Kickstarter was a smash hit, raising half a million dollars in hours. The usual suspects are smugging about le anti woke being defeated, but i suppose its succesful because the average anti warhammer sperg doesnt actually care about discord drama. That and the models they offer seem to be pretty good, with options for physical tiers if you dont own a 3d printer, which is abit above average for a tabletop kickstarter
Of course, some are using the success to do autistic smug victory laps around retarded culture warriors like Grummz instead of just enjoying the game
The current most updooted post on the reddit about the Kickstarter is focusing more on felting Grummz rather than actually celebrating the game's success
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